Peter Maurin, My Teacher

Introduction

 

Among many books I use in my work, three are precious beyond almost others. My autographed copies of Dorothy Day’s Loaves and Fishes, The Long Loneliness and On Pilgrimage: The Sixties were given to me by Dorothy Day in 1975, five years before she died at the age of 83. She got down on her knees in her room and pulled a cardboard box of her books from under her bed, explaining that the paperback edition had gone out of print, and that these were publisher’s remnants.

 

Other memorable details of the visit stand out. She called my attention admiringly to the long, sturdy grey wool skirt she was wearing, a cast off from a Sister who had gone into secular dress. I think she enjoyed the irony, and so did I. Later in the evening, when we moved down to the large room in Maryhouse, where I was to be the Friday night speaker in a long established Catholic Worker practice, I noticed that she was holding an American cheese sandwich, still wrapped in plastic, from a local automat. “Look at this sandwich.” She said. “That poor woman over there gave it to me.” The poor woman was one of the guests at Maryhouse, where Dorothy too lived. I watched her handle that cheese sandwich with as much respect and care as she would have shown to the Eucharistic bread.

 

Why do these details linger in my mind, when so many other people I have met have slipped out of memory? The answer, for me at least, is simple. Dorothy Day was the walking love of God, a love as tangible as the lower east side of New York where she lived and worked for so many years. Dorothy Day’s influence on American spirituality grows through the years, and extends far beyond the United States. I have learned that, together with Martin Luther King, Jr., and Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day is the American peace-maker who speaks to the European members of Pax Christi, as together we try to help one another grow in an understanding and practice of Christian nonviolence. There is no doubt in my mind that her life will speak with equal eloquence to the emerging Pax Christi groups in Asia.

 

In the selections from Dorothy Day’s writings included here, I have tried to include those that reveal the depths of her personality and spirituality. She lived by gifts, and not only by material gifts; she was very conscious of this, as her own autobiographical writings show.

 

In choosing texts I was struck over and over again by several distinctive traits. She could see to the heart of an issue no matter how impressive the credentials of those who were confused. Her analyses are often brilliant. But she was certainly no cold intellectual. She was a woman of deep emotion, and in her writings conveys her feelings with disarming honesty. It is that honesty that keeps her from closing her eyes to the truth when it is painful. She describes over and over again life as she knows it, the sordid, the tragic, and the glorious and tender.

 

She loved to repeat Dostoyevsky’s assertion, “The world will be saved by beauty.” Certainly it was beauty that saved Dorothy regularly from being overwhelmed by the vocation she bravely accepted. That vocation was the works of mercy, a life-long effort to make it a little easier for people to be good, to help build a new just and peaceful society within the shell of the old.

 

Born in 1897 in Chicago, she spent a few years of her childhood in San Francisco, but most of her girlhood in the city of her birth, until she went to the University of Illinois on a scholarship, determined to become a journalist. A year later she was in New York, working at her profession on left wing journals. Her background was as devoid if religious training as that of most of her peers, though her writings attest to her early hunger for God. Her autobiography details her early adult years of intense involvement in social causes, always on the side of those struggling for justice, and often as not for sheer survival.

 

In those early years in New York she kept company with Greenwich Village intellectuals and artists. Her common law marriage came to an end when the man who fathered their child refused to accept Dorothy Day’s decision to become a Catholic. The joy of motherhood had brought her into contact with God in a way she had never known before, and for her, conversion to the Catholic Church was a logical consequence.

 

Soon after, her life’s journey took its unique direction from an encounter with Peter Maurin (Питер Морэн), a largely self-educated French peasant who became in Dorothy’s own words, her teacher. He taught her in the area where she longed for instruction, the integration of the world of faith with the experience of poor people whose lives she wanted to share. Peter introduced her to the breadth and depth of the Catholic tradition. She was an apt pupil, and until the end of her days nurtured her faith partly by immersing herself in classic Christian literature, but never to the exclusion of other good writing, particularly the great Russian novelists, for whom she had a special love.

 

Together, Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day founded the Catholic Worker movement with its houses of hospitality and its penny a copy newspaper, The Catholic Worker, which reached a circulation of 100,000 and became a major vehicle of spreading Catholic social teaching from the time of the depression of the 1930’s to the present. For more than a generation, Dorothy Day was editor of The Catholic Worker. That both the movement and the newspaper flourish today its testimony to the depth of the foundation on which they are built.

 

Writing of Dorothy Day in his book, Justice Seekers, Peace Makers: Thirty-Two Portraits in Courage, Michael True says of Dorothy Day that she is a model for our times “because she internalized values associated with peace and justice and gave them substance.” He explains:

 

In her devotion to voluntary poverty, to nonviolence, and to the radical reconstruction of the social order, she lived among workers, radicals, prisoners, and the down and out. For Christians, she came as a great shock. Here, in the life and vocation of one woman were the values that had been held up to church members, but often by people who did not embody them. Through her, the words became flesh: devotion to the poor, resistance to war, vulnerability toward circumstance, and charity to everyone.

