The Long Loneliness
By friar Vincent Petersen, OFM Conv.

To champion the cause of justice and peace is to accept a risk the prophets knew well: to be dismissed, avoided, and misunderstood. When one speaks on behalf of the marginalized, the poor, and the disenfranchised, the cost can include loneliness. Servant of God Dorothy Day writes in The Long Loneliness: “We have all known the long loneliness, and we have learned that the only solution is love, and that love comes with community.”
My own loneliness as an activist and artist led me to write about icons of contemporary saints and martyrs. As a social justice activist, Dorothy Day discovered her community in the work of hospitality: providing for the homeless and the jobless through the Catholic Worker Movement. I discovered mine in conversation with her.
To write an icon is not simply to make an image. It is to consent to a long, interior labor—one shaped by fasting and prayer, and by the discipline of form. Icons are described as being “written,” and not “painted,” because in Eastern Christianity icons are considered a form of visual Scripture, theology or prayer rather than “artwork.” My style is not traditional, yet the encounter was unmistakable. Dorothy Day met me heart to heart. She did not flatter the vision; she strengthened it. She both encouraged and challenged me to keep going, to keep telling the truth in color and line, to keep listening for the Gospel’s demand. In her presence, I felt drawn again into Christ’s passion for the poor—and into the stubborn hope of a world freed from war and oppression.
Dorothy Day is a saint and prophet the American Church needs today, though she often chided her admirers for calling her one. She felt it could become a way of dismissing her, and dismissing the demands of the Gospel. She insisted that “the work of justice is normative for the follower of Christ—no one is exempt.” By her words and her example, she taught that doing the works of mercy and practicing charity were not enough. One must also work for social justice, including the transformation of unjust economic systems that keep people in poverty.
As a Catholic laywoman, she lived within the long prophetic tradition of faithful opposition. She challenged Church leaders for lavish living and for failing to condemn nuclear weapons. She was arrested and imprisoned many times for her support of civil rights, for defending the rights of workers to unionize, and for her opposition to war and militarism.
In this image, we see Dorothy serving a “trinity” of homeless people in a Catholic Worker house, while right outside the door a protest march moves down the street. She turns toward us as if repeating the words she once offered a reporter when asked what he could do: “Yes, get busy and clean the toilets.”