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The Spiritual Life with Fr. James Martin, S.J.
Catholic and Anarchist: The Spiritual Wisdom of Dorothy Day
00:45:02
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- [00:01]
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- [00:32]
Robert Ellsberg
Life at the Catholic Worker was very improvisational. You just never knew what the day would hold for you. And that was a kind of spiritual training that I wasn't experienced in abandonment to Divine providence. Whatever might happen, and it could be anything, someone could die, there could be a fight, there could be an emergency, there could be some call for protest. And so there was a kind of freedom also of like I don't have to be somewhere at a certain time. It was just kind of being present in the day and interacting with people who were so different from anybody I'd ever known before. And I learned a lot from that.
- [01:09]
Fr. Jim Martin
Welcome to the spiritual life. I'm Fr. Jim Martin. On this podcast, we reflect on how people experience God in their prayer and in their daily lives. And I'm joined by my saintly producer, Maggie Van Dorn. Maggie, good to be back with you.
- [01:25]
Maggie Van Dorn
It's great to be with you, Jim. I had a feeling you were going to go with saintly for this episode because it is a theme throughout. I of course, am no saint, but the person that we're speaking with is an expert on saints.
- [01:38]
Fr. Jim Martin
He is, and he's a very good friend. I am no saint either, but we're speaking with someone who's holy in his own way and who's written a lot about the saints. Robert Ellsberg can you tell us about our friend Robert Ellsberg?
- [01:50]
Maggie Van Dorn
Yes, happily so. Robert Ellsberg is a well known and celebrated Catholic author, editor and publisher, best known for his work as editor in chief of Orbis Books. And the journey that Robert took to get to that point is no less interesting. So when he was only 19, Robert dropped out of college, Harvard no less, intending to spend just a few months with the Catholic Worker movement. He ended up staying to become the managing editor of the Catholic Worker. That's the newspaper for two years. And this is a job that would introduce him to Servant of God Dorothy Day, and consequently would allow him to work with Dorothy Day for the last five years of her life. This life changing experience prompted Robert to convert to Catholicism. He then returns to Harvard and earns a degree in Religion and Literature and later a master's in Theology from Harvard Divinity School. He is the author of several books including All Saints and Blessed among All Women and is the editor of the published Diaries and letters of Dorothy Day. Quite a pedigree.
- [03:02]
Fr. Jim Martin
Yeah, we're so happy to have him on, as I say at the beginning of our conversation. For many years I've been encouraging him or inviting him or kind of pushing him a little bit to do a book called My Life with Dorothy Day because he had these, you know, several years, as you said, Maggie, of really sort of up close encounters with her, worked with her, you know, almost on a daily basis. And so I just think that's fascinating for people. But our conversation is not just about Dorothy Day and not just about his encounters with this famous saint. It really is about more broadly what holiness is, what holiness is in her life, what holiness means for him in his life, and really what holiness means for all of us. So he is an expert really on the saints as well as on Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker.
- [03:46]
Maggie Van Dorn
Right. So Dorothy Day is in the process or on the road to canonization, but I think right now we call her Servant of God, Dorothy Day.
- [03:56]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
Correct.
- [03:56]
Maggie Van Dorn
And there's so much that we could say about Dorothy Day, but maybe just a quick primer. Jim, what are the things that you need to know about Dorothy Day to really enjoy this conversation?
- [04:07]
Fr. Jim Martin
Yeah, sure. Happy to, Maggie. And you're right, it's hard to kind of summarize. One of my favorite quotes about Dorothy Day, which I just looked up is from Commonweal. And. And it is that Dorothy Day was the most significant, interesting and influential person in the history of American Catholicism.
- [04:23]
Maggie Van Dorn
Totally agree.
- [04:24]
Fr. Jim Martin
Yes. That is, I would say the only person who might give her a run for her money would be Thomas Merton. But yeah, so Dorothy Day, 1897-1980. She starts out as a journalist. She goes to the University of Illinois, but she moves to New York and is a journalist sort of with the radical left. She falls in with people like Eugene o' Neill and John Dos Passos and people like that. Through a number of experiences that Robert talks about, she has a conversion to Catholicism and then she founds what is called the Catholic Worker. With Peter Morin, she's a co founder of the Catholic Worker. That becomes a movement, a movement for the poor, a movement for social justice, a movement for Pacifism. And of course, around the world today we have Catholic Worker houses. You know, Robert said in one of his books that she is a kind of political saint. Right. In the sense that if you think of someone like Mother Teresa. Mother Teresa also cared for the poor. Right. St. Teresa of Calcutta. But Dorothy Day also, I would say, critiqued the systems that keep people poor.
