Editor’s note: This tribute to Dorothy Day, who died on Nov. 29, 1980, originally appeared within the Dec. 13, 1980, print edition of America.
In his philosophy of history, Nikolai Berdyaev, from whom Peter Maurin drew heavily in formulating the philosophy of the Catholic Employee movement, tended to be apocalyptic. Just before he died in Paris in 1946 Berdyaev had written that the twentieth century represented “the last demonic attempts of the dominion of Caesar to dominate and to enslave man and the world.” But ultimately, there could be a victory of the Lamb over the Beast, which is the victory “of freedom and love over force and hatred.” Then, the Beast would “be forged over again into the abyss of hell and shackled, to not eternity, but to time: for hell is that which stays in time; that which, obsessed by its evil nightmares, doesn’t pass into eternity.”
Many will agree that the outstanding exemplar of affection and freedom in our time was a girl, Dorothy Day, and that she was the implacable foe of St. John’s “Beast.” Now she is dead. She is not any longer of history, not forced to confront its tragic themes, which today seem increasingly devastating and inescapable. The triumph of such a death ought to be celebrated by a poet, an artist, a composer, creating something of the everlasting to forged into time’s flow, reminding time that ultimately it is going to not have its way, for here is that which escapes its devastation. For Dorothy preached love and practiced love with such ardor that one couldn’t but consider that she had already come inside a handclasp of eternity.
Dorothy preached love and practiced love with such ardor that one couldn’t but consider that she had already come inside a handclasp of eternity.
The amazing thing about her life was the improbability of all of it. Psychobiographers, with all of their dexterity in fitting the person into the patterns of history’s necessity, would ultimately exhaust their categories in attempting to “explain” her. If anyone, in the primary 25 years of life, seemed headed for despair, it was she, yet she turned away from that fate and, having set her vision on eternity she never again looked back. If she was free, there may be hope for us all, living and dead, for when time is defeated there isn’t any past. Suffering and tragedy are erased.
The third in a family of 5 children, she was born at Bath Beach, Brooklyn, on Nov. 8, 1897. When she was 6, the family moved to California where her father worked as a newspaperman. The San Francisco earthquake of April 1906 terminated the enterprise. Resettling in Chicago, the elder Day found a job compiling racetrack results for a newspaper, the Inter-Ocean, a task he performed at nights. Having to sleep through a lot of the day, his relationship with the youngsters—a minimum of from Dorothy’s account—seemed somewhat distant, however the mother was a seamless and uniting presence within the family.
Religion within the household was a formalism that was politely and deferentially acknowledged, but at a distance. As a young girl, Dorothy frightened about this courteous reserve, but as she grew older her concern for what looked as if it would have been a craving for something to worship was propitiated by a love of the masses, a passion, she said, that got here from reading Jack London. So the thought of transcendence, as within the minds of many other young seekers, gave option to a vision of a final community of creation to be attained in time and never in eternity.
She carried this passion along with her when she entered the University of Illinois in the autumn of 1914. To a lot of the students there she will need to have seemed a curiosity, tall and thin, with a pale face and huge, curiously slanting eyes that were shadowed from lack of sleep. Whatever religious sentiments she had had as a toddler were formally abandoned. She smoked and uttered unladylike words like “rattling” and “hell.” Excited about writing, she related to a gaggle that wrote for the campus magazine. She apparently found her classes dull because she was continuously absent from them.
Dorothy Day: “It’s my vocation to agitate, to be a journalist, a pamphleteer, and now my time have to be spent in these cities, these slums.”
Sometime after Dorothy began college, the Inter-Ocean ceased publication, and the Day family moved to Recent York. In 1916 Dorothy followed, but not to affix the family. She rented a room on the Lower East Side and wheedled a job as a reporter from the editor of the Socialist journal, Call. Possibly because she never seemed in the slightest degree desirous about the intricacies of Socialist logic, she was fired. Little matter, it seemed. The USA had just launched into its Great Crusade, so she joined a gaggle of Columbia University students who were going to Washington to protest the draft. She was already professing pacifism.
When she returned to Recent York she got a job as an assistant to Floyd Dell, who, with Max Eastman, edited The Masses. The aim of this journal, as its young editors and artists saw it, was to attack conventional morality in favor of one which was more “open” and “free,” one that might conform to the brand new scientific and progressive spirit being fashioned by Sigmund Freud, John Dewey and others. Dorothy did no writing for The Masses; she was, actually, a sort of office girl amongst whose tasks it was to deliver the morning mail to the regal Max Eastman.
