Friday, February 03, 2012

Dorothy Day Today?

I've been reading All the Way to Heaven. The Selected Letters of Dorothy Day and came across this very timely remark in my reading last night. It is from a letter Day wrote to the IRS when she was called upon for a "visit" about her taxes. ("I have no personal income," she replied, "and so am unable to report.") Anyway, this is the passage that struck me as fitting to our times (even if it was written in 1951):

"I certainly do not want to go to jail, but if some day the 'all-encroaching State,' as our bishops have termed it, does prosecute me, which it would do if it were legalistic and insistent in its rejection of Christianity, which it isn't, I hope I would be given the grace to endure it and be accounted worthy to suffer for Christ, who loved us and died for us..."

2 comments:

C said...

This current state of the State would take more than Days, Maurins and Berrigans to get its attention (the Occupiers' thrust isn't exactly Christ-based). Where to from here?

Anonymous said...

My comments always seem to be lost in the translation. Some of them are quite pertinent, I think.
Maybe another day another time.