- [05:30]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
Right.
- [05:30]
Fr. Jim Martin
Which was not something that Mother Teresa did. This is not a dig on Mother Teresa. It's just two different ways of being holy. There's a great picture of her and Mother Teresa meeting, I think, in 1980, which is really sweet. So, again, the most significant, interesting, and influential person in the history of American Catholicism, I.e. servant of God, Dorothy Day.
- [05:49]
Maggie Van Dorn
Yeah. You would find her at a soup kitchen and a protest and maybe in a really great work of literature. She wrote the Long Loneliness as well.
- [05:57]
Fr. Jim Martin
Thank you for reminding me of that. That is, I think, her most famous book, and it's a beautiful book if people haven't read it, about her conversion. The Long Loneliness. So highly recommended by Jim Martin and Maggie Van Doren.
- [06:10]
Maggie Van Dorn
And it also ties us back to our guest, Robert Ellsberg, because he has so many literary gifts as a writer, as an editor. So I'm excited for y' all to hear that conversation. The audience question that Father Jim and Robert will treat together comes from Michelle. And Michelle asks, are there particular saints who might assist my prayer when I am feeling desolation around the institutional church?
- [06:37]
Fr. Jim Martin
Yeah, we figured. Perfect question to ask our expert on the saints.
- [06:41]
Maggie Van Dorn
So if you'd like to ask Father Jim a question, you can always write to us@thespirituallifemericamedia.org and now onto our conversation
- [06:50]
Fr. Jim Martin
with our friend Robert Ellsberg. Robert Ellsberg, welcome to the spiritual life.
- [07:02]
Robert Ellsberg
Thank you. I'm very glad to be here.
- [07:03]
Fr. Jim Martin
I am very happy to have you on Robert. We're good friends. The audience may not know that, but as you know, I've always wanted you and have encouraged you to write a book on your time with Dorothy Day. And I even have the title, I think I told you this. My Life with Dorothy Day. Now, I know you've had encounters with many holy people in your life, like Henry Nouwen and Daniel Berrigan and all sorts of people. But I would like to focus for a bit on Dorothy Day. Can you tell us how you went from Harvard to the Catholic Worker and when that was and sort of set that up for us?
- [07:34]
Robert Ellsberg
That was in 1975. That summer, I had decided to take a year off from college. And I planned to go first to the Catholic Worker for a month or two and then move along, and I did that. But after just like three months, she asked me if I would be managing editor of the paper, which was kind of amazing because I was only 20 years old and I had no qualifications for such a responsibility. And I should add, I wasn't even a Catholic at the time. So I become the editor of the Catholic Worker. And I did that for two years, and then I stayed on for another couple of years. So I was there the last five years of her life.
- [08:15]
Fr. Jim Martin
Yeah. Talk about the Catholic Worker a little bit. For people who don't understand what that is. Would you describe it as a movement or a community or both?
- [08:22]
Robert Ellsberg
Well, it started as a newspaper, and then it became a community, and then it became a movement. The first issue of the Catholic Worker newspaper, which Dorothy Day brought out on May 1st feast of St Joseph the Worker in 1933 at a big radical rally in Union Square. She herself was a convert, and her background earlier, previous to that, had been really sort of in the radical movement, working on radical socialist newspapers, that sort of thing, and other kind of literary bohemians. She was very close to Eugene o' Neill and other people in Greenwich Village. And then she went through this period where she was drawn to become a Catholic through. It's an interesting story, through pregnancy and the birth of her daughter, she becomes a Catholic. And then her big question in her mind was how to combine her Catholic faith with her commitment to the poor and oppressed. And she didn't really have a model at hand. And so a number of years go by, she actually goes to the shrine of the Immaculate conception in Washington, D.C. and prays, she says, with tears and anguish, to find some way to find her vocation. And when she comes home, she finds this Frenchman, Peter Morin, waiting for her. And he came from sort of peasant origins, had emigrated to North America and had sort of tramped around like a Franciscan kind of troubadour, reading and studying. And he had this kind of vision of kind of reigniting an understanding of the radical dimensions of the gospel. But he was looking for someone to put this into practice because he was completely impractical. So he meets Dorothy Day and he says, and by the way, there should be, like, a newspaper. And immediately, like a light bulb goes off, because her whole family and her own personal background was in newspaper work. So she starts this newspaper. And one of Peter Morin's themes was that there ought to be houses of hospitality for the practice of the works. Of mercy. And people come to the door and say, well, where are these houses of hospitality? So they. They got a house, and they began welcoming people in and offering food. So that was the beginning of the Catholic Worker. But from the beginning, Dorothy brought in her kind of radical critique of the capitalist system. She felt it was not enough just to practice charity, but she combined that with a commitment to social justice and to criticize and to analyze and resist the institutional forces that create so much poverty. And then it led into a pacifist witness as well. If God comes to us in the form of those who are hungry or thirsty, she believed that we also can see God in the disguise of the one we call the enemy. Jesus said, blessed are the peacemakers. You should not kill, et cetera. And so that became then kind of also an aspect of the Catholic Worker. So then communities began to spread through the newspaper all around the country. And in the 1930s, there were just dozens of Catholic Worker communities. She continued with that until her death in 1980. And the Catholic Worker goes on. Wow.