The Masses was suppressed by the Government in the autumn of 1917, and Dorothy, with nothing to do, impulsively agreed to affix an illustration in front of the White House in support of ladies’s suffrage. Searching for martyrdom, the group refused to disperse and sooner or later was sent to Occoquan prison, where the ladies made their customary declamations for his or her cause and refused to cooperate with prison procedures. Dorothy played her role admirably, perhaps higher than anyone else. She needed to be dragged to her cell by a guard while she, not yet confirmed within the doctrine of nonresistance, kicked his shins and bit his hand. For this she was put into solitary confinement for six days. This is able to be the primary of six imprisonments for her, although those of her later life were, for essentially the most part, occasioned by her pacifist convictions.
After President Wilson released the ladies, Dorothy returned to Recent York and spent the rest of the autumn doing odd jobs of writing and research. Within the evenings she fell into the habit of sitting in on the rehearsals of Eugene O’Neill’s plays being produced on the Provincetown Playhouse at 133 MacDougal Street. After rehearsal, she would go together with O’Neill to a saloon on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Fourth Street, “The Golden Swan,” where a special back room was reserved for the young writers and artists. There Dorothy spent her nights, sitting with O’Neill as he fell right into a morose drunkenness. Within the early hours she would walk with him to whatever room happened to be his lot, see that he was warmly covered, after which, likely as not, stop at St. Joseph’s Church on Sixth Avenue and kneel for some time. She did this from no explicit religious impulse, but only since the church was warm, and he or she felt soothed by its quietness.
One must strive for sanctity, for, as she wrote, to change into a saint “is the Revolution,” giving the phrase her own emphasis.
She and O’Neill were nothing greater than friends, although he looked as if it would have felt a strength in her that his nature craved. In his “A Moon for the Misbegotten,” one in all his last plays to be produced, he made the character, Josie, a composite that contained elements of Dorothy. As for O’Neill, Dorothy in later life recorded in her notes that she prayed for him and thought that his suffering got here from his inability to simply accept God’s goodness.
Dorothy was 20 years old because the yr 1918 began. Troubled by a scarcity of purpose in her life, she began nurse’s training at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn. In her two autobiographical books, From Union Square to Rome and The Long Loneliness, she related intimately her experiences as a nurse in training, but she omits two unhappy occasions in her life that got here in that period. She had a despairing love affair, quit her training after one yr, and made what appeared to be a rebound marriage. Sometime in 1919 she and her husband went to Europe, joining the exodus of a lot of other young Americans who sought artistic inspiration in what was presumably the more civilized culture of the Continent. And, just like the others, Dorothy set herself to writing a novel.
The wedding, to date as compatibility of mind and spirit were concerned, was an outrageous one, and it brought on a fast separation, although Dorothy speaks of a completely happy time in southern Italy, where she wrote her novel. They returned to the USA in the summertime of 1920, ending up in Chicago. For over two years she lived a disordered existence there, living in rooming houses, imprisoned briefly on the absurd charge of being a prostitute, holding nondescript jobs and otherwise finding her companionship in the corporate of radicals and “bohemians,” as they were called in those days.
Again wearying of her aimless existence, she went to Recent Orleans where she found a job writing articles for the Recent Orleans Item, a newspaper much inclined toward the sensational. As her project, Dorothy was alleged to change into a taxi-dancer in a dive on Canal Street and write stories about “the women,” which she did for a month or so. But again, before going to her evening’s work, she would stop by the cathedral, and with a rosary that somebody had given her in hand, she began to hope.
In his “A Moon for the Misbegotten,” Eugene O’Neill made the character, Josie, a composite that contained elements of Dorothy Day.
Then, with no inkling in any respect as to what was about to occur, she got a telephone call from the Boni and Liveright publishing house telling her that her novel could be published and that it had already been sold to the flicks with $5,000 on the best way for her.
Now fabulously wealthy, she hastened back to Recent York where for several weeks she wined and dined old friends, but then, taking counsel of a friend, she bought a beach cottage on Raritan Bay amongst a colony of radicals and beachcombers. All the time liable to all the subtleties of nature’s beauty, she found as of late, when she was taking long walks along the beach, a time of welling sense of peace and order in her life.
