Unruly Saint

Dorothy Day's Radical Vision and Its Challenge for Our Times

By: D.L. Mayfield

Narrated by: Sarah Zimmerman

In 1933, in the shadow of the Great Depression, Dorothy Day started the most prominent Catholic radical movement in United States history, the Catholic Worker Movement, a storied organization with a lasting legacy of truth and justice.

Day's newspaper, houses of hospitality, and ministry of paying attention to the inequality of her world would eventually become world famous, just as she would become a figure of promise for the poor. The ways in which Day and her fellow workers both found the love of God in and expressed it for their neighbors during a time of great social, political, economic, and spiritual upheaval would become a model of activism for decades to come.

In Unruly Saint, activist, writer, and neighbor D. L. Mayfield brings a personal lens to Day's story. In exploring the founding of the Catholic Worker movement and newspaper by revisiting the early years of Day's life, Mayfield turns her attention to what it means to be a good neighbor today. Through a combination of biography, observations on the current American landscape, and theological reflection, this is at once an achingly relevant account and an encouraging blueprint for people of faith in tumultuous times. It will resonate with today's activists, social justice warriors, and those seeking to live in the service of others.

©2022 D. L. Mayfield (P)2022 eChristian

A Book for the Despairing Deconstructer

I thought, ill listen to this while I work on stuff during this week. Wrong. I've listened to this every moment I could in the last 24 hours. This book has me wishing for all that is unsaid inbetween the different lifestages of Dorothy Day and has me hoping to hear more from D.L Mayfield. D.L Mayfield brings great hope in, holiness of the lay person, the ability to remain unbothered by shortsighted bishops, and in the reminder of duty to delight and despair. Thank you for this book!

She was a normal person with strong ideals

Unruly Saint makes me want to learn even more about Dorothy Day and her life and the people who knew her best. And it convinces me that each of us has a role to play today in making our world a better place!

A biography of a radical Christian

Dorothy Day is someone that I have known about for a long time, but someone who I have not known much about. I have read one of DL Mayfield’s previous books and I know that she takes seriously the call for Christians to serve and live with the marginalized so I thought she would be a good author to read about Dorothy Day. (I have also read a book by her husband, a counselor.)

Unruly Saint is not a lengthy biography, about 250 pages. And most of its focus is on the founding of the Catholic Worker and its early years. Mayfield’s personal reflections on Day and her use of the research on Day as a way to grapple with her own Christian faith I think is one of the strengths of the books, but also one that may not appeal to everyone. I particularly read a lot of biography and memoir because I want to know how others have thought about what it means to live a good life or discern how to they can live in a complicated world. Reflective biographies like this give me insight not only into the subject of the biography but the author.

I was aware of the basic shape of Day. I knew she was a writer and that she founded the Catholic Worker Newspaper and various others activities to serve the poor during the Great Depression. I knew she was a radical and had been a communist prior to becoming Catholic. I knew that she had a child and was a pacifist. But I think that was really the extent of what I knew walking into this biography.

I am not going to rehash the book. But what I appreciate about Mayfield’s writing is that she is empathetic to both the strengths and weaknesses of Day and she doesn’t try to cover up either. At the end there is a grappling with the movement to officially recognize Day as a Catholic Saint. It is clear that Day wanted to try to live like a saint but didn’t want to be treated like one. There are several quotes about how Day was concerned about being minimized and reduced to “a saint” in a way that reduced the call to serve the marginalized to work that only saints did and not a calling on all Christians. Mayfield also reflects on the fact that Day was overwhelmed by her work often, but saw the need and couldn’t say no to giving away almost anything she had to someone who needed it because she understood the desperation of real need. Day assumed that others would react as she did when they also saw the need; but many do not.

There was a real community that formed around her, but it was also not a community that cared for Day as peers. She was lonely in part because she had such a strong call and skill at organizing. But I think she needed a community that would have shared responsibility and helped to get her to learn about her healthy, created limitations. There just do seem to be people with nearly superhuman capacity, but it isn’t unlimited capacity. There are people that I know who do so much more than I am physically capable of, but no one can operate without limitations.

More than anything else this made me want to know more about Dorothy Day. I already have a copy of The Reckless Way of Love by Dorothy Day, with an introduction by DL Mayfield and Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved By Beauty, the biography written by her granddaughter. Day’s autobiography, The Long Loneliness is on Kindle Unlimited, so I will borrow that eventually.

A helpful introduction to Dorothy Day

The author provides a visible, auidble, almost touchable description of Dorothy Day, the person and her life as a whole, as well as the daily and unique moments that made her both a person and a saint. I also like the way the author brings Dorothy Day's life and views into the light of the present day. I think maybe that I am now ready to try reading The Long Loneliness. Thank you to D.L. Mayfield for this introduction.