- [11:22]
Fr. Jim Martin
I want to back up a little bit. So how did you find out about the Catholic Worker and then what was it like to meet the famous Dorothy Day?
- [11:30]
Robert Ellsberg
Well, I had been. I was very caught up in the Vietnam War and reading Gandhi and learning about people who are going to jail to protest the war. And my mother actually had a friend who was Catholic who said, you know, there are Christians who do this kind of thing, too. And I said, like who? And she told me about the Berrigans, and she told me about Dorothy Day. So I began subscribing to the Catholic Worker newspaper. But I was really. You know, for me, Dorothy Day at that time was somebody that I knew from these kind of heroic pictures of her being arrested with the farm workers. I knew she had supported draft resisters. I knew that she had gone to jail repeatedly during the 50s protesting nuclear war. And. And that was kind of my concept of who Dorothy Day was. I didn't really know that much about life of the Catholic Worker, and I didn't know anything really about the spirituality that kind of underlay her witness.
- [12:23]
Fr. Jim Martin
Now, you talked about being attracted to her during the time of the Vietnam War and whatnot. You know, it sounds like for issues of social justice. What was your spiritual life like at the time?
- [12:33]
Robert Ellsberg
I had been raised in the Episcopal Church in Los Angeles, and. And I was kind of a devout kid. I really took this seriously. And I sang in the choir, and I was an altar boy or an acolyte, as we said. And I Used to take notes on the sermons and then give my critique to the priest afterwards, which I'm sure he really appreciated.
- [12:54]
Fr. Jim Martin
I'm sure he appreciated.
- [12:56]
Robert Ellsberg
But I began to feel kind of disillusioned. I felt like Christianity that I knew was just a sort of Sunday observance. Dorothy Day had had a similar experience in her youth. She was baptized as an Episcopalian, but at a certain point in her teen years, she kind of drifted away from it. She felt that Christians were going to church, but she didn't see the gospel in action. She was attracted more to labor organizers and social radicals and that sort of. They seem to have taken up that kind of concern for the poor and oppressed. So I was a little bit like that. Gandhi was my hero. And in fact, my plan that year of the year off was to go to India and join the Gandhian movement there. But then a state of emergency was declared in June of 1975. All my sponsors were imprisoned. So I found myself with nothing to do. So I thought, well, I'll go visit kind of communities that have a kind of Gandhian flavor. And by that I meant a consistent commitment to nonviolence as a way of life, not just protesting against war, relationship with the poor, a concern for community. All these kinds of things I saw in the Catholic Worker. Everything except for the Catholicism. But it wasn't all that unfamiliar to me because of my Episcopalian lingo that I knew. And I was familiar with the Gospel story. So I was able to blend in pretty well. I'll have to say that after a couple of years, I really kind of. I don't know. I wouldn't call it a nervous breakdown, but I just felt I can't do this anymore. I'm saying all this stuff. I'm acting like the spokesperson for this Catholic movement. I don't know what I'm talking about. And I told Dorothy, I have to step down. I'll keep on writing, but I don't want to be this person. So she said, okay. So I hung around. I worked for two years as a hospice orderly at St. Rose's Home, which is a home for terminal cancer patients run by the Hawthorne Dominican Sisters, founded by the daughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne. And I worked there from 1 to 8am in the morning, night shift. I was all by myself. And anything could happen during that time. People could need me, people could die, whatever. And I had a lot of time during that year. And that's when I really began delving into kind of spiritual classics. The Confessions of St. Augustine and the Work of Thomas Merton. And then I began reading the Letters of Flannery o', Connor, which is just published, had a tremendous impact on me and was kind of my catechism. And I began reading all the authors that she wrote about, all these French Catholic novelists and that sort of thing. And at a certain point, it just occurred to me that, gosh, what if I became, maybe I am a Catholic, maybe I've become a Catholic. So that was, it was five years I was at the Catholic Worker. And I can't say it was exactly Dorothy who, who prompted that, because Dorothy was very welcoming. I never felt like I was an outsider or a second class Catholic Worker or something like that. And it wasn't like, oh, now I found the true church. I mean, I talked to Henri Nouwen about this and he said, you should only do this if this feels like a way to become closer to Jesus. And that's how it felt to me. So on Holy Thursday in 1980, I was received into the church. And that was just a few months before I left and went back to Harvard. Dorothy Day died just soon after I left.