Some months after moving into her cottage she began a relationship with a person to whom she would all the time seek advice from as her “common-law husband,” Forster Batterham. The Batterhams were a solid middle-class English family who had come to Recent York from Asheville, N.C. A daughter, Lily, had married the semanticist Kenneth Burke, and it was at their place that Dorothy met Forster, then moodily languishing within the aftereffects of a protracted case of World War I flu and otherwise affirming his person by a career of war against all conventional customs. So for 2 years they lived together contentedly, as Dorothy read, wrote and gathered driftwood while Forster fished within the bay.
In June 1926, Dorothy realized that she was pregnant and for her it was an occasion of great joy. She felt herself a component of that creation which of late had swelled in her consciousness as an indication of goodness and redemption. Her daughter, Tamar, was born on March 3, 1927, and it was an occasion of such happiness that she wrote an account of her experience, it was published by her friend, Mike Gold, in The Recent Masses. Wishing to register an indication of her dedication of her daughter to that goodness she felt, she sought out a nun and thru her arranged for Tamar’s baptism.
After which she realized that there was no course for her but to be baptized herself, so on a gray December day in 1927 she went to the village of Tottenville, Staten Island, N.Y., and was baptized. Why had she change into a Catholic? In her “notes,” which she irregularly kept, she tried to clarify. It was not from an inward look, from an awesome anguish over her “sins.” “It was the glories of creation, the tender great thing about flowers and shells, the song of birds, the smile of my baby, this stuff brought such exultation, such joy to my heart that I couldn’t but cry out in praise of God.”
She had, after all, felt the anguish of isolation, “the long loneliness,” that got here from the continuing assault on community by time.
She had, after all, felt the anguish of isolation, “the long loneliness,” that got here from the continuing assault on community by time. “Such pain comes and goes through all of life. It comes and goes so often as breath within the body. But there was something inside me which rebelled at turning to God in sorrow, within the woe which got here so often from sin, or the results of sin. Perhaps I felt a grim determination to simply accept suffering as expiation, that it might come, that I couldn’t indeed escape it.”
Nonetheless, baptism only complicated her immediate life. Forster, with a growing displeasure over Dorothy’s increasing involvement with religion, had left her. Hoping that in some way she could straighten out her life by having her legal marriage annuled, she met several times with a young priest within the Recent York chancery office, Francis A. Mclntyre, later Cardinal Archbishop of Los Angeles. “He all the time gave me essentially the most courteous and sympathetic attention,” she observed years later. What got here of this is just not clear, but one thing was: Forster was out of her life, and the following five years for Dorothy were years of wandering.
Nor did baptism solve the issue of what appeared to be the deepest craving of her spirit: the way to bring that vision of community that she had affirmed in baptism into the substance of time. She knew, without the help of a pc evaluation on the topic, that in some way her Christian faith had been turned other than history, had been distorted in its meaning, and even, by some, had been made right into a sweet syrup to be poured onto all types of bourgeois striving. As she saw her religion in 1932, it appeared to be dying. Her old friends, the Communists, were certain that point was their invincible weapon; they might bring the world to community. The fascists, for his or her part, were proclaiming their inerrant ability to direct time’s purposes to the success of their caesardoms, and the bourgeois world’s faith in “progress” got here far ahead of their faith in God. She wanted a vocation, and on the Communist-organized “hunger march” in Washington in December 1932, her anguish reached crisis proportions. She went to the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception to hope for an answer. “And once I returned to Recent York I discovered Peter Maurin—Peter, the French peasant, whose spirit and concepts will dominate…the remaining of my life” she wrote later.
By modern criteria, wherein a professor is judged worthy of the esteem of his associates by evidence cited in 10-page vitas and cardboard boxes of documentation, Peter Maurin could hardly have qualified to operate a slide projector in today’s college classroom. He was a French peasant who had come to America, wandering from job to job, but all of the while reading intensively in church history and the novel social theorists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In time Maurin got here to a synthesis of the key ideas that he had read and so fastidiously noted. It was a view of history at radical variance with the Enlightenment proposition that the truths of history were found exclusively in an “objective” reference, where the thought climate was obsessive about “facts” and their accumulation and organization, all to the top of quieting the lashings of history’s flow, where the morbidity of erratic change would give option to the nice hum of an everlasting and steadily accelerating “progress.” In Maurin’s view the historian should study the thing in relation to the topic. The topic was the person, and as Maurin got here to see it, the church provided the vision and the option to the true fullness of personhood.