 

When I think of words that took flesh in Dorothy Day, my mind turns immediately to the beautiful opening words of Vatican’s II’s Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the Modern World: “The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the people of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these too are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ. Indeed, nothing genuinely human fails to raise an echo in their hearts.” These words could have been written by Dorothy Day, so exactly do they mirror her mind and heart and her day to day life as revealed in the following selections from her writings.

 

Mary Evelyn Jegen, SND

 

 

A Touch of Beauty

 

It was in Chicago, where we moved to afterward, that I met my first Catholic. It was the first time we had been really poor. We lived in an apartment over a store, on Cottage Grove Avenue. There was no upstairs, no garden, no sense of space. The tenement stretched away down the block and there were back porches and paved courtyards with never a touch of green anywhere. I remember how hungry I became for the green fields during the long hot summer that followed. There was a vacant lot over by the lake front and I used to walk down there with my sister and stand sniffing ecstatically the hot sweet smell of wild clover and listening to the sleepy sound of the crickets. But that very desire for beauty was a painful delight for me. It sharpened my senses and made me more avid in my search for it. I found it in the lake that stretched steel gray beyond the Illinois Central tracks. I found it in that one lone field of clover. And I found a glimpse of supernatural beauty in Mrs. Barrett, mother of Kathryn and six other little Barretts, who lived upstairs.

 

It was Mrs. Barrett who gave me my first impulse towards Catholicism. It was around ten o’clock in the morning that I went up to Kathryn’s to call for her to come out and play. There was no one on the porch or in the kitchen. The breakfast dishes had all been washed. They were long railroad apartments, those flats, and thinking the children must be in the front room, I burst in and ran through the bedrooms.

 

In the front bedroom Mrs. Barrett was on her knees, saying her prayers. She turned to tell me that Kathryn and the children had all gone to the store and went on with her praying. And I felt a warm burst of love toward Mrs. Barrett that I have never forgotten, a feeling of gratitude and happiness that still warms my heart when I remember her. She had God, and there was beauty and joy in her life.

 

All through my life what she was doing remained with me. And though I became oppressed with the problem of poverty and injustice, though I groaned at the hideous sordidness of man’s lot, though there were years when I clung to the philosophy of economic determinism as an explanation of man’s fate, still there were moments when in the midst of misery and class strife, life was shot through with glory. Mrs. Barrett in her sordid little tenement flat finished her breakfast dishes at ten o’clock in the morning and got down on her knees and prayed to God.

(from Union Square to Rome)

 

 

To Be a Saint

 

The Harrington family also lived in that block of tenements, and there were nine children, the eldest a little girl of twelve. She was a hard-working little girl, and naturally I had the greatest admiration for her on account of the rigorous life she led. I had a longing then, I can remember, for the rigorous life. I was eight, and I had begun to help my mother for the first time. It was the first time our own family (to me a large one though we were only six) had to do without a servant, and my sister and I were pressed into service to help with dishes and housecleaning. I remember the joy I got out of it, this having a part in the family’s concerns, having them depend on me too for my help. I took my dishwashing very seriously and I can remember scouring faucets until they shone. The work grew wearisome, of course; it did not always have the aspect of a game. But it had to be done and after six months of it, I was well used to the fact that I had to do my share.

 

But I had a tremendous amount of liberty compared to little Mary Harrington, my senior. It was not until after the dishes were done that she could come out to play in the evening. Often she was so tired that we just stretched out on the long back porch, open to the sky. We lay there, gazing up at the only beauty the city had to offer us, and we talked and dreamed.

 

I don’t remember what we talked about, but I do remember one occasion when she told me of the life of some saint. I don’t know which one nor can I remember any of the incidents of it. I can only remember the feeling of lofty enthusiasm I had, how my heart seemed almost bursting with desire to take part in such high endeavor. One verse of the Psalms often comes to my mind: “Enlarge thou my heart, O Lord, that Thou mayest enter in.” This was one of those occasions when my small heart was enlarged. I could feel it swelling with love and gratitude to such a good God for such a friendship as Mary’s, for conversation such as hers, and I was filled with lofty ambitions to be a saint, a natural striving, a thrilling recognition of the possibilities of spiritual adventure.

 

I, too, wanted to do penance for my own sins and for the sins of the whole world, for I had a keen sense of sin, of natural imperfection and earthliness. I often felt clearly that I was being deliberately evil in my attitudes, just as I clearly recognized truth when I came across it. And the thrill of joy that again and again stirred my heart when I came across spiritual truth and beauty never abated, never left me as I grew older.

