March 30, 2025 Essay: Saved by Beauty
Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker, has been proposed for canonization. Pope Francis included her among four “great Americans” in his speech to the Congress in 2015. Much of her life was spent in city slums. Though she never became inured to the sights and smells of poverty, she remained keenly alert to signs of beauty, even cultivating the capacity to see beauty in places that others might overlook.
Often, she returned to Dostoevsky’s line, “The world will be saved by beauty.” This didn’t mean the world would be saved by fine art or pretty things. It would be saved by our capacity to see beneath the surface, to see reality in its ultimate depth, as God sees it.
I have fallen in love many a time in the fall of the year. I mean those times when body and soul are revived, and in the keen clear air of autumn after a hot exhausting summer, I felt new strength to see, to “know” clearly, and to love, to look upon my neighbor and to love. Almost to be taken out of myself. I do not mean being in love with a particular person. I mean that quality of in-loveness that may brush like a sweet fragrance, a sound faintly heard, a sense of the beauty of one particular human being, or even one aspect of life. It may be an intuition of immortality, of the glory of God, of His Presence in the world. But it is almost impossible to put into words. The point is that it is general rather than particular, though it may come as a reminder, this flash of understanding, of recognition, with the reading of a particular book, or hearing some strain of music.
It is tied up in some way also with the sense of hope, and an understanding of hope. How can we live without it, as a supernatural virtue, “hoping against hope,” during this dark period of violence and suffering throughout the world?
I am bold in trying to express the inexpressible, to write of happiness, even of Joy that comes, regardless of age, color, or condition of servitude to us all.
Regardless of failures, regardless even of the sufferings of others. If we did not have this hope, this joy, this love, how could we help others? How could we have the strength to hold on to them, to hold them up when they are drowning in sorrow, suffocating in blackness, almost letting go of life, life which we know with a sure knowledge is precious, which is something to hold to, be grateful for, to reverence.
This is the point of war protests, of a strong faith in the doctrine of nonviolence, the evidence of its continuing efficacy throughout the world.
It is the spiritual weapon of the little ones, the weak, the powerless, the poor. In some obscure way, an inarticulate way, the young have grasped this.
From this day on I am going to ask for the Holy Spirit and wait. I will be growing, of this I am sure. Maybe it won’t come until the moment I die.
But how wonderful if we could be “surprised by joy,” to use the title of C.S. Lewis’s book. I have heard of witnesses who said, “When he or she died, at that moment a look of surprise” came over their faces, “surprised joy which was wonderful to behold.” (October 1969, The Duty of Delight)
— Robert Ellsberg, Publisher, Orbis Books
Join us on Monday, March 31st at 7 PM in Wallace Hall for the Laetare Lecture “The Long Pilgrimage of Dorothy Day,” presented by Robert Ellsberg. Ellsberg will reflect on Day’s long life “on pilgrimage,” and the way her faith was tested by daily life and the challenges of history.