We have been meditating on the story and person of Dorothy Day this week. I was inspired to do so on listening to an interview last Saturday with Robert Ellsberg, author of Dorothy Day: Spiritual Writings.
Dorothy seems especially pertinent to our challenges today since she was a Resister of the first order. She had a deep inner life, which included daily Mass and daily prayer that prepared her for her powerful outer work on behalf of the anawim or forgotten ones.
She resisted nonviolently and bravely and paid the price with many trips to jail. She was also a committed pacifist.
She lived a life of great simplicity in and among the poor, sometimes in the city and sometimes in the countryside. She summarized her work as an effort to render it easier for people to be good. And happy.
She was close to the Catholic monk Thomas Merton, as we discussed in yesterday’s DM. We meditated there on their shared stand on behalf of Native Americans, and on how Dorothy wrote a Foreword to Merton’s book Ishi Means Man, in which he laments the genocide of indigenous peoples and holds up their rituals for their capacity to connect us to the greater cosmos.
Merton criticized missionaries for failing to grasp the beauty of Mayan rituals and painted a picture of the “graceful, ritual dancing of the men and women” at prayer in tribal ceremonies. One commentator says Merton recognized pre-colonial Mayan culture as “a symbol of the paradise that is possible for all.”
In his final year, 1968, Merton wrote a major poem called The Geography of Lograire and offers these lines:
Redneck captains with whips
Fire in their fingers….
Friars behind every rock every tree
Doing business
Bargaining for our souls
Book burners and hangmen.
Strong language to name the oppression that has gone on for centuries toward indigenous peoples, often in the name of religion.
Merton recognizes how ceremony or ritual should connect the human to the cosmos and how it helps us move from an ego consciousness to a larger awareness, one might say from self to Self.
For the Native Americans, it brings about the awareness of a network of relationships in which one had a place in the mesh. One’s identity was the intersection of cords where one ‘belonged.’ The intersection was to be sought in terms of a kind of musical or aesthetic and scientific synchronicity. This is how “one fell in step with the dance of the universe, the liturgy of the stars.”
A sense of belonging seems hard to come by in our time, when so much time is spent on computers and so little time in community or community celebration. We have been slow to ritualize our connection to the vast universe being discovered in our time.
But that connecting, that “network of relationships” and sense of belonging with a “place in the mesh” is what healthy ritual can and ought to provide. It connects us “into a cosmic system which was at once perfectly sacred and perfectly worldly.”
Such belonging is not beyond our capacity; it undergirds all community, which Pére Chenu defines as the quest for the common good. We have surely felt this power in our Cosmic Masses over the decades.
Ritual honors the network of relationships that allows society to happen and the “I” to become “We” and for “self” to graduate to “Self.” Union with the whole. Communion in the fullest sense of that term. “Oneing,” to use Julian of Norwich’s word for mystical experience.
Banner Image: Dorothy Day icon by Nicholas Tsai. Photo by Jim Forest on Flickr.
Queries for Contemplation
Do you sense a loss of a sense of belonging in today’s world? Do you agree that a healthy ritual is meant to provide that sense of belonging? And that community and a quest for the common good are possible? And that the new cosmology beckons rituals that gather people to celebrate our beauty and awe in the context of creation?
Related Readings by Matthew Fox
A Way To God: Thomas Merton’s Creation Spirituality Journey, pp. 196f.
Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality
Christian Mystics: 365 Readings & Meditations
A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Awareness with Social Justice
Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth.
Charles Burack, ed., Matthew Fox: Essential Writings in Creation Spirituality.
The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance
Adam Bucko and Matthew Fox, Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision for a New Generation
8 thoughts on “Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton and the Power of Ritual”
I am you and you are me and as one we shall always be. We are one in the sacred circle of eternal existance.
I love the African term, ubuntu, which I think means, I am because you are.
I do feel that sense of loss but I regard is as being similar to the changing seasons, such as the oncoming of winter. There’s a much greater cosmic cycle taking place in which the wheels are turning. As Anthony de Mello used to say, “All is well!” Attention and awareness are all.
With its praise of “belonging,” “rituals” and “union with the whole,” I read today’s DM as a life-giving palimpsest over a diagnostic of endemic addiction. 1) “I did not feel I belonged” is the most common statement in the sharing of addicts in recovery; a most interesting graph of the trends of the word “belong” shows that its use frequency (per million words) decreased steadily from 44 in the 1840s to 17 in the 1980s [https://www.etymonline.com/word/belong]. A similar graph for “addiction” would surely show a reverse trend. 2) The loss of healthy rituals is clearly compensated by the many unhealthy rituals associated with addiction. 3) The prevalence of alcoholism has been shown to be especially high in populations spiritually wounded by the loss of Earth-based spirituality. “Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness” by Frederick Turner (1980) is the most heart-wrenching account I have read of the rape of the North American indigenous cultures. Thank you for this rich breakfast of meaningful thoughts.
Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! We all need a healthy sense of community and rituals to maintain a sacred sense of interconnectedness with one another, with Beautiful Sacred Mother Earth/Her living creatures/Her graceful essential abundance, and with All spiritual physical/nonphysical beings and dimensions of Our Sacred Evolving Cosmos with-in the Divine Loving Spirit/Flow of the ETERNAL PRESENT MOMENT… OUR LOVING DIVERSE ONENESS….
In literary analysis, the phrase “concrete universal” describes the resonance that one person has, like the “Everyman” of an ancient drama. In a poem, story, movie or play we can see the humanity of one child, woman or man, whether from one culture or another. Jesus wisely referred to himself as the “Son of Man,” which term has been degendered to “human being.” And we see the Jesus of Scripture as “the Universal Christ” risen and glorious.
In Lak Esch Ala Keem. I am another yourself. You are another Me. Together we are WE. So BE it!
The song “All Nations Rise” by Lyla June came up for me while reading. I believe we as humanity are yearning for ritual and an embracing of indigenous ways of life.