Before I left, I received a copy of the Houston Catholic Worker. It had an article written by Michael Baxter in it that reviewed the publication of Dorothy Day's personal journal -- it had been sealed for 25 years, and had recently been published -- including a last journal that was still in the bedstand in the room where she had died until it was discovered over twenty-five years later. She journaled up till a week before she died -- intermittently, but always with the intent.

I haven't read it, but I have leafed through it. I want to include a long excerpt, from pp. 427-28, from September 1968:

'There is nothing new under the sun' "Men have always warred, at home or abroad.' Christianity is 2,000 years old and a thousands of years are as one day.

It is part of age, the depression which comes with age, to realize so keenly the horror and suffering around us. What early Father of the Church said that if we could sit on a mountain to and see the misery and evil in the world, life would be unbearable to the sensitive. Thru radio, television, all modern communication we do just that. So many try to drown out the sound of man's screams with the fratic music, dizzying lights and colors. Speed, and rushing from one end of the world to the other, to try by words, by reason, to bring repose.

It is time to study history, to study the lives of great men and women and to realize we begin with ourselves.

With all the tumult going on now against the church, the 'institutional' church, it is as tho adolescents had just discovered their parents were fallible and they are so shocked they want to throw out the institutions of the home and go in for 'community' as a salvation to all their own pressing problems, including the children that are arriving (if they are) as part of the ever-recurring problem of marriage. They call them 'young adults' but it seems to me they are belated adolescents with all the romanticism that goes with it.

They are trying to throw out all the wisdom of churchmen and philosophpers in their emphasis on 'the world.' 'Romanticizing the secular,' one Protestant writer accuses them of. Disregarding the primacy of the spiritual they thnk to begin with the secular which is so much an important part of the job of the layman. (To make the kind of society where it is easier to be good, as Peter Maurin said.)

The trouble is Americans want too much. Yes, the (priests) are men of desires, as Daniel was, and so are beloved of God. But why do they want to be laymen too and do the work of laymen. They want everything -- to good, physical life, food and drink, comfort for the flesh, including wife and children, and a homre to shelter their loneliness, and they want too to be in on all the demonstrating which is going on today -- to play the prophetic role as well as the priestly.

Yet reform in the church has always come about not thru the mob, mob action, revolutionary action, which without prayer and penance means violence. Jesus Christ showed the way. Scripture, the gospels, show the way. Prayer and fasting. Penancne, acknowledgement of our personal sin, which is part of the sin and disorder of the world. Whence come war and strife among you?

I love the story of the two hermits of the Desert -- 'Let us have a quarrel.' And theother, the uncritical Father who on going into an untidy cell exclaimed, 'How this monk must be absorbed with the things of God!' and on going into an orderly one, 'What peace in this soul.'

But what means so much to me, such stories and the lives of the saints who so influenced their times, and lived in such peach and joy-- do not reach people today. Nor the Gospel either, tho there is much talk of 'Jesus and Buddha,' put on a par.

People need to be rediscovering the Gospel. They have to find them thru people who find their joy in them, and who accept the crosses of this life as preparation, as the inevitable in the way."