Hello.

This is Jan, Your Gentle Radical.

It’s been a while since we last met in this space. I’ve been away longer than I intended—sometimes the circumstances of life demand a silence that we didn’t plan for. I’m grateful to be back with you now. And perhaps that forced pause is a fitting way to begin today’s conversation. Because today, we are exploring a life that was never a straight line. I want to talk about a woman, an anarchist who is currently being considered for sainthood by the Catholic Church, but who famously said, “Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.”

She knew that once we put someone on a pedestal, we no longer have to listen to them. We can admire the statue while ignoring the radical, uncomfortable demands they made on our lives. I’m talking about Dorothy Day.

She was a journalist, a bohemian, a mother, a radical, and a convert. But more than anything, she was a person who refused to keep her inner life and her outer actions in separate boxes. For her, to believe something was to do something. And to do something radical, you had to be radically open about who you were—including the parts of yourself that were broken.

To understand Dorothy’s radicality, we have to go back to Greenwich Village in the 1910s. This wasn't the "pious" Dorothy. This was a young woman who drank with Eugene O’Neill, worked for socialist magazines like The Masses, and lived in the heart of the American counterculture.

She was searching. She was, as she called it, in the grip of "The Long Loneliness." The "long loneliness," for Dorothy Day, was not merely the psychological ache of being alone or the sting of a failed romance. It was a profound, existential isolation—the realization that we are fundamentally separated from one another by the structures of modern life, by our own egos, and by a society that prizes individualism over solidarity.

She saw it as the universal human condition, a desert that everyone must cross. However, her radical insight was that we cannot escape this loneliness through private happiness or intellectual theory; we can only survive it through love, and that love is only possible in community. To Dorothy, the "long loneliness" was the hunger that drove her toward the poor and toward the Church, leading her to the conviction that the only way to be truly "at home" is to make a home for the homeless.

But here is where her openness starts to challenge us. Dorothy Day did not hide her "bohemian" years once she became a religious leader. She wrote about them with a transparency that still shocks people today. And it is her honesty in self-reflection that remains so inspiring today, for instance when remembering her encounter with anarchist Louis Kramer:

"He was young, an unbalanced youth, who often escorted me home at night. We would sit for hours in one of the little East Side restaurants, but he talked so disjointedly, so incoherently, that it is impossible to remember now the point of his discourses. With all my radicalism, I was extremely conventional, and disliked his long hair, his ragged clothes, his emotional speech. I only endured his company because I could not get away from him, and perhaps also I pitied him, his poverty and impending jail sentence. I know that I dreaded his constant telephone calls, and groaned at finding him waiting for me every night as I was about to go home. I got away from him as often as I could, to go with some of the men from the copy desk to the restaurant on Park Row where we sat over pancakes and applesauce and talked for hours."

"Every Friday night there were dances at Webster Hall on Twelfth Street to raise money for some radical group. One night there was an anarchist ball, probably to get funds for the defense of the half-dozen anarchists who were being tried for obstructing the draft, and Louis Kramer was at the dance waiting for me. When he saw me come in he rushed to embrace me and, taken aback, I pushed him, or slapped him, I don't recall which. Thereupon he slapped me back. Altogether it was a childish affair that I was much ashamed of afterward. Some other reporters who were also covering the dance were delighted to act gallantly, to take poor Louis by the shoulders and put him out of the hall, "protecting" me. I was neither a Christian nor a pacifist, and I certainly acted like neither. Had I been a Christian I would not have rebuffed the boy, and certainly would not have struck him had I been a true pacifist. Or, this little encounter having already happened, I would not have wanted others to come to my rescue, making a mountain out of a molehill."

This story isn't just an exercise in self-flagellation for its own sake. For Dorothy Day, these raw admissions serve a deeper purpose: they allow her to untangle the contradictions that activism inherently generates. Her self-reflection mirrors the self-reflection of the movement itself—a movement that often risks letting its radical intensity overshadow its need for human openness:

"I was not even acting like a good radical, lining myself up on the side of the "capitalist-imperialist" press, rather than on the side of my poor friend. Often, in looking back on my past life I can see that I was not a good radical, not worthy of respect like those great figures in the movement who were fighting the issues of the day."

"I recall this tiny incident now because it illustrates a point that has since come up many times in our work with others. Our desire for justice for ourselves and for others often complicates the issue, builds up factions and quarrels. Worldly justice and unworldly justice are quite different things. The supernatural approach when understood is to turn the other cheek, to give up what one has, willingly, gladly, with no spirit of martyrdom, to rejoice in being the least, to be unrecognized, the slighted. I was making no pretensions to being a Christian at the time, but I was professing to be a radical."

