Linden Jenkins wrote this piece as part of our recent Writing Nonviolence Course. Linden is also a member of the Writing Nonviolence Affinity Group. 

She was striking not for her looks but for the energy that she held, that held her. Slim, of nordic heritage, honey brown hair and solemn eyes, cigarette smoking, she loved to write or maybe that came later, as a way in. She was drawn, seemed called, actually, to where the action was, where people were reaching for liberation, to be free of economic serfdom, of ethnic discrimination, of gender-confining rigidities, all long-standing oppressions not just in this country but world-wide, in the early to mid-twentieth century. To get close to these struggles, while making ends meet, at the age of 19 in 1916, she got a newspaper to hire her and send her out to observe and report on these struggles, sometimes getting herself locked up with the activists she was supposed to be just observing, describing, not joining. When the newsroom was a man’s world, she found a way in and held her own there.

Her friends were like-minded: secular, socialist to communist, all wanting deep changes in the structures that still—to this day—keep most of the world’s people cornered by the rich. This society she kept, while delving into the world of the working poor and unemployed masses, was hard working, hard playing. 

But then something unexpected came out of left field. The Spirit grabbed her suddenly, after a life removed from religion or even spirituality. No Sunday school or catechism for her as a kid. Then suddenly she was blind-sided by that hound of heaven—like the one in the poem by Francis Thompson. That Presence pursued her too, tracked her all unawares. She had to strike out on her own to find people who spoke that language, could help her find and learn words for this new orientation, a new sense of the beleaguered souls she’d been tracking, when the Holy Spirit tracked her and brought her to them in a new way.

When the student is ready, the teacher will come. Her teacher came in an unlikely guise. Peter Maurin, a French peasant some 40 years her senior, hoboing around the continent, appeared one day in 1932 at the door of the apartment on East 15th Street and Avenue A on New York’s lower East Side that she shared with her little girl, Tamar, her brother, John, and sister-in-law, Tessa. Peter had tracked her down, after catching wind of her newspaper stories about the down-trodden workers that were trying to fight off the heavy hand of the exploiting “man.” This disheveled prophet, jack of all trades, philosopher and dreamer who appeared on her door-step, ferreted her out, calling the Spirit up in her so that together, they, Peter and Dorothy, walked on, not as lovers but as lovers of Christ, embodying a simple rough justice of accompaniment. 

Accompaniment of those in the streets, in hunger, in the cold, in abandonment. Peter stood shoulder to shoulder with Dorothy, enlivening her mind with a vision of the way to the Beloved Community of the Good News. Beloved Community was newly in the air in the early 20th century, attributed to philosopher Josiah Royce but later brought into wider consciousness by Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr and Thich Nhat Hanh. It harkens back to the way Jesus and his followers established their community before any human hierarchy was grafted onto his teachings, when he and his women and men disciples held all property in common, rejecting the practice of personal property—perhaps almost inconceivable now. 

But that was later, when Day and Maurin and others who joined them began living together in houses of hospitality that gradually came to be established and known all over the world as Catholic Worker Houses. Before that, she had to get it down on paper, get this new, old, vision down, in a new monthly newspaper (which still sells for a nickel an issue)—The Catholic Worker. The first edition came out in 1933 and in three years had a circulation of 150,000. As she got the words down, her own imagination came alight, spurred on by Peter’s Easy Essays, as they called them, that he spoke extemporaneously in free verse to anyone who would listen as Dorothy, and later, other community members labored together to get the paper out. 

Later Dorothy credited Peter with the new vision but it seems their visions fed each other’s and those visions combined in the work of opening the first shelter, on East 15th Street, a ramshackle tenement building uninsulated, unheated, originally donated by an absentee landlord. They offered the 38 unfurnished drafty rooms to those destitute who needed a place to stay until they could find their own footing. There they made big pots of soup and 100 gallon tanks of coffee served with hunks of bread to the long lines of the hungry that waited snaking down the block and around the corner. All were welcome.

Like Jesus did while on the planet, with his Beloved Community, they held all in common, weaning themselves off of not just consuming but also possessing. And wonder of wonder, she brought a baby into this uncertainty, raised her daughter intentionally in a lap of material poverty, of poverty to the point of precariousness.

Was this courage? Faith? Love of Jesus? Determination to follow him with no holds barred, to the max? That’s what it looks like to me. And the single-minded commitment to keep her eyes on them, Christ’s Little Ones: given into all our care.