This, then, was the mission of the Catholic: The central fact of existence shouldn’t be history’s process, where individuals were forced to evolve to the target; it ought to be a turning to a lifetime of lively love which, of itself, would redeem and end history. Peter preached a revolution, but a personalist revolution. It was to not be waged for a political or social form within the customary dress of slogans, banners and the exciting call to fight yet another battle to rid history of the last barrier to the community that point had promised. On the contrary, it was a revolution that began by “putting on Christ.” It proceeded toward community fairly than fragmentation. It was a revolution that began with the person and had all of creation as its object. It was this revolution that was the true mission of the church, and it was one which Dorothy with all of her ardent nature could embrace.
For the remaining of her days Dorothy would seek advice from Peter as a saint, and there was something in regards to the intensity of her quest and the openness of her mind to an concept that enabled her to catch the meaning of his “clarification.” She was his student, the one who knew what he was talking about, the one who didn’t see his selflessness, his obliviousness to all the allurements of the thing world as a sort of cosmic buffoonery, but as truly the character of the saint who lives outside of time. Maurin died on May 15, 1949, then having lived for 15 years within the Catholic Employee community.
How and when should she begin this “correlation of the fabric with the spiritual,” she asked Maurin in those early months of 1933. Begin now, he counseled: As a journalist, she should start a newspaper to introduce the thought of primacy of the spirit, of affection into all the affairs of time that roiled about them. They were to start a community of like-minded individuals, feed the poor, proceed to read and think to “make clear” their sense of what it meant to be human, and in time to start an agrarian commune where “the employee could change into a scholar and the scholar change into a employee.”
Dorothy Day: ““So I won’t be afraid, and I’ll talk of affection and write of affection, and God help me, I’ll suffer from it, too.”
So it began in May 1, 1933, the day that Dorothy Day and her friends went nervously into Recent York’s Union Square to sell the primary edition of the Catholic Employee to the 50,000 or so Communists assembled there. The world was seething that day with gigantic rallies. In Moscow there have been awesome lines of rolling weaponry and parading soldiers. In Berlin, after marching and singing all day, that night at Tempelhof airport, 1,000,000 individuals gathered to listen to Hitler. All this, it may be supposed, springing from an irrational and frenzied searching for for community in a world where a vision of the unity of all had been obscured by a fragmenting speedup of history’s process.
For nearly half a century now, the Catholic Employee has been published monthly, its circulation often running at around 100 thousand. It was Dorothy’s paper; she formed the character of its message and wrote her own column, “On Pilgrimage.” Its message was Maurin’s idea: creating community, affirming peace and denouncing war; restoring true human creativity to the thought of labor; and, as all the time, criticizing the ever-growing and baleful giantism of an financial system that ultimately would make people into blank-faced nullities who of their leisure time were positioned, like dolls, in front of a television set. The way in which of life that Dorothy and her friends wrote about within the Employee was practiced in Catholic Employee houses of hospitality and on Employee farms. Perhaps what they did amounted to little within the face of the rising torment of the world, but they believed that already they were ending that world.
Through the years of the Catholic Employee period Dorothy wrote reams about herself: six books and her monthly “On Pilgrimage” reports within the Catholic Employee. Why did she write a lot? It was her vocation to write down, she said. Her object was to make some extent, to present an instruction. The identical was true of her speaking appearances. She was endlessly on the go, even traversing the world several times, but all to the top of finding “concordances,” of telling of “the work,” and the personalist revolution that Peter Maurin had taught her.
Maurin’s revolutionary idea placed Dorothy Day, the would-be revolutionary, inside the substance of the Catholic tradition. Peter Maurin had given her a vocation and an example of holiness that she would speak about for the remaining of her life. Yet, in the primary years of the lifetime of the Catholic Employee movement she still appeared to be searching. Her daughter was growing, and with the strain that the Employee life imposed upon her, she can have considered turning to a more tranquil lifestyle. It was within the Catholic Employee retreats, held in the course of the war years on the Employee farm at Easton, Pa., that she found the ultimate “clarification,” as Maurin would say, of her quest within the lifetime of the spirit.
