Viewpoint Change in culture is whats needed, as Dorothy Day
knew
By JIM TULL
Dorothy Day was a large part of why
I first showed up 23 years ago to work at Amos House, a Catholic
Worker-inspired house of hospitality in Providence, R.I. Following four years
as an irregular volunteer, I moved into the house and joined the staff; three
years later I became the director.
Soon after this transition, I discovered that a scattering of
people here and there were calling me a saint. Maybe it had something to do
with the privileged upbringing that I seemed to be renouncing, or perhaps it
was my choice to work with the poor instead of some other population. Although
I left Amos House five years ago and sense that my reputation as a saint -- or
fool -- hasnt followed me very closely, I am challenged to consider the
ramifications of the now-official campaign to canonize Dorothy Day, my
formative inspiration.
Dorothy herself was consistently and genuinely hostile to any
association with sainthood, and her hostility expressed a general aversion to
the concept beyond its official or unofficial application in her case. I
wont raise an objection if the Catholic church chooses to declare her
saintliness, but Im moved by her spirit to embellish her case for
distrusting the idea of sainthood itself.
Dorothy insisted that the label amounted to a dismissal of the
meaning of her life and words. When she becomes a saint, the rest of us become
exempt from the call of her teachings and witness. The act of canonization
displaces responsibility.
Going a bit deeper into the role of the saint in our culture,
sainthood also promotes an individualistic worldview. The conflicting messages
of sainthood are that the examples of saintly lives can be dismissed because
theyre lived by unusually graced individuals and that the nasty world we
live in can be transcended, as exemplified by these individual heroes.
Both messages subtly enable and support the oppressive status quo.
Its common for people to subscribe to both messages at once:
Because there are people -- the saints -- who made the grade, Im
accountable for my own failure, but since the saints are so extraordinary
theyve earned their own special label, theres no way I can be
expected to be so holy.
Like the focus on celebrity in our culture, sainthood fixation
promotes the cheerleading spectator rather than the active participant, and at
the same time calms any worry that there is a systemic source of our social and
spiritual ailments.
For those more committed to social transformation, sainthood takes
on a different, but no less individualistic interpretation: If only [some
critical mass of] people followed the example of [name of saint], the world
would be the place we want it to be. The way to improve the world is to
get people to be better than they are.
Intending to move society from the status quo, this understanding
of sainthood has the opposite effect by promoting the moral behavior of the
individual rather than a look at the systemic basis of our social problems. Our
culture, by which I mean the global culture of civilization, fuels the social
distress in our society. Neither the worlds troubled condition nor its
salvation are a matter of how good, bad or saintly are the thoughts and
behavior of individuals. It is much more a function of how we think and live
collectively. No amount of pleading and whipping is going to snap ordinary
people out of the habit of following the flow. This is true of people in our
culture and any other.
Peter Maurin, Dorothys founding partner in the Catholic
Worker initiative, insisted that we must create a society in which it is
easy to be good. Instead of laboring to make ourselves and others
into saints, we should help transform our culture so that average people will
be compelled by the cultural flow to share, cooperate in community living and
respect the earth. We contribute to this transformation by exposing and
recanting the mythology that undergirds our culture and by experimenting with
new ways of living. The goal is a new worldview and social habits that are held
collectively by ordinary people bearing the usual variety of personal gifts and
shortcomings.
A final dimension of our sainthood fascination can be illuminated
by the absence of saint, prophet, savior, guru or avatar concepts (as we know
them) in nature-based, tribal cultures that have survived in relative isolation
for thousands of years.
Attempting what saintly people like Dorothy Day attempt can be
understood as an effort to survive in a profoundly dysfunctional society
without going crazy. Daniel Berrigan has defended his acts of civil
disobedience by insisting that he is merely protecting his soul from being
captured by the machine. While many of us seem to prosper in our troubled
society, many try desperately to make sense of the world by acting
out in one of a variety of ways. In this sense, the saint response is not
so much a rising above the rest but a kind of coping mechanism: It is one
defense strategy against a culture gone mad.
Functional, sustainable cultures would not -- and ordinarily do
not -- produce saints. Contrary to the noble savage perception many
people have of, say, Australias aboriginal people, you wont find a
saint (as we might recognize one) among them, only ordinary people with the
usual individual idiosyncrasies living in the flow of a culture that works.
This cultural comparison suggests that we quit falling over
ourselves to recognize and adore the lotus rising out of the muck and instead
concentrate on the muck. So long as we choose to live in muck, a lotus will
surely rise now and again -- as will 12-year-old boys who come to school and
spray bullets at their schoolmates. We can get at the muck by recognizing that
it grows from and is shaped by our culture, regardless of how virtuous or
vicious are any one of our individual members. The culture has a life of its
own and a strong will to sustain itself. Its sustenance is its mythology, which
we collectively live out every day and accept as fact, without a thought given
to it. The facts provided by this mythology, explaining who we are and how
things came to be the way they are, apply only to one culture, our own, though
we mistake them for explaining the human story in its entirety.
Shifting our attention from transcendence to the struggle of
ordinary people to survive the system, we can transform the culture that has us
all transfixed. With a revised understanding of who we are, where weve
come from and where were heading, we will create both a new cultural
mythology and new way of living on the earth and with each other.
Like Clare and Francis of Assisi, Lao Tsu and some of the others
we might call saints, Dorothy Day certainly challenged our culture in this
radical manner as she also transcended it. And as I continue my own personal
efforts to become a more mindful, compassionate and nonviolent presence in my
home and in the world, I am not at all critical of individuals choosing a way
of life that others may want to consider saintly. I also depend for guidance
and inspiration on the examples of many whom others might call saints. I urge
only a shift in perspective on what this means.
My own ministry has shifted, as my understanding has shifted.
Though I continue to support worthy programs, campaigns and movements of the
kind I contributed to for many years, I have become more committed to learning
and teaching about our collective need to untie our cultural shackles and the
process of how this might unfold. Raising these questions and experimenting
with alternatives using the tools available to me, I hope to contribute to a
change in the flow of our society that promises something better.
Since leaving Amos House in 1995, Jim Tull has taught courses
in community service and social change, peace studies and philosophy at
Providence College and the Community College of Rhode Island. His e-mail
address is jtull@ccri.cc.ri.us
National Catholic Reporter, February 16,
2001
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