The Long Loneliness

And her resilience came for those practices and her deep understanding of the significance of the incarnation.

She said at one point in her famous autobiography, The Long Loneliness, interesting title, she meditated on what it was like to imagine that God, the God of the universe, the Holy One, the Transcendent One, the Other, came to us, walked on our earth, and lived a lowly life.

She said, I wish I could kiss the dust that he walked on.

It was so beautiful to her.

And so when I, in high school, had to do a school project on a social justice issue I was passionate about, and I decided to do it on homelessness and research the Catholic Worker.

My mother knew what I was talking about and took me to the local seminary of all places to go through their stacks to find back issues of the Catholic Worker and a copy of The Long Loneliness.

And so I'm in the local seminary stacks by the light of a stained glass window reading the first chapter of The Long Loneliness and just being like, oh, everything about my family's faith suddenly is beginning to make sense, which was not something that I felt before that time.

Before that time, I was like, why do we go to church? Why do I have to do this stuff? What's so important about it? but something about the works of Mercy and Dorothy's story started to make the family make more sense.

And so ideologically, I felt like I was a Catholic worker or felt like since it made my life make sense, like probably that was an important thing to think about and consider and follow through on.