The retreats, held by Fathers John Hugo and Louis Farina, were based on a model created by Father Onesimus Lacouture, a Canadian Jesuit. Controversial due to their rigor and since some theologians thought they opposed nature to grace, they filled Dorothy’s heart with joy. “It was as if we were listening to the Gospel for the primary time. We saw all things latest. There was a freshness about the whole lot as if we were in love, as indeed we were.” Such was the sense of community that she and her friends felt that she called it a “foretaste of heaven.” She had come to a latest sense of what Peter had taught her: “Allow us to make a world where it is less complicated for people to be good.” Now she saw clearly what the “good” was that he had talked about. “For too long,” she said, “too little had been expected of us… We saw for the primary time man’s spiritual capacities raised as he’s to be a toddler of God. We saw the premise of our dignity.”
The retreats brought her to a latest sense of the truth of affection, and it was this that she would speak about for the remaining of her days. In notes that she made in the course of the retreats she wrote this reflection on love:
“St. John of the Cross talks of the involuntary pleasure which comes about when the soul is caressed by God and the way it overflows into the senses. Is that this an experience of that love? All my prayer, my very own suffering, my reading, my study, would lead me to this conclusion. That is an amazing and holy force and have to be used because the spiritual weapon. Love against hate. Suffering against violence. What’s two thousand years within the history of the world? We have now scarcely begun to like. We have now scarcely begun to know Christ, to see him in others around us… All love is holy—the love of passion, of friendship—there may be passion in all of it, for passion means suffering.
Perhaps what they did amounted to little within the face of the rising torment of the world, but they believed that already they were ending that world.
“Love is so beautiful and lust so ugly. And all of the world is busy portraying lust… it’s in us all, self deceit may make us attempt to cover it up but just because the corruption of the flesh is there, the rottenness of decay, the seed of death—so is also the seed of everlasting life.
“So I won’t be afraid, and I’ll talk of affection and write of affection, and God help me, I’ll suffer from it, too—the humiliations, the degradations, the misunderstandings because ‘what’s it I really like when I really like my God?…’
“Love comes at any age, and the remembrance, the nostalgia is there. And yet who would return to the agonies of youth? No, it’s a completely happy thing, a joyous thing to consider the love to return, the love of God which awaits us, the success where we are going to know as we’re known, when all our talents, energies, abilities shall be utilized, and developed, once we shall be truly loved.”
The retreats impressed upon her one other conviction, hitherto held more as a formalized truth than one which applied explicitly to her. In an editorial within the Catholic Employee of this era which was printed individually in leaflet form by Stanley Vishnewski on the press the Employees had on the Easton farm, she made some extent: “Called to be Saints.” On one in all these pamphlets Dorothy had written, “That is the retreat.” Within the pamphlet she stressed the purpose that “all are called.… Where are our saints to call the masses to God?” One must strive for sanctity, for, as she wrote, to change into a saint “is the Revolution,” giving the phrase her own emphasis.
She said her love and gratitude to the church had increased with the years. “She taught me the crowning love of the lifetime of the spirit.”
So, she concluded within the journal she kept, “it’s my vocation to agitate, to be a journalist, a pamphleteer, and now my time have to be spent in these cities, these slums.” But, she added wistfully, “how wonderful it’s to be out here in…the midst of fields, atop a hill and to have samples of Heaven all about, not hell. I actually love sweet clover and thank God for it.”
Thirty years later, she could say surely that she had kept her vocational commitment. It was the afternoon session of the Catholic Eucharistic Congress at Philadelphia on Aug. 6, 1976 that Dorothy made her last speaking appearance before a big audience. Although town in the mean time was racked with alarms over the outbreak of “Legionnaire’s disease,” a big crowd had gathered to listen to her. She was well into her 79th yr and beset by the infirmities of age, and so many within the audience probably felt that there could be few future speaking engagements for her. And, as these people regarded her, she had already achieved a prophetic position within the lifetime of the church.
Her appearance was one in all extreme frailty, a mark that increased fairly than diminished the dramatic impact she had all the time registered on audiences. Her eyes, with their unusual slant, seemed larger and more luminous against the white transparency of her skin. As usual, she was garbed in clothing that had probably come from the bins of the Recent York Employee houses. Despite all of her years of public speaking she all the time approached a platform appearance with a trepidation approaching terror. Per week before the congress she had written to a friend that she was looking forward “with such dread… once I speak August 6 (Hiroshima Day) that I can plan nothing….”