 

The sad thing is that one comes across it so seldom. Natural goodness, natural beauty, brings joy and a lifting of the spirit, but it is not enough, it is not the same. The special emotions I am speaking of came only at hearing the word of God. It was as though each time I heard our Lord spoken of, a warm feeling of joy filled me. It was hearing of someone you love and who loves you.

(from Union Square to Rome)

 

 

Glimpses of God

 

But always the glimpses of God came most when I was alone. Objectors cannot say that it was fear of loneliness and solitude and pain that made me turn to Him. It was in those few years when I was alone and most happy that I found Him. I found Him at last through joy and thanksgiving, not through sorrow.

 

Yet how can I say that either? Better let it be said that I found Him through His poor, and in a moment of joy I turned to Him. I have said, sometimes flippantly, that the mass of bourgeois smug Christians who denied Christ in His poor made me turn to Communism, and that it was the Communists and working with them that made me turn to God.

 

Communism, says our Holy Father, can be likened to a heresy, and a heresy is a distortion of the truth. Many Christians have lost sight, to a great extent, of the communal aspect of Christianity, so the collective ideal is the result. They have failed to learn a philosophy of labor, have failed to see Christ in the worker. So in Russia, the worker, instead of Christ, has been exalted. They have the dictatorship of the proletariat maintained by one man, also a dictator. The proletariat as a class has come to be considered the Messiah, the deliverer.

 

A mystic may be called a man in love with God. Not one who loves God, but who is in love with God.And this mystical love, which is an exalted emotion, leads one to love the things of Christ. His footsteps are sacred. The steps of His passion and death are retraced down through the ages. Almost every time you step into a Church you see people making the Stations of the Cross. They meditate on the mysteries of His life, death, and resurrection, and by this they are retracing with love those early scenes and identifying themselves with the actors in those scenes.

 

When we suffer, we are told we suffer with Christ. We are “completing the sufferings of Christ.” We suffer His loneliness and fear in the garden when His friends slept. We are bowed down with Him under the weight of not only our own sins but the sins of each other, of the whole world. We are those who are sinned against and those who are sinning. We are identified with Him, one with Him. We are members of His Mystical Body.

 

Often there is a mystical element in the love of a radical worker for his brother, for his fellow worker. It extends to the scene of his sufferings, and those spots where he has suffered and died are hallowed. The names of places like Everett, Ludlow, Bisbee, South Chicago, Imperial Valley, Elaine, Arkansas, and all those other places where workers have suffered and died for their cause have become sacred to the worker. You know this feeling as does every other radical in the country. Through ignorance, perhaps, you do not acknowledge Christ’s name, yet, I believe you are trying to love Christ in His poor, in His persecuted ones. Whenever men have laid down their lives for their fellows, they are doing it in a measure for Him. This I still firmly believe, even though you and others may not realize it.

 

“Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these brethren, you have done it unto me.” Feeling this as strongly as I did, is it any wonder that I was led finally to the feet of Christ?

 

I do not mean at all that I went around in a state of exaltation or that any radical does. Love is a matter of the will. You know yourself how during a long strike the spirit falters, how hard it is for the leaders to keep up the morale of the men and to keep the fire of hope burning within them. They have a hard time sustaining this hope themselves. Saint Teresa says that there are three attributes of the soul: memory, understanding, and will. These very leaders by their understanding of the struggle, how victory is gained very often through defeat, how every little gain benefits the workers all over the country, through their memory of past struggles, are enabled to strengthen their wills to go on. It is only by exerting these faculties of the soul that one is enabled to love one’s fellow. And this strength comes from God. There can be no brotherhood without the Fatherhood of God.

 

Take a factory where fifty per cent of the workers themselves content, do not care about their fellows. It is hard to inspire them with the idea of solidarity. Take those workers who despise their fellow-worker, the Negro, the Hungarian, the Italian, the Irish, where race hatreds and nationalist feelings persist. It is hard to overcome their stubborn resistance with patience and with love. That is why there is coercion, the beating of scabs and strikebreakers, the threats and the hatreds that grow up. That is why in labor struggles, unless there is a wise and patient leader, there is disunity, a rending of the Mystical Body.

 

Even the most unbelieving of labor leaders have understood the expediency of patience when I have talked to them. They realize that the use of force has lost more strikes than it has won them. They realize that when there is no violence in a strike, the employer through his armed guards and strikebreakers may try to introduce this violence. It has happened again and again in labor history.

 

What is hard to make the labor leader understand is that we must love even the employer, unjust though he may be, that we must try to overcome his resistance by non-violent resistance, by withdrawing labor, i.e., by strikes and by boycott. These are non-violent means and most effective. We must try to educate him, to convert him. We must forgive him seventy times seven just as we forgive our fellow-worker and keep trying to bring him to a sense of solidarity.

