Dorothy & Dostoevsky [... the musings of Becca]

Hey, all!

Mark invited me to share what I’ve been thinking about as I read… specifically, what are internal percolating questions. So, here goes! 

First, I’ll confess to you all that I am horribly behind on the reading, which combined with my shyness leads to me being quieter than most during our gatherings. Rest assured, I am listening and love hearing about your observations!

However, I have made my way through has me thinking about Dorothy Day...

As I mentioned during one of our first classes, I was attracted to giving The Brothers Karamazov a shot because it is often mentioned as one of Dorothy Day’s favorite books.

In All is Grace: A Biography of Dorothy Day, Jim Forest writes: “The following year, 1971, Dorothy had an invitation from her friend Nina Polcyn in Chicago to join her in going to Eastern Europe with a tour group led by a professor of theology from Yale… The stops included Poland, Bulgaria and Hungary, but the main part was in Russia - or rather ‘Holy Mother Russia,’ as Dorothy invariably put it even during the Soviet era - the Russia whose authors, icons, and exiles had mattered so much in shaping her Christian faith… Having arrived in Saint Petersburg (still Lenigard at the time), the most important stop for Dorothy was the Saint Alexander Nevsky Monastery. In the monastery cemetery, she prayed at the grave of her beloved Dostoevsky, so many of whose characters she spoke of with the familiarity of friendship and whose fictional Father Zosima in the  Brothers Karamazov was as real to Dorothy as any living friend.” 

As I read, I try to look for connections between the characters and my image of who Dorothy was as a person. How did this book influence her faith? What parts of it influenced the Catholic Worker Movement? What does it say about the Church I am a part of and work for - often begrudgingly and with lots of existential angst? What passages did she mark? What were her notes in the margins?

A few passages that have caught my attention. I muse that they might have also caught Dorothy’s eye: 

The most famous one that we’ve discussed and that she was known to quote: “Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.” 

An exchange between Miusov and Ivan about the Church: “So far as I understand it, this, then, would be the realization of some ideal, an infinitely remote one, at the Second Coming. That is as you please. A beautiful utopian dream of the disappearance of wars, banks, and so on. Something even resembling socialism.” Sounds a lot like the Catholic Worker to me.

A colleague recently sent our staff this homily after the Church came down once again on same sex couples. Insert huge eye roll. The pastor mentions The Brothers K, specifically the section with the Grand Inquisitor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQhuWUYuN4o

The point the pastor makes about our preference often for institutional certainly over wrestling with our faith actively and struggling to put love into action really hits home. Also, I want to clone this priest. We need more like this one.

Finally, all of the above makes me think of one of Dorothy Day’s counterpart in the Catholic Worker Movement, Peter Maurin. I will leave you with one of his more famous of his easy essays: 

Blowing the Dynamite 

Writing about the Catholic Church 

a radical writer says: 

“Rome will have to do more 

than play a waiting game; 

she will have to use 

some of the dynamite 

inherent in her message.”

to blow the dynamite 

of a message 

is the only way 

to make the message dynamic. 

If the Catholic Church 

is not today 

the dominant social dynamic force, 

it is because Catholic scholars

have failed to blow the dynamite 

of the Church. 

Catholic scholars 

have taken the dynamite 

of the Church, 

have wrapped it up 

in a nice phraseology, 

placed it in a an hermetic container 

and sat on the lid. 

It is about time 

to blow the lid off 

so the Catholic Church 

may again become 

the dominant social dynamic force.

How can I be this dynamite both at work and in my personal life? What do I need to wrestle with to put love into action? Where am I falling short or where am I succeeding? How can I be present and mindful like Alyosha? What would our world look like if the Church actually acted like Jesus? 

The end.

See you tonight!