- [16:18]
Fr. Jim Martin
Let me take you back a little bit. So I want to talk about the first time you met Dorothy Day, in your early days with her. What was it like to meet her? What happened at that meeting, and how did your friendship develop?
- [16:30]
Robert Ellsberg
Well, it's funny, I had this idea that I was going to come to the Catholic Worker, but I didn't know. How does someone do that? It's like, how do you become a Jesuit or something like that. And I asked my friend Jim Forrest, who was a former editor of the Catholic Worker, and I was actually staying with him up in Nyack at the time. How do you do this? Do you have to write an application or a letter and something like that, or you have to know somebody? And he said, well, let me just call. So he calls up and gets the editor on the phone and says, I have a young man here who's interested in volunteering. Do you have a bed free? Well, as a matter of fact, there was a bed free. And that's just a number of the incredible, you know, providential occurrences in my life that if that door had been closed, I would be sitting here with you today. And for a while you just sort of, you know, observe and see how to be helpful. And eventually people say, well, okay, it's time for you to start pulling your own weight here. And they give you a set of keys, which was the mark of real status there. And you'd have to take turns being sort of in charge of the house. There was a soup kitchen every morning, and then the doors would open up and 100 people or so would come through there for a bowl of soup and some bread and some tea or coffee. And then there was all this cleanup to do. But life at the Catholic Worker was very improvisational. You just never knew what the day would hold for you. And that was a kind of spiritual training that I wasn't experienced in. Abandonment to divine providence, whatever might happen, and it could be anything, someone could die. There could be a fight, there could be an emergency. There could be some call for protest. I remember somebody calling up and saying, oh, there's a fast going on in Chile at the UN to protest Pinochet's repression. We need some people to do the same thing at the UN here. And so there was a kind of freedom also of, like, I don't have to be somewhere at a certain time. I don't have really a calendar or schedule of stuff. It was just kind of being present in the day and interacting with people who were so different from anybody I'd ever known before. I come from Harvard, I was around a lot of smart people, but there was a kind of human connection that I had never experienced before, to be with people so different from me. And I learned a lot from that. Now, Dorothy was mostly living up at the Catholic Worker farm in Tivoli at the time, and she's now in her, you know, more than mid-70s, and she comes down to First street, and you could sort of feel like that something was different. Like, everybody's, like, on their best behavior. And, you know, some of the homeless people had known her for a long time, always called her Ms. Day, and they were, you know, extremely respectful and admiring of her. But she was very aware of newcomers and very interested in who they were and where they came from. And you can imagine after 50 years or whatever at the Catholic Worker, the just countless number of young people that she'd met during that time. And you could think, well, until they've been around, I don't need to bother with them or something like that. But from right away, who are you? I told her, and she liked to kind of place people. And so the fact someone could be called, like, Tall Paul or Skinny Paul or something like that. And so I was from Harvard, and so that became like, this albatross around my neck. And so I was trying to make an impression, think of, like, what's a question that would make her notice me or something. So I said, how do you reconcile Catholicism and anarchism. And she kind of looked at me and said, it's never been a problem for me. Which now I didn't have a backup follow up question. But she really was easy to be with. She was not intimidating. And once you knew her, she was fun to be with and she enjoyed company. And she loved storytelling, she loved young people. She was kind of energized by their energy and their enthusiasm. So that was my. So then I began writing for the paper. And because I had this interest in Gandhi and there was a state of emergency in India, I wrote an article about Gandhi's views on politics. And she liked that very much. She said, you must do more of this. So then I wrote an article about Gandhi's views on economics. And she said, oh, this is the kind of thing that in the old days we would pass this around and study it and all this kind of thing. And I think that's what really made her think that maybe I could be the.
- [21:06]
Fr. Jim Martin
Did she mentor you, would you say?
