Dorothy Day and child

When I was a child I spoke as a child. Not I am elderly but would like to speak as a child. It is difficult since with all my education the child voice has been deafened. Education has lots of benefits and spells success but often wrecks our imagination.

Today, November 2, was All Souls day in our church, a day we honor the dead. A long list of dead from our parish was read off at the end of liturgy. Since I have not been a member very long I did not recognize many of the names.

Cornell West, in a talk he gave last November at Maryhouse, Catholic Worker House of Hospitality in New York city, talks about Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement and one of my heroes as a “death wrestler.” He quotes her statement in her autobiography, Long Lowliness, “I had to learn how to die in order to live well.” A person wrestling with death is not afraid to speak the truth as she or he sees it. If you are facing death, what do you care about being insulted, marginalized or being jailed?

We recognize the dead to bring home the reality of death in our lives not only at the end of life but in our daily lives. If we ignore death in our lives we live a superficial life not worth living. Yet facing death is hard, even with faith that only by dying we will rise to new life.

Death wrestlers, like Dorothy are people of strong beliefs yet very gentle and kind. Dying to live and finding new life in death seem like contradictions, and they are. Death Wrestlers take to contradictions like a child to imagination. It is only natural.

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