How Long Does Fame Last?

Let’s begin with a strange question. Who among all the people living now will be remembered in a thousand years?

We might assume that anyone from our era who will be remembered in 3025 must have been famous in his or her lifetime. Do we think that current political leaders, here or elsewhere in the world, will still be remembered? How about the people whose faces appear on magazine covers at the grocery store? What about outstanding athletes? Will people still know about Michael Jordan? From the world of music, Beethoven will be remembered, but will the Beatles or Willie Nelson?

If we imagine that fame is enduring, I suggest that you put that assumption to the test by finding a newspaper from a hundred years ago on the internet. Once, in an old cabin, I stumbled upon a newspaper from the 1920s and sat down to read through it. If names in the headlines suggest proof of fame, I was surprised to find that I didn’t recognize even one name. It seems that fame is indeed fleeting.

There is one type of person, however, whose name isn’t written in fading ink, but who I’m convinced will be remembered for a thousand years and more. It’s not an athlete, entertainer, or politician; in fact, many of the people I’m thinking of weren’t famous in their own day, nor did any of them seek fame.

I’m thinking of the saints, those from various religions who are remembered for their sanctity. Their memory survives centuries and millennia, even though many of these saints were ignored by their contemporaries.

A person from my era who could soon be declared a saint is Dorothy Day, who died in 1980. Dorothy Day wasn’t known for her piety. In fact, when some of her followers asked if she wished to be considered a saint someday, she replied that she didn’t want her message to be dismissed so easily.

Like Mother Theresa, Dorothy Day lived with the poor and fought for their dignity, but Day was a rabble-rouser, not a nun. In college and shortly afterwards, she was attracted to the American Communist Party, had a brief common-law marriage, and had an abortion. Yes, she subsequently had a conversion to Christianity, but Day never deviated from her conviction that anyone following Christ’s example should work harder than the Communists for the rights of the poor and the dispossessed.

Day marched in countless protests for the rights of the marginalized; was frequently jailed, even into her seventies; was the target of an assassin; and was investigated by the FBI. Along with her friend Peter Maurin, she set up hospitality centers and farming communities around the country and even outside the US, where the homeless, unemployed, and those in need could find a clean bed, a bowl of soup and bread, and work. Like Maurin, she worked tirelessly to bring about the world that God wanted, where it would be easy, rather than hard, to be good. Living in that way sounds simple until we face what we would have to change.

Dorothy Day will be remembered a thousand years from now, not as a saint who lived isolated in a convent but as someone who lived in the slums of America with the people, in their poverty, whom she considered closest to God because God is closest to them.

Yet, I hear Dorothy Day’s voice reminding me that she never wanted her face to appear on a saint’s card or her life celebrated on a feast day. Instead, Dorothy Day would want me to step off consumerism’s wheel that has me buying more than I need but getting nowhere in my life.