- [21:09]
Robert Ellsberg
We shared a lot of interest in books in common, whether Dostoyevsky or Ignacio Cielone. I mean, I think the first time I met her, she said, what's your favorite novel by Dostoevsky? So of course I said, the Brothers Karamazov, which I don't believe I'd actually read. But she agreed with me. I think I learned just more from just observing Dorothy and the way that she related to people. And she, you know, there was a lot of people who tended to think of the Catholic Workers as, you know, the young volunteers like me, who weren't there because we were hungry or something like that, and they had a place. She said that the Catholic Worker is a kind of school where people like that come and kind of find their vocation. You know, they go off to do different things. But she felt it was not really. She was not thinking that everybody should be a Catholic Worker for the rest of their life, but they would learn certain things about life and a certain kind of perspective that they would bring into whatever else they were doing. She certainly was that for me, both in kind of, I think, steering me in the way of my vocation, not only as an editor and an editor of her writings, but also one of the big gifts that I got from Dorothy was learning about saints. And that went on to have a tremendous influence in my life. But Dorothy had this great devotion to saints, both the canonized saints that she talked about, St Francis, St Benedict, St Augustine, St Teresa of Avila, and her favorite, Therese of Lisieux. But I was also interested in the way that she kind of had her own canon of prophets and heroes and witnesses that she talked about a lot, whether they were writers or philosophers or activists or revolutionaries or peacemakers or martyrs or whatever. So that is one of the biggest takeaways that I took from my experience there. Combined that with my becoming a Catholic, and that sort of determined the rest of my life.
- [23:00]
Fr. Jim Martin
So, Dorothy Day, you're there. What year is this?
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Robert Ellsberg
75 to 1980, the year she died.
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Fr. Jim Martin
Okay. So she would have been well known probably in the Catholic world. Did you have a sense that you were with someone who might be a saint someday?
- [23:12]
Robert Ellsberg
You know, Dorothy is famous for saying, don't call me a saint. I don't want to be dismissed that easily. And when I say she's famous for it, I think because I included it in the introduction to my anthology of her writings back in 1984, I've never been able to actually find a source of that. I think maybe Jim Forrest might have said it to me. So that has become, like, the one thing that everybody knows about Dorothy Day. Now, in Time, I understood very clearly that that didn't mean she didn't take seriously the saints herself. She took them very seriously, but she didn't want to be put on a pedestal. She cringed if somebody called her a living saint. I remember one time a woman from Time magazine came down to. They were doing a cover story on living saints, and they wanted to interview Dorothy. And I said, dorothy, there's a woman from Time there. What? I said, woman from Time magazine. She couldn't hear out of one ear. What did you say? Woman from Time magazine. She said, I've been trying to avoid her all day. Now, Dorothy believed that we were all called to be saints. She believed that, that that's the vocation of a Christian, is to put off the old person to put on Christ, and your life should be shaped by the story of Jesus. And that was this whole story of her life. But she didn't like people putting her in some kind of category. I mean, of course, no saint would actually say, bring it on. Say it again. I like the sound of St. Dorothy. Please, St. Teresa, call me that.
- [24:39]
Fr. Jim Martin
Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up. That famous quote, doan, call me a saint. I don't want to be dismissed that easily, because I think sometimes people today use it as a sort of argument against her canonization process, which is going along. Right. Do you think she would mind that? I mean, you said she obviously saw the value of saints. Right. So you're not disturbed by the canonization process. Right.
- [25:01]
Robert Ellsberg
On the contra have been a great supporter of that. I mean, I think that she had her natural humility of any holy person of feeling, I'm not worthy, you know, and not like, oh, I'm not worthy of that. I mean, she really felt, you know, aware of her own sins and her own flaws and would not have wanted to put herself in the same category as, you know, Therese of Lisieux or something like that. And if she had been canonized immediately by acclamation or something, it would have been sort of the saint of the peace movement. And I think that it took some time for her reputation to settle and for people to get a wider comprehension of really who she was and not to kind of pigeonhole her in some place. So I think that there are some people who think, oh, Dorothy's too good for this process. She would hate it. She would hate. She would protest against the expense, don't spend that money on me, or whatever like that. But saints are not around during this process. They don't have a vote. And to me, it's not a matter of honoring Dorothy Day. She doesn't need that in the slightest. But I think if she thought that her story and her own struggles and the extraordinary story of her conversion from experiences of deep unhappiness and suffering and how she found her vocation through all the things in her life, both positive of a negative, I think if she felt that that would help people to follow Jesus more closely. She would say, behold the handmaiden of the Lord. Do with me whatever you want. So I think that my concept is that this does not reduce Dorothy to be canonized, that it enlarges the church and the walls get kind of bigger. And our moral imagination, our spiritual imagination, opens up to think about ways that we could more faithfully respond to the gospel commands in our time.