This is the part labor does not seem to understand in this country or in any country. Class war does exist. We cannot deny it. It is there. Class lines are drawn even here in America where we have always flattered ourselves that the poor boy can become president, the messenger boy, the head of the corporation. The very fact of the necessity of national security laws, old age and unemployment insurance, acknowledges the existence of a proletariat class. The employer much too often does not pay a wage sufficient for a man to care for his family in sickness and in health. The unskilled worker, who is in the majority, does not have enough to lay some by for his old age or enough to buy a home with or to buy his share in partnership. He has been too long exploited and ground down. The line has been fixed dividing the rich and the poor, the owner and the proletariat who are the unpropertied, the dispossessed.

 

And how to convert an employer who has evicted all his workers because they were on strike so that men, women, and children are forced to live in tents, who has called out armed guards as Rockefeller did in Ludlow, who shot into those tents and fired them so that twenty eight women and children were burnt to death? How to forgive such a man? How to convert him? This is the question the worker asks you in the bitterness of his soul? It is only through a Christ-like love that man can forgive.

 

Remember Vanzetti’s last words before he died in the electric chair. “I wish to tell you I am an innocent man. I never committed any crime, but sometimes some sin. I wish to forgive some people for what they are now doing to me.”

 

He said when he was sentenced: “If it had not been for these things, I might have lived out my life talking at street corners to scorning men. I might have died unmarked, unknown, a failure. Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life could we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man’s understanding of man, as now we do by accident. Our words, our lives, our pains–nothing! The taking of our lives—lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fishpeddler–all! That last moment belongs to us. That agony is our triumph.” He forgave those who had imprisoned him for years, who had hounded him to his death. You have read Mauriac. He was one of those of whom Mauriac was speaking when he said, “It is impossible for any one of those who has charity in his heart not to serve Christ. Even those who think they hate Him have consecrated their lives to Him.”

 

It was from men such as these that I became convinced, little by little, of the necessity of religion and of God in my everyday life. I know now that the Catholic Church is the church of the poor, no matter what you say about the wealth of her priests and bishops. I have mentioned in these pages the few Catholics I met before my conversion, but daily I saw people coming from Mass. Never did I set foot in a Catholic church but that I saw people there at home with Him. First Fridays, novenas, and missions brought the masses thronging in and out of the Catholic churches. They were of all nationalities, of all classes, but most of all they were the poor. The very attacks made against the Church proved her Divinity to me. Nothing but a Divine institution could have survived the betrayal of Judas, the denial of Peter, the sins of many of those who professed her Faith, who were supposed to minister to her poor.

 

Christ is God or He is the world’s greatest liar and imposter. How can you Communists who claim to revere Him as a working class leader fail to see this? And if Christ established His Church on earth with Peter as its rock, that faulty one who denied him three times, who fled from Him when he was in trouble, then I, too, wanted a share in that tender compassionate love that is so great. Christ can forgive all sins and yearn over us no matter how far we fall.

(from Union Square to Rome)

 

 

Peter Maurin, My Teacher

 

We loved him dearly, this Peter of ours, and revered him as a saint, but we neglected him, too. He asked nothing for himself, so he got nothing.

 

When we all lived together under one roof in the houses of hospitality, he seldom had a room of his own. Returning from trips around the country, he never knew whether there would be a bed for him. The younger editors had their own desks and were jealous of their privacy. But Peter not only had no place to lay his head but had no place for his books and papers—aside from his capacious pockets. He had no chair, no place at table, no corner that was particularly his. He was a pilgrim and a stranger on earth, using the things of this world as though he used them not, availing himself of only what he needed and discarding all excess baggage. I think of him walking down the street slowly, leisurely, deep in thought, his hands clasped behind him. He paid no attention to traffic lights; I suppose he out his faith in his guardian angel…

 

Someone once described me in an interview as “authoritative.” Later, listening to a rape recording of a talk I had given on the plight of agricultural workers, I had to admit that I did sound didactic. Since then, I have tried to be more gentle in my approach to others, so as not to make them feel that I am resentful of their comfort when I speak of the misery of the needy and the groaning of the poor. But if I am didactic it is because Peter Maurin was my teacher, because he gave me principles to live by and lessons to study, and because I am so convinced of the rightness of his proposals.

 

“How can you be so sure?” Mike Wallace once asked me in a television interview. He spoke with wonder rather than irritation, because he felt my confidence was rooted in religion. I told him that unless I felt sure I would not speak at all. If I were ever visited by doubts—either religious ones or doubts about my vocation in this movement—I would accept it as a temptation, as a great suffering that I must share with so much of the world today.

 

Even then, deep within, I would be sure; even though I said to myself, “I believe because I want to believe, I hope because I want to hope, I love because I want to love.”

(Loaves and Fishes)