Dorothy Day’s Troubling Conscience

Although every world religion maintains that we are spiritual beings, we can decide to believe or disbelieve that. Humans who admit that the spiritual life is real must still decide how important spiritual matters will be in their lives.

Let’s think of the spiritual life as similar to basketball. For some people, basketball is a game to watch on TV. For others, basketball is playing “horse” in the driveway twice a year with friends. For others, basketball is a game played in a league at the gym. For a smaller number, basketball is the game they played competitively in high school or college. For the very few, basketball is a passion, a passion so strong that they dedicate their lives to the sport.

The spiritual life is much like basketball. For some, the spiritual life is something that others care about. It’s just not for them. Others pay attention to their spiritual a few times a year or maybe an hour a week. But if people want to see how the spiritual life is lived at the highest level, where the spiritual life is lived passionately, I suggest they read the writings of Dorothy Day. 

Dorothy Day was the founder of The Catholic Worker movement, a radical Christian anti-war, anti-poverty, and anti-capitalist community that desired to follow a radical Jesus. Dorothy Day took Jesus’ command to love our enemies so seriously that she opposed World War II, the war against Hitler. Talk about being unpopular. Dorothy Day was someone who loved the homeless so deeply that she opened up soup kitchens and shelters for anyone in need. Dorothy Day was a woman who was arrested in her eighties for protesting with migrant workers about low wages.

I like to keep Dorothy Day’s writings around, if for nothing else than to make me uncomfortable. Recently, she taught me to take my decisions more seriously. She suggests that the most challenging way to decide anything is to listen to and follow our consciences. At face value, that doesn’t sound very radical. In fact, that sounds a bit like basic Sunday School fare.

But here is where Dorothy Day gets radical. She observed that we are more likely to make our decisions by listening to two other components of our being—our egos and our fears. Our ego wants us to decide matters so that we look better to ourselves and impress others. Even more common, she suggests, is our tendency to make decisions on the basis of fear. No one wants to be attacked. No one wants to be punished. No one wants to be ridiculed or laughed at. No one wants to be shunned. Fear rules more than we’d like to admit.

When we make our decisions on the basis of our egos, we desire to look good in our own eyes. When we make our decisions on the basis of fear, we want to be safe and look good in the eyes of others. Dorothy Day suggests that there is a heavy price for deciding on the basis of ego or fear, and that price is that we will never become our true selves. 

The only way to become the whole person that God has in mind for us, Day taught, is to make our decisions on the basis of consciences. God isn’t the voice of our egos, and God is not the voice of our fears. God’s voice is heard within the conscience—if we learn how to listen to it. 

Perhaps that is what I most admire about Dorothy Day and why I am glad that she makes me so uncomfortable. Day didn’t preach about the conscience so much as she showed what a life that listens to that inner voice looks like. She was radically spiritual because she was as tough on herself as she was on others

The wisdom Dorothy Day left us with isn’t abstract at all. Her wisdom is completely practical. She suggests when we face a major decision that we pause and ask ourselves two questions: “Am I doing this to flatter myself and impress others?” and “Am I doing this because I’m afraid to anger and disappoint others?”

Only when we can answer those two questions in total honesty with “no,” can we ask the only question that matters: “What, God, do you want me to do here?”