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| Dorothy Day |
COMMENTARY: For both Day and Chesterton, gratitude wasn’t the end of a feeling — it was the beginning of faith.
David Mills, June 11, 2025.
Her world ended in the 10 days she was in the hospital with her newborn daughter, Tamar, Dorothy Day wrote a little dramatically many years later.
“If I had written the greatest book, composed the greatest symphony, painted the most beautiful painting or carved the most exquisite figure, I could not have felt more the exalted creator than I did when they placed my child in my arms,” she wrote in the preface to her book Therese, a biography of St. Thérèse of Lisieux.
This feeling led her to God and thence to the Catholic Church. “Such a great feeling of happiness and joy filled me that I was hungry for Someone to thank, to love, even to worship, for so great a good that had been bestowed upon me. That tiny child was not enough to contain my love, nor could the father, though my heart was warm with love for both.”
She described the feeling this way in her autobiography The Long Loneliness:
The final object of this love and gratitude was God. No human creature could receive or contain so vast a flood of love and joy as I often felt after the birth of my child. With this came the need to worship, to adore.
Il resto in questo collegamento:
David Mills, ex direttore esecutivo di First Things e redattore di Touchstone, è autore di due substack, Pulled Quotes e Pulled Quotes (Catholic Edition).