In her early twenties, Dorothy fell madly in love with a man named Lionel Moise. He was a volatile, cynical journalist who told her he didn't want marriage or children. When Dorothy became pregnant, he gave her an ultimatum. To keep him, she had an abortion. It was 1919.

She later wrote about this in her semi-autobiographical novel, The Eleventh Virgin.

"It was four months later. June lay on a single cot bed in the home of Dr. Jane Pringle, a six-room flat in a huge apartment house on the upper East Side. Pretty soon it would be all over with. It ought not to take but a few hours more the doctor had said. Just to lie there and endure. Three hours seemed an eternity, but the minutes sped by very fast. One pain every three minutes. How fast they came! It seemed that the moments of respite could be counted in seconds. The pain came in a huge wave and she lay there writhing and tortured under it. Just when she thought she could endure it no longer, the wave passed and she could gather up her strength to endure the next one."

"After the procedure, Moise left her anyway. The sacrifice didn't 'save' the relationship; it destroyed it. In the aftermath, Dorothy went through a period of profound despair. She attempted suicide on two occasions. She even went as far as trying to destroy all existing copies of her novel, The Eleventh Virgin, in an effort to erase the evidence of her shame."

Now, why does this matter for a podcast about being a "gentle radical"? Because Dorothy’s radicality was never "moralistic." It didn't come from a place of being "better" than anyone else. It came from the gut.

" 'How close are you to the worker?' Pitirim Sorokin asked me when I was talking with him at Harvard. He himself was the son of a peasant woman and a migrant worker and was imprisoned three times under the Czars and three times under the Soviets. He too had suffered exile in the forests, hunger and imprisonment; he had lived under the sentence of death and was, through some miracle, and probably because of his doctrine of love in human behavior, allowed to go abroad. He had a right to ask such a question and it was a pertinent one. Going around and seeing such sights is not enough. To help the organizers, to give what you have for relief, to pledge yourself to voluntary poverty for life so that you can share with your brothers is not enough. One must live with them, share with them their suffering too. Give up one's privacy, and mental and spiritual comforts as well as physical."

When she later stood in breadlines with the "destitute"—the people society called "sinners" or "failures"—she wasn't looking down at them. She was looking at herself. Her openness about her own trauma, her own mistakes, and her own "loneliness" was what allowed her to translate her thoughts into a radical form of solidarity. Listen what she wrote about her first experience of imprisonment:

"I lost all feeling of my own identity. I reflected on the desolation of poverty... I would never be free again, never free when I knew that behind bars... there were women and men... suffering constraint, punishment, isolation and hardship for crimes of which all of us were guilty... Why were prostitutes prosecuted in some cases and in others respected and fawned on? People sold themselves for jobs... and if they only received a high enough price, they were honored... Why were some termed criminals and others good businessmen? What was right and wrong? ... I lay there in utter confusion and misery."

"... I was that mother whose child had been raped and slain. I was the mother who had borne the monster who had done it. I was even that monster, feeling in my own breast every abomination. Is this exaggeration? ... If you live in great cities, if you are in constant contact with sin and suffering... then you become inured to the evil of the day..."

"I had an ugly sense of the futility of human effort, man's helpless misery, the triumph of might. Man's dignity was but a word and a lie. Evil triumphed. I was a petty creature, filled with self-deception, self-importance, unreal, false, and so, rightly scorned and punished. I was willing not only to say two and two were five, but to think it. The incomplete and sullen silence of the place was broken by the far-off squealing of pigs at their evening meal, by the twitter of a sparrow just outside the ventilator, by an occasional shuffle from a cell along the corridor as someone turned on her straw mattress. These suppressed sounds were a torture. But worst of all were the hurrying footsteps. They were never moderate or leisurely or happy or complacent. If I could only control the rush of expectancy, the frantic feeling, that they aroused in me. I always expected something to happen and then nothing ever did."

She knew what it felt like to be abandoned by the systems of the world—and by the people who were supposed to love you.

By the late 1920s, Dorothy had found a new kind of love. She was living on Staten Island with an anarchist named Forster Batterham. And then, a miracle happened. She gave birth to her daughter, Tamar.

Dorothy believed the abortion had made her sterile. So, she saw Tamar’s birth as a literal sign of God’s forgiveness. It filled her with a gratitude so vast that no human could contain it. She felt she had to join the Church to say "thank you."

But this created a new conflict. To become Catholic meant leaving Forster, who refused to marry or participate in religion. This is what she called the "Long Loneliness" in its most acute form. To choose God, she had to lose her home.