- [26:59]
Fr. Jim Martin
Yeah. And also it brings her into contact with more people. I mean, if she is canonized, I think she will be at some point canonized. She becomes part of the universal church. And people, not just in the United States, you know, can, you know, look to her. Did she change your idea of what it means to be holy, would you say? Kind of close contact with her?
- [27:17]
Robert Ellsberg
I knew her for those years. I wouldn't say that. I don't want to exaggerate the intimacy of our relationship. She seemed so approachable and so much like a kind of grandmother figure whom I loved and I loved to be around her. But a lot of what I've learned from Dorothy came from editing her writings. And it was actually 25 years after her death that I was invited to be the editor of her personal papers, her diaries and her letters. And I would say it was really from reading her diaries that I learned and encountered a whole different Dorothy than I knew. And I guess I would have said that, yes, she's a saint. She's getting arrested and she's feeding the hungry, and she's started a Catholic Worker and she's speaking truth to power and all that sort of thing when she goes to church and she prays and all those churchy, those saintly kind of things that a saint does. But I didn't really realize until I read her diaries that the substance of her spiritual life was really in her daily encounters with other people. You know, St. Benedict formed kind of the monastic kind of idea through his Rule of St. Benedict that the path of holiness is not being some spiritual superstar up on a mountain or a cave or something, but living with other people in community as a school of charity. And I think that she saw the Catholic Worker that way, as well as a kind of family. And from her favorite Saint, Therese of Lisieux, the idea of the little way, that there's a path to holiness that lies through our everyday encounters and challenges. And that means being more forgiving and restraining our impulse to judgment and anger and jealousy or competition or whatever ego. And those are things that she struggled with, as she admits very freely in her diary. But I realized that we tend to associate the saints with the great things they did. But for most people, and that includes saints, most of life is spent in very ordinary ways. And from Therese, she had the idea that that's the real arena of holiness. And it was that daily practice that I think prepared her for the more heroic things that she did. So I guess that's how I would answer that.
- [29:34]
Fr. Jim Martin
Yeah. I think one of the most surprising things from those diaries and journals which I read that you edited so well, was how much she struggled with the anger and frustration and all. Also just how much she struggled with the day to day stuff that was going on in the Catholic Worker. You know, people who were violent there and, you know, people throwing cans and whatnot. And were you surprised to come upon that very human anger when you edited her stuff?
- [30:00]
Robert Ellsberg
No. I mean, she had that reputation. Somebody once said, dorothy, hold your temper. And she said, I hold more temper in one minute than you will in your entire life. And she writes about that. I wake up with anger. It's like a giant beast that wants to consume me. I go to bed with it and what it meant for her. People think again of the saints. Well, they could do this because they're like saints. And when you really know the truth of how much discipline and exercise that that required in her spiritual life. And she saw life as a pilgrimage. She called her column on Pilgrimage because everything that happens in your life takes on a certain meaning in relation to your ultimate goal, which is closeness to Jesus, closeness to God.
- [30:51]
Fr. Jim Martin
We're going to pause for a short break, but we will be right back.
- [30:56]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
The Spiritual Life is sponsored by Give Us this Day from Liturgical Press. Our community works for a faith that fuels hope, justice and prayer with voices and perspectives you trust. Like a monthly feature from Father James Martin, Blessed among us and reflections that meet you where you are. Listeners of the spiritual life receive 10% off a new subscription@giveusthisday.org SpiritualLife.
- [31:28]
Dramatic Voice Actor
Our names were whispered through time. From generation to generation. Our lives were to become one. The story started long ago. Don't you feel that there are things that cannot be explained?
- [31:54]
Robert Ellsberg
I have to go.
- [31:56]
Dramatic Voice Actor
If you need me to do this, Abraham, I will go with you. What if we were brought together for a purpose? He appeared to me. Who appeared to you? An angel of God. I thought my purpose was elsewhere, but I don't need to keep looking anymore. I should have known you wouldn't understand. Hey, girl. Don't. Don't you dare. Rachel's my own sister. After all I have given you. Esau. You left me no choice. This is not what God wants.
- [32:41]
Robert Ellsberg
No, this is not what you want.
- [32:46]
Maggie Van Dorn
Leia.
