New York Times columnist David Brooks has been writing and
lecturing on character in recent months, finding inspiration in, among others, Dorothy
Day. Here is an excerpt from his most recent article, The Moral Bucket List:
ENERGIZING
LOVE Dorothy Day led a disorganized life when she was young:
drinking, carousing, a suicide attempt or two, following her desires, unable to
find direction. But the birth of her daughter changed her. She wrote of that
birth, “If I had written the greatest book, composed the greatest symphony,
painted the most beautiful painting or carved the most exquisite figure I could
not have felt the more exalted creator than I did when they placed my child in
my arms.”
That kind of love
decenters the self. It reminds you that your true riches are in another. Most
of all, this love electrifies. It puts you in a state of need and makes it
delightful to serve what you love. Day’s love for her daughter spilled outward
and upward. As she wrote, “No human creature could receive or contain so vast a
flood of love and joy as I often felt after the birth of my child. With this
came the need to worship, to adore.”
She made unshakable
commitments in all directions. She became a Catholic, started a radical
newspaper, opened settlement houses for the poor and lived among the poor,
embracing shared poverty as a way to build community, to not only do good, but
be good. This gift of love overcame, sometimes, the natural self-centeredness
all of us feel.
NY Times Sunday Review,
April 11, 2015
The
whole article may be found here.
