Dorothy Day and Wendell Berry"Saints" for the Daily Work of Doing it Differently

Portraits of Dorothy Day and Wendell Berry by Rob Shetterly*

Reading Wendell Berry for the first time in the early 1980s changed my world view. He so very clearly revealed the wrong-headedness of the direction in which we were collectively marching as consumers of "goods" instead of producers of good - and how desperately we needed to turn it around. Later, reading  Dorothy Day's accounts of her nose-to-the-grindstone life lived with radical intentionality, did the same. She was the embodiment of Berry's belief that "what we need is here," and that it is also us - wide awake and fully engaged in the work of healing.

The other night, while leafing through a friend's copy of Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, a book I read soon after it was published in 1992, I was thrilled to find this quote by Wendell Berry regarding Dorothy Day: 

The real work of planet-saving will be small, humble, and humbling, and (insofar as it involves love) pleasing and rewarding. Its jobs will be too many to count, too many to report, too many to be publicly noticed or rewarded, too small to make anyone rich or famous...

The great obstacle may be not greed but the modern hankering after glamour. A lot of our smartest, most concerned people want to come up with a big solution to a big problem. I don't think that planet-saving, if we take it seriously, can furnish employment to many such people...

When I think of the kind of worker the job requires, I think of Dorothy Day (if one can think of Dorothy Day herself, separate from the publicity that came as a result of her rarity), a person willing to go down and down into the daunting, humbling, almost hopeless local presence of the problem - to face the great problem one small life at a time.

*I'm a great admirer of Shetterly's work and have enjoyed watching it unfold since 2001 when he took on the project, "Americans Who Tell the Truth," as a response to the events of September 11.

Comments

[Julie Garrett]

Hi Kelli,

Thanks for the link to Americans Who Tell the Truth. It's wonderful.

julie

[Sheila B.]

Kelli,
Good thoughts to start the week with. Thanks as always for sharing!

Sheila B.

[Zot Lynn Szurgot]

Attention comes to a local producer of good (and not much of a consumer of "goods") who happens to be an author on a closely related subject:
http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/rdbook/2002/a_daily_utopia:_creating_our_moral_values_every_day

i also recommend her _Being_Human_. ISBN-13:9780520226548 , ISBN: 0520226542

Fuller disclosure: i am one of Anna's friends (she's accurate about conversational threads weaving through decades), and her electrician. She often teases me about how much i like to drill holes in her house.

Funny, but i never seem to want to do that to her arguments.

[Ron Zamora]

Thanks Kelli,
I've gotta read more Wendell Berry !