- [32:46]
Dramatic Voice Actor
God has a destiny for us all. My whole life I've been waiting. What if this is it? Nothing is impossible for God.
- [33:11]
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- [33:40]
Maggie Van Dorn
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- [34:00]
Fr. Jim Martin
What's your daily spiritual practice like? Your prayer, in particular.
- [34:06]
Robert Ellsberg
When I first came to Orbis Books, I told Henri Nouwen that I'd been offered this job. And he said, well, if someone asked me, I'd say, intellectually, ideal fit for this job. I don't know if you have the Human gifts. He said the human gifts for this kind of work, being able to relate to people and everything. And at first I was really, like, offended, like, well, I'm glad no one's asking you. But over time, I began to learn what he meant. And I really feel, in a way, like Dorothy Day's kind of school of holiness was the Catholic Worker. That for me, editorial work and working with authors, especially authors who have something so important to share that my subordinating, my ego or whatever to trying to help them craft the best presentation of their thinking. But I think that just my own experience of family life and work and of that kind of lessons of Dorothy Day, that it's not just a good thing to be patient, but that is really a way of. Of making the gospel work in your life is not just the time you spend on your knees in prayer, but the way you relate to other people.
- [35:27]
Fr. Jim Martin
You talked about the human gifts that Henri Nouwen thought you needed to develop. What helped you to develop those gifts?
- [35:34]
Robert Ellsberg
I think experience over time. I think one of my largest human failings at an earlier time in my life was this need to always be right and always have the last word and to be correct. And I discovered at a certain point that that actually gets you nowhere. That you imagine that you'll have this perfect thing you'll say, and that the other person will say, oh, my gosh, you're totally right. I'm a complete jerk. You know, it just doesn't work that way. So to learn how to focus on the outcome that I'm aiming for, which is presumably a shared outcome and not showing how smart I am or that sort of thing.
- [36:15]
Fr. Jim Martin
Well, it's funny because that's, in a sense, what an editor does. The editor, I mean, it kind of feeds into that predilection. Because the editor, of course, has the last word, right?
- [36:24]
Robert Ellsberg
Yes or no? I'd like to think so. But you don't want to show your work, get the last word. But they don't realize that you've got the last word.
- [36:33]
Fr. Jim Martin
So what about just experiences of God in your life? Where do you most encounter God? What are the most powerful moments for you?
- [36:41]
Robert Ellsberg
I would say one of them is experience of nature. My wife has contributed that a lot. I think that a lot of my life was spent with my head in a book and to just open up my eyes and to see the beauty and the wonder that's all around us. Outside my window in the house where I live now, there's a flock of deer that walk across outside the window almost every day. And just to wait for that and look at it, my heart skips, like Hopkins would say, and it prepares me in some ways for the day. I also begin by reading aloud one of my saints. And as I hope it functions for a lot of people in give us this day that they read that story. And even though it's short, it gives them something to think, think about and to aspire to and to be affected by it. And you see that even in the lives of the saints, in the case of St. Ignatius, recovering from a war injury, and he's given a boring book of saints to read. And as he. There's nothing else to read. As he reads it, his heart is opened up and he begins to think, gosh, what it would be like if I lived like St. Francis or St. Dominic or something like that. I think we're very affected by what we pay attention to. And so the importance of training ourselves not to fill our attention with all the glop that comes through us on the news, though I do more than my share of that. But beauty, goodness, honesty, truth, wherever we find that, and to really meditate on
- [38:22]
Fr. Jim Martin
that and take it in, we have an audience question. We end with an audience question, and I'll answer it first and then give you time to think about it, and then you can answer it. So the audience question is from Michelle, and Michelle writes, this is obviously the perfect question for you, Robert. Are there particular saints who might assist my prayer when I'm feeling desolation around the institutional church? So I would say pretty much all of them, because a lot of them felt that, you know, I would say Dorothy Day, of course. But there are saints, you know, like Saint Mary MacKillop from Australia, who was actually excommunicated Saint Mother Theodore Guerin from Indiana, who was really kind of kicked out of her religious order by her local bishop. I think there are saints who have been really mistreated by the church. I don't think that's a stretch to say that. And so you have these witnesses, particularly foundresses of women's religious orders, who I think, really understand those difficulties. So not only did they feel upset about the church, but that the church sort of set itself against them, but through their patience and their fidelity, even like Mother Cabrini, who, when she came to New York, was sort of turned away by the local archbishop, and she said to him, I love this line in America, I stay to Archbishop Corrigan. So I think I would say someone like Mary McKillop and Theodore Guerin and Mother Cabrini would understand your struggles with the institutional church. What would you say to that? I'm going to repeat it again. Robert, Are there particular saints who might assist my prayer when I'm feeling desolation around the institutional church?
