“Love is indeed a harsh and dreadful thing, but it is the only answer.” (Dorothy Day)

This is perhaps the best description of love—real, selfless love—that I have ever heard. To truly love others in the 'lay down your life for their sake' way that the Gospels calls the Church to is no small thing. But what else is there? If not love, than to what can we turn?

“To try and stop war by placing before men’s eyes the terrible suffering involved will never succeed, because men are willing (in their thoughts and imaginations at least) to face any kind of suffering when motivated by noble aims like the vague and tremendous concept of freedom…” (Dorothy Day)

How do you get people to change their perspectives on social issues? According to Day, concern for the suffering of others won't do it because ideology is a stronger force than empathy. People are willing to excuse—or at least justify—a great many things in the pursuit of their so-called greater good. So what can actually bring about change?

For Day, a religious conversion is the only way. That's of course not to say that all religious people are concerned with the suffering of others, especially since so much of her time was spent trying to push the Catholic Church on these issues. But, I think Day is hitting on something important that I want to look at from two angles.

First, one way to change someone's ideology is an even stronger ideology. This is why religion can be such a powerful tool for appeal. A higher power can override our own ideals. It can work, but it doesn't always end well. Arguments around how to interpret the 'wishes' of the higher power can just create the same sort of entrenched viewpoints—and even further justify human suffering for divine good. This sort of religious appeal can also remain purely intellectual, in "thoughts and imaginations" as Day put it. This isn't always a a bad thing. I do think you can 'fake it till you make it' so-to-speak when it comes to selfless behaviour. Do good works and (hopefully) you will be changed internally as well.

But let's shift to the second angle, which is where I think Day would ultimately land in all of this. That is that real change, the sort that can be stronger than ideology, can only come from genuine encounter. For Day this means an encounter with the crucified Christ. Importantly, this is not an encounter in an intellectual sense or in some immaterial transcendent way, rather it is an encounter that only comes from seeing Christ in the suffering of others.

“Christ is being martyred today in Vietnam, in Santo Domingo, and in all places where men are taking to the sword in this world crisis. He will be crucified to the end of time. He is with us in His humanity until the end of time.”

Day lived and worked on the margins. She spent her days amongst the poor and sick. She frequently travelled and met with others struggling for justice—migrant workers, racialized communities, people whose daily lives were threatened by war and conquest. This is where she encountered Christ. And it's where she would say the Church belongs lest its ideologies remain purely in "thoughts and imaginations."

Is your conscience a good measure for doing the right thing?

This is a question that has been circling around some of the reading I've been doing lately. In a column from December, 1965, Dorothy Day reflects on the role of conscience when it comes to how one feels about participating in war. Notably, she writes that one's conscience can be wrong, or ill-formed; but you should still follow it.

“If a man truly thinks he is combating evil and striving for the good, if he truly thinks he is striving for the common good, he must follow his conscience regardless of others.”

People can have deeply set convictions on things or a passion for some sort of idealized good that they want to see in the world. I guess Day’s starting place here is that you should follow those convictions as opposed to ignoring them. However, that doesn't immediately mean that your conscience is taking you in the right direction. This is why she goes further and suggests that our conscience must be continually formed.

“But he always has the duty of forming his conscience by studying, listening, being ready to hear his opponent’s point of view.”

For our actions to be meaningful, they need to come from some deeper value or conviction; but we must keep bringing those values and convictions back to the testing ground that can only come from deeper reflection. This is the sort of thought > praxis > thought model that I remember encountering when I first read Paulo Freire many years ago. Both our convictions and our actions require ongoing formation.

That said, I believe the formation of one's conscience is a much deeper process than simply 'doing your own research.' We need something to orient ourselves, and this is my proposal for a guiding ethic (or at least an acknowledgement of my own).

My current studying has had me returning to another favourite writer and thinker of mine, William Stringfellow (who I was very close to doing a thesis on in my Masters). He writes this,

“The beginning of conscience, in a Christian sense, is realizing that every action or omission, even those which seem routine and trivial, is consequentially related to the lives of all other human beings on the face of the earth... Conscience, in other words, is knowing that people are related to, and responsible for, each other in all things." (Stringfellow, Dissenter in a Great Society)

Stringfellow is no stranger to ethics (he has a trilogy on the topic). If you're looking for a place to orient yourself—you could do worse. This idea of interconnection, that our actions have impact, is crucial to trying to understand (and solve) big problems. It forces us to confront the reality that we participate in a system and in doing so we uphold and benefit from it. I'd personally push this even further than Stringfellow does here and suggest that we are interconnected with all things, not just humans. But his point remains.

Dorothee Sölle (another favourite) expands on this, suggesting that if you want to understand your own praxis—that is, do deep reflection on your actions—it begins by asking who is being victimized and who is profiting? These two questions have been core to my own conscience formation for many years now. And while they might not always offer easy answers, they help orient me in these complicated systems of interdependence to which we are all bound. By knowing who suffers and who profits by and in these systems, we can try and better untangle the ways we knowingly—and unknowingly—participate. This knowledge should then form our actions.

So to return to Day—yes, follow your conscience, but your conscience alone is not enough. It must be formed and reformed by deep reflection on the context you are trying to live within.

"There are not enough historians among us."

One thing that stood out while reading a decade of Dorothy Day's columns is how much time she spends in sharing the stories of ordinary, local activists and saints. These are the people that she regularly visited and corresponded with, regular folks—families, carpenters, painters—who were responding to need in their own context.

In one column from 1967, she laments the way many younger people who are engaged in activism did not know the history of all these people who made up the Catholic Worker of decades past. This is what it is to record the lives of the saints, not to capture a few great deeds, but to show how their faith led them to act in many daily little ways.

I'm drawn to this idea of how her columns helped bring together this community of workers across the whole country and how sharing and celebrating their stories made them a part of it all.

“We have to live with the positions we take, and at the same time we are bound to be beset with all kinds of human doubts… I know what human fear is and how often it keeps us from following our conscience.”

In an April column of 1968, Dorothy Day reflects on the way fear often prevents us from being willing to sacrifice on behalf of others. She is writing this in the aftermath of the death of MLK and the way in which white Christians have been afraid to stand in solidarity for racial justice in the south—even when they knew it to be the right thing to do. And I think she seems to believe that sometimes we need to be pushed into it because otherwise fear would keep winning. There's something in our nature that resists the idea of giving up our comforts, safety, and self-interest for the sake of others. But this, for Day, is what the church is: a kingdom formed around giving up one's life for the good of other people. Its the one thing that makes any of it compelling.

“It is not worthwhile writing or speaking unless you say what is in your heart and say it as you see things. This is the way. This is what converts expect when they come into the Church and they find it in the lives of the saints who accept the idea of death in whatever form it takes. We say all these things in our prayers and don’t mean them. And God takes us at our word, fortunately, and so we are saved in spite of ourselves; we are dragged in by the hair of the head.”

Our hearts may know it to be true, but fear stops us from acting on it. This is what she means by us not actually meaning the things we pray. If we meant it, we would live it. And so sometimes we need to be dragged in to acting against our self-interest because we can't seem to get there on our own.