In December 1932, Dorothy was in Washington D.C., covering the "National Hunger March." Thousands of unemployed workers were marching in the freezing cold, demanding bread and justice. Dorothy stood on the sidewalk as a reporter, but her heart was breaking.

"I stood on the curb and watched them, joy and pride in the courage of this band of men and women mounting in my heart, and with it a bitterness too that since I was now a Catholic, with fundamental philosophical differences, I could not be out there with them. I could write, I could protest, to arouse the conscience, but where was the Catholic leadership in the gathering of bands of men and women together, for the actual works of mercy that the comrades had always made part of their technique in reaching the workers? How little, how puny my work had been since becoming a Catholic, I thought. How self-centered, how ingrown, how lacking in sense of community! My summer of quiet reading and prayer, my self-absorption seemed sinful as I watched my brothers in their struggle, not for themselves but for others."

"How our dear Lord must love them, I kept thinking to myself. They were His friends, His comrades, and who knows how close to His heart in their attempt to work for justice. I remembered that the first public act of our Lord recorded in the New Testament was the overthrowing of the money-changers' tables in the temple. The miracle at Cana, when Christ was present at the wedding feast and turned water into wine, has been written of as the first public act of our Lord. It was the first miracle, it was the sanctifying of marriage, but it was not the social act of overturning the tables of the money-changers, a divine courage on the part of this obscure Jew, going into the temple and with bold scorn for all the riches of this world, scattering the coins and the traffickers in gold."

She felt that the Church was sitting in its comfortable pews while the "comrades"—the communists and radicals—were the ones actually doing the "Works of Mercy."

She went to the National Shrine in Washington on December 8th. She knelt there in "tears and anguish" and prayed a simple, radical prayer. The very next day, she went back to New York and met Peter Maurin.

Peter Maurin was a French peasant-philosopher who looked like a tramp and talked like a prophet. He gave Dorothy the "thought" that she would translate into "action."

He taught her about Personalism. The idea that you are responsible for your brother. Not the state. Not the "system." You.

If someone is hungry, you don't send them to a social worker. You give them your own soup. If they are homeless, you give them your own bed.

This was the birth of The Catholic Worker. They started a newspaper to teach the workers their own dignity, but they quickly realized you can’t just give people a newspaper; you have to give them a home. They started "Houses of Hospitality."

Dorothy’s radicality was now being translated into a very specific, physical action. She called them the "Weapons of Mercy."

"We felt a respect for the poor and destitute as those nearest to God, as those chosen by Christ for His compassion. Christ lived among men. The great mystery of the Incarnation, which meant that God became man that man might become God, was a joy that made us want to kiss the earth in worship, because His feet once trod that same earth. It was a mystery that we as Catholics accepted, but there were also the facts of Christ's life, that He was born in a stable, that He did not come to be a temporal King, that He worked with His hands, spent the first years of His life in exile, and the rest of His early manhood in a crude carpenter shop in Nazareth."

"He fulfilled His religious duties in the synagogue and the temple. He trod the roads in His public life and the first men He called were fishermen, small owners of boats and nets. He was familiar with the migrant worker and the proletariat, and some of His parables dealt with them. He spoke of the living wage, not equal pay for equal work, in the parable of those who came at the first and the eleventh hour. He died between two thieves because He would not be made an earthly King. He lived in an occupied country for thirty years without starting an underground movement or trying to get out from under a foreign power."

"His teaching transcended all the wisdom of the scribes and pharisees, and taught us the most effective means of living in this world while preparing for the next. And He directed His sublime words to the poorest of the poor, to the people who thronged the towns and followed after John the Baptist, who hung around, sick and poverty-stricken at the doors of rich men. He had set us an example and the poor and destitute were the ones we wished to reach. The poor were the ones who had jobs of a sort, organized or unorganized, and those who were unemployed or on work-relief projects. The destitute were the men and women who came to us in the breadlines and we could do little with them but give what we had of food and clothing. Sin, sickness and death accounted for much of human misery. But aside from this, we did not feel that Christ meant we should remain silent in the face of injustice and accept it even though He said, 'The poor ye shall always have with you.' "

She didn't see the "Works of Mercy" as charity. She saw them as tactics. When she helped during a strike, she wasn't just being "nice." She was performing a spiritual work of mercy: "rebuking the unjust." She refused to be "meek" for others. She would endure wrongs patiently if they were done to her, but if they were done to the poor? She was a lioness.

There is a specific kind of openness in Dorothy’s writing that I find incredibly challenging. It’s her refusal to be a "professional."