- [40:02]
Robert Ellsberg
I'm glad you mentioned those women who suffered excommunication later canonized. One of my books is called Blessed Among All Women. And the idea for that came because after I published All Saints, some people said, well, it's a good book, but you've got a lot of women in there, but it's mostly men still, just like the traditional books on saints and everything. I said, well, they're right. So I did this book on women saints and again, including people like Dorothy Day or other people from the Catholic Worker that artists and things not necessarily candidates for canonization, but the kind of common theme that I found through all of them is how often women were in a situation where they were told, here's the alternatives, they that are available to you. And then they invented another way. And that was from the beginning, whether it was to be celibate, to live in community, to read scripture for themselves, or to devise their own prayers or to do apostolic work, or to be missionaries or to be involved in social justice. Whatever it was, there was always someone saying, well, that's not what God is calling you to do. It was always some man telling them what God's will was for them. And I felt that that's, you know, it's true for a lot of saints, but particularly women who have had to kind of imagine and invent a new way very much as Dorothy Day did. There were no other examples. Now, the other thing I'll say about Dorothy Day is that she didn't wait for the church to approve her before setting off to follow the gospel and to live it out. She didn't consult the bishop. Is it okay if we call ourselves the Catholic Worker? Maybe it was naive. Maybe it's because she wasn't raised as a cradle Catholic, so she didn't have that kind of deference. But she just said, here's this Sermon on the Mount. What if we just live this out? And she was very obedient and submissive to authority of the church, but she also believed that conscience comes first and she didn't need anybody's permission to do that. So I guess I would say you can almost pick up any book about saints and you'll see somebody there who didn't take their cue from what was prescribed, saying, this is the way you do it, but were able to read the gospel and that was their rule of life.
- [42:21]
Fr. Jim Martin
Well, isn't that the famous Daniel Berrigan quote about Dorothy Day? She lived the gospel as if it were true.
- [42:26]
Robert Ellsberg
Yeah, true. Yeah.
- [42:28]
Fr. Jim Martin
Robert Ellsberg, thank you for joining us on the Spiritual Life. I want to thank you personally, you know, for being a friend first of all. But thank you for All Saints, which really changed my way of looking at the saints. Thank you for editing the journals and the diaries of Dorothy Day. Thanks for your work at Orbis all these years, one of your authors. And just thanks for all that you do for the Catholic church and helping people understand what it means to be holy. Thanks for everything.
- [42:50]
Robert Ellsberg
Well, thank you very much. Very glad to be invited.
- [43:02]
Fr. Jim Martin
Well, I was so happy to finally have him on and talk about, as we said, not only his life with Dorothy Day, but the saints and holiness and his own spiritual practice, which he was very honest about.
- [43:12]
Maggie Van Dorn
Yeah, you both have written about the saints and quite well. So what do you think that you will write about to accompany this episode?
- [43:21]
Fr. Jim Martin
Yeah, you can find an article by me on the influence that Dorothy Day had on my life at America and the link is in the show notes. Also, I'd like to let you know that I have a new book out, a memoir called Work in Progress. It's the story of finding work through a variety of crazy summer jobs like busboy, dishwasher, caddy, factory worker, and many more. And eventually finding God. Basically, it's a light hearted spiritual memoir about growing up in the 60s, 70s and 80s and is available in print, ebook and audio anywhere books are sold. I really hope you enjoy Work in Progress. The Spiritual Life with Fr. James Martin is produced by Maggie Van Dorn, Sebastian Gomes and myself, production assistants from Kevin Christopher Robles and Will Gualtieri. Adam Buckmuller engineered the show. The theme score is courtesy of Teddy Abrams and Nate Farrington. You can follow me across social media at jamesmartinsj. Thanks so much and God bless you. Hey everyone, it's Father Jim Martin. I want to take a moment to welcome all of you, especially new listeners, to the Spiritual Life. This is a podcast that we hope will nourish your spiritual practice through open and honest conversations about life, prayer, and even suffering. We're now in the season of Lent, as you know, and there's no better time for us to pause and pay attention to the deep longing for God that exists within all of us. And you're not alone in that. We'd like to accompany you on this journey of discovery. So our staff@America magazine is writing short and inspiring Bible reflections every day during Lent. They are free for listeners of the Spiritual Life, and you can sign up@amer America magazine.org thespiritual life.