She spoke briefly, but of the convictions that had, for a half century, been the source of that zeal that made her “different,” as people would say. She spoke of the love of God and the decision to take that like to all of Creation. She talked of the church. “It was also the physical features of the church which attracted me. Bread and wine… water (all water is made holy since Christ was baptized within the Jordan), incense, the sound of waves and wind, all nature cried out to me.” She said her love and gratitude to the church had increased with the years. “She taught me the crowning love of the lifetime of the spirit.” However the church had also taught her that “before we bring our gifts of service, of gratitude, to the altar—if our brothers have anything against us, we must hesitate to approach the altar to receive the Eucharist. Unless you do penance, you shall all perish.”
She reminded her hearers that there, on the congress on Aug. 6, that they had not registered an indication of penance, of sorrow for the event which had occurred on that day some 31 years previous. “And here we’re on August sixth, the day the primary atomic bomb was dropped….” There had been holocausts before, massacres, she reminded them: “After the First World War of the Armenians, all but forgotten now, and the holocaust of the Jews, God’s chosen people. When He got here to earth as Man, He selected them. And he told us ‘All men are brothers,’ and that it was His will that every one men be saved, Japanese, Jew, Armenian.”
Her last talk: she had been speaking for 40 years and the world now appeared to be hurtling with a latest momentum toward that time where all was fragmented and time had won its final victory. Holocausts—now greater than ever, from the unborn child to whole populations thought to be ideologically unsafe, all justified on the grounds of keeping time’s flow appeased.
Dorothy Day: “Irrespective of what our wandering, we will still say, ‘All is Grace.’”
That night, following her talk on the congress, she had a heart attack. After that she remained confined, for essentially the most part, praying day by day for several hours within the morning as was her custom, reading and going to a 5:30 Mass within the chapel of the Recent York Employee house for ladies on Third Street. Occasionally, when she felt as much as it, she went to the beach house on Staten Island, a small cottage not removed from the situation of her first house. It almost seemed in these latter days, because the discordancies of the world became more menacing, that she was not preoccupied with the world but was content to spend her time in prayer and in taking pleasure from the corporate of her daughter. Her eightieth birthday on Nov. 8, 1977, was widely celebrated, and it was a moment of much pleasure for her when Recent York’s Cardinal Terence Cooke went to the Employee house on Third Street bearing a message of birthday greetings from Pope Paul VI. Characteristically, she spoke to Cardinal Cooke of Peter Maurin and Maurin’s idea of homes of hospitality for the poor.
Now, what may be said of this woman, all the time radical, but who, after becoming a Christian, had a vision of the radicalism of the Gospels so profound that it geared toward ending time itself? Was she, the pacifist, the one who wrote and spoke passionately against the injustice of a social system that deified the bourgeois values, truly of the church?
Dorothy Day, to the bemusement of some who would have had her a Marxist, a romantic liberal, a radical feminist, considered herself and spoke of herself as a daughter of the church. Once she told a friend that if she should ever disavow the church or the trail she had taken he would know that she was mad. Writing in her notebook toward the top of her life she said that she had heard a lot of people that were “sick of the church, sick of faith!” For her the treatment for this had been “a faithfulness to the means to beat it, recitation of the psalms every day, prayer and solitude, and by these means arriving or hoping to attain a state of well being… To hope the psalms even without understanding…. then suddenly like a sudden shower, understanding a verse comes, with the sunshine of joy like sun breaking through the clouds.”
Amidst the darkness of the world there was the church, itself darkened by its involvement in time. But she believed that point was ending and ahead was the sunshine of “the newfound, newly realized, emphasis on the freedom of Christ, and the belief, too, that we now have scarcely begun to be Christian, to deserve the name Christian.” Still there have been times, “fairly often, when one must continue to exist blind and naked faith.” But even then, “God sends intimations of immortality. We consider that if the desire is correct, God will take us by the hair of the top, as he did Habakkuk, who brought food to Daniel within the lion’s den, and can restore us to the Way and irrespective of what our wandering, we will still say, ‘All is Grace.’”