Just in time for this year’s 75th birthday of the Catholic Worker Movement, its co-founder Dorothy Day’s diaries have been painstakingly edited by Robert Ellsberg and published under the title “The Duty of Delight.” The current Orbis Books publisher, who lived as part of the Catholic Worker community in New York (1975-1980), also worked as managing editor of The Catholic Worker newspaper for two years. So it’s a knowledgeable eye indeed that guides his whittling of Day’s diaries to the wheat, not to mention the boon of an easy familiarity with her handwriting.

The historian David O’Brien has famously called Day (1897-1980) “the most significant, interesting and influential person in the history of American Catholicism.” There was no separation between Day’s Gospel ideals and the way she lived, in voluntary poverty serving the poor and witnessing for peace and social justice, as Ellsberg has written in the introduction to “Dorothy Day: Selected Writings,” an earlier book he ably edited.

Unsealed 25 years after her death, Day’s diaries are kept in the Dorothy Day-Catholic Worker collection at Marquette University in Milwaukee along with her other personal papers. The diaries eloquently reveal the daily challenge of trying to live the Gospel. They begin in 1934, shortly after the founding of the Catholic Worker, and end just before her death in 1980, transporting the reader with her through the Great Depression, World War II (in which Day and her paper, The Catholic Worker, remained staunchly pacifist), the Cold War, the Korean and Vietnam wars and the struggle for civil rights.

Day emerges as fully involved in the everyday work of feeding and sheltering the poor. “I have been harried and worn out all day by the consciousness that we were inundated by an ocean of unemployed and unemployable, black and white human beings, searching for food, warmth, comfort, momentary surcease from suffering,” she writes in February 1972. She dealt each day with alcoholics, drug addicts and the insane; she worried about paying bills; she got her clothing from the common clothing bin and ate whatever was served in the soup kitchen each night.

She also recounts witnessing to her long-standing pacifism and nonviolence through public demonstrations and civil disobedience, and on the most personal level, through her frequent struggle to become more compassionate and charitable, more forgiving and more prayerful. “A sincere repentance for my sins—the result of turning my eyes inward on myself, instead of regarding the faults of others—this is what is most necessary for me,” she writes in March 1934.

And, in August 1952: “When I say, Lord, that I am too sensitive, it is truly that—my senses, exterior and interior are too thin-skinned. I am tormented by people’s moods, their unhappiness. I must live more in my own heart, with Thee. Then when I go forth I have at least serenity.”
Day, who found strength in daily Mass, prayer and the sacraments, is a very human saint here. She is also a devoted mother to her daughter Tamar and grandmother to nine, a lover of music and literature who devoured books from Dostoevski to Flannery O’Connor, a colleague of Blessed Mother Teresa’s, a world traveler and so much more.

A delightful sense of humor occasionally peeks through, as in her September 1964 account of caring for her grandchildren: “It is hard to write or think when the record player is blaring with ‘Devil Woman.’” She adds, “Every morning I wake at 5:30 or 6 to have an hour before I get the kids up for school. Six children rushing thru breakfast, making their lunches, washing, brushing up, make for tumult. To be heard over it is impossible, so I must be content with making the sign of the cross on each forehead and a plea—’Say a little prayer as you go down the road. Just thank God, or say, Jesus, I want to love you.’”

Ellsberg includes a thoughtful introductory essay and timeline as well as occasional excerpts from Day’s Catholic Worker columns, including her prescient recognition of the dropping of the first atomic bomb in 1945 as the start of a new and terrible arms race. The editor’s occasional annotations are well placed and clear. Overall, the book’s intimate look at how Day tried to see God in everyday life is extremely engaging and valuable.

The title comes from a line by John Ruskin of which Day was very fond. “I was thinking how, as one gets older, we are tempted to sadness, knowing life as it is here on earth, the suffering, the cross,” she wrote in February 1961. “And how we must overcome it daily, growing in love, and the joy which goes with loving.”

“The Duty of Delight” is Day’s inspiring account of how she tried to reach this goal.