March 26, 2009
Peter Maurin
So I just finished The Long Loneliness which is a kind of autobiography Dorthy Day wrote back in the fifties. I highly recommend it, first of all. The first section about her early life is fascinating, the section about the birth of her daughter is moving (and should be required reading for mothers), and her depiction of Peter Maurin, who practically drove her to start the Catholic Worker movement, left me wondering why he hasn’t been canonized yet. There will be much, much more on The Long Loneliness as I re-read it in the coming months, but we started looking again at Maurin’s Easy Essays, and here is one for a taste. I suspect a similar feeling of unconnectedness to my experience in the world is what has caused me to drift away from my interest in formalized theology. (No offence intended, studiers of formalized theology, it’s just that I have found God more easily in my garden than in Aquinas lately.)
BLOWING THE DYNAMITE
Writing about the Catholic Church,
a radical writer says:
“Rome will have to do more
than to play a waiting game;
she will have to use
some of the dynamite
inherent in her message.”
To blow the dynamite
of a message
is the only way
to make the message dynamic.
If the Catholic Church
is not today
the dominant social dynamic force,
it is because Catholic scholars
have failed to blow the dynamite
of the Church.
Catholic scholars
have taken the dynamite
of the Church,
have wrapped it up
in nice phraseology,
placed it in an hermetic container
and sat on the lid.
It is about time
to blow the lid off
so the Catholic Church
may again become
the dominant social dynamic force.