She lived in the slums. She lived in the tenements. She mentioned cities like Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, and Houma, Louisiana. She lived there with the "shrimp shellers, fishermen, longshoremen and seamen."

She didn't live in an office. She gave up her privacy.

"Once a Midwest priest said to me that if I were a woman of family, the things I wrote in The Catholic Worker about community and personalism would have more validity. I accepted his criticism at the moment, especially since I was going through a difficult time. I was thirty-eight, wishing I were married and living the ordinary naturally happy life and had not come under the dynamic influence of Peter Maurin. Every now and then I'd look at him and groan, 'Why did you have to start all this anyway?' "

"I thought this criticism of the positions I took in my writing valid because it gave me an excuse to dally with the idea of marriage. Afterward I thought indignantly—"But I am a woman of family. I have had husband and home life—I have a daughter and she presents problems to me right now. How can I let anyone put over on me the idea that I am a single person? I am a mother, and the mother of a very large family at that. Being a mother is fulfillment, it is surrender to others, it is Love and therefore of course it is suffering. He hath made 'a barren woman to dwell in a house: the joyful mother of children.'""

"I saw the film Grapes of Wrath at this time and the picture of that valiant woman, the vigorous mother, the heart of the home, the loved one, appealed to me strongly. Yet men are terrified of momism and women in turn want a shoulder to lean on. That conflict was in me. A woman does not feel whole without a man. And for a woman who had known the joys of marriage, yes, it was hard. It was years before I awakened without that longing for a face pressed against my breast, an arm about my shoulder. The sense of loss was there. It was a price I had paid. I was Abraham who had sacrificed Isaac. And yet I had Isaac. I had Tamar."

Think about that for a second. We live in an age where we "help" through apps, through donations, through "awareness." Dorothy says that’s not enough. To be a radical is to share the suffering of the person next to you.

She was open about the fact that this was hard. She didn't romanticize the poor. She knew that living in a House of Hospitality meant bedbugs, smells, noise, and people who were often ungrateful or mentally ill. But she stayed.

Her "action" wasn't a one-time protest. It was a life-long commitment to staying present.

And then there was her pacifism. During World War II, when the whole world was caught up in the "just war," Dorothy stood her ground. She said: "We will not collaborate."

"We had been pacifist in class war, race war, in the Ethiopian War, in the Spanish Civil War, all through World War II, as we are now during the Korean War. We had spoken in terms of the Sermon on the Mount and all of our readers were familiar enough with that. We had lost subscriptions and bundle orders, but these cancellations came from those who frankly disagreed with us and the matter was settled at once."

"But there were a very great many who had seemed to agree with us who did not realize for years that The Catholic Worker position implicated them; if they believed the things we wrote, they would be bound, sooner or later, to make decisions personally and to act upon them."

"Union workers in steel plants, auto and airplane factories—many in industry and business would have to find other jobs, jobs not tied up with the war effort. And where could they get them? If they worked in the garment factories, they would have to fill government orders for uniforms. Mills turned out blankets, parachutes. Raising food, building houses, baking bread—whatever you did you kept the wheels of industrial capitalism moving, and industrial capitalism kept the wheels moving on war orders. You could not live without compromise. Teachers sold war stamps and bonds. Children were asked to bring aluminum pots and scrap metal to school. The Pope asked that war be kept out of the schoolroom, but there it was."

She lost subscribers. She lost supporters. She was accused of being a "traitor." But her radicality was rooted in the Gospel: “Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you.” She didn't think the Gospel was a suggestion. She thought it was a command.

So, where does that leave us?

Dorothy Day ended her autobiography with these words: “We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.”

Her openness about her own "long loneliness"—her abortion, her suicide attempts, her failed loves—was the very thing that drove her to create community. She knew that if we are honest about our brokenness, we don't have to be afraid of each other anymore. Her radicality wasn't built on being "right." It was built on being vulnerable.

Dorothy Day translated her thoughts into action by refusing to live a divided life. She didn't have a "private" faith and a "public" politics. She had a heart that had been broken open, and she let the whole world walk through it.

As we close today, I want to leave you with a question for you:

Where are you keeping your "radical" thoughts safe in your head? And what is one small, vulnerable, open action you could take today to let those thoughts out into the world?

Maybe it’s not starting a House of Hospitality. Maybe it’s just being honest with a neighbor about your own "long loneliness." Maybe it's standing your ground when you see an injustice, even if it’s inconvenient.

Thank you for being here with me in this gently radical space.

Until next time: stay gentle, and stay radical.