15 Days of Prayer With Dorothy Day

Book excerpt: Dorothy Day connected radical faith with doing radical deeds. Beginning from her discovery of God in the Word when she was eight years old, Michael Boover shares Dorothy’s reflections about her pilgrimage to the daily discipline of readiness and openness to God in her life, especially to God in her neighbor. He shares her words on why and how she prays, on her preference for frequent confession, on her intentional choice of suffering and poverty, and on her desire to imitate the saints and to make sanctity the norm of everyone’s life. In these 15 days, we see how Dorothy’s discipline gave her true freedom. In particular, it allowed her to give priority to Love – to take the most direct route to God by loving her neighbor. She recognized “the paucity of her own best spiritual efforts and took refuge in the fact that God would do for believers what they could not fully do for themselves.” Boover’s practical exercises emulate Day’s own temperament. They push you to live with more integrity and deeper love, and they show a deep compassion for the difficulty of the challenge.