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<\/a><\/p>\nLove is a risky thing between people. It is so much easier to love things like sunsets, and puddle-jumping and puppies. When I was a child, I remember falling in love with the sight of bioluminescence on summer nights. I had no idea what was going on in the water to cause such a miracle of light. I remember wading through the shallows and watching stars twinkling by my feet, and explosions of light in the splash of rocks. It was magical, and I could feel love igniting within me.<\/p>\n
The offering of love is a sacred thing. True love offers an opening to the soul which requires a certain reverence, because the soul gives testimony and a welcome to \u2018home\u2019. Simone Weil writes a basic observation that \u2018the soul is the human being considered as having value in itself\u2019 [1]. Having concern for the one loved, the one offering love, is both essential and healthy. Further, accepting love authentically is to offer love genuinely. Love, otherwise, is an easy target to be exploited. The \u2018soul\u2019 of a person is not something to meddle with. A confounded soul, in the story of grievous violation, is well-known to God-who-draws-near \u2018to the broken-hearted\u2019, who saves those who are \u2018crushed in spirit\u2019 [2].<\/p>\n
Dorothy Day loved her man though \u2018he was an anarchist and an atheist\u2019; she could not imagine leaving him [3]. With Forster, and later with their child, Day experienced a kind of contentedness. She referred to it as a \u2018peace, curiously enough, divided against itself’ [4]. There\u2019s a \u2018home\u2019 that the peace she felt was only a semblance of. She reflected deeply into her happiness, \u2018that there was a greater happiness to be obtained from life than any I had ever known’ [5]. She was being called back into love with God. I wonder how that made Forster feel?<\/p>\n
Dorothy mentions, \u2018it was killing me the thought of leaving him’ [6]. She ponders Forster\u2019s bitterness in this beautiful and divisive moment of righteous clarity, \u2018Why should not Forster be jealous? Any man who did not participate in this love would, of course, realise my infidelity, my adultery’ [7]. (From memoir to memoir now, hopefully not too-abruptly or without relevance\u2026)<\/p>\n
I remember when someone I loved was leaving me. The reasoning seemed unchangeable\/immoveable, hearing the stories and rumours left me in a tremble of confusion; the movement was haunting. The vectoring off wasn’t toward God, the nature of Day\u2019s ‘leaving’. Regardless, be it God or some thing or someone else, the feeling of one leaving can be \u2018like death\u2019; the experience can feel so deeply wrong that the soul of person can feel shaken, as if an ‘original integrity’ has been disrupted*. This weeping wound remains, the prospect it seems, irreparable with intention. I could not have learned of pain, in this body, in a more brutal way. Rejection is not an easy feeling for the soul’s being, within a sensitive body.<\/p>\n
The act of leaving someone-once-loved behind, or to reject (move on from) someone for lack of adherence to a specified conformity or for being \u2018less than\u2019 optimal in ways, THIS – MUST – TAKE – SOME – COURAGE, an act not without some (though, perhaps with slightly less) pain to it (for care and empathy)**. Forster was not \u2018the end of it\u2019 for Dorothy, as she pilgrimed back into the Bosom. She writes of another love that she was inspired to veer away from in this time of awakening, that being the life she had led in \u2018the radical movement\u2019 [8].\u00a0From the birth of her child, to the whisper of God who creates and recreates, the tide was changing, a new day forming in which God would be the center of her life, her passion, her radical devotion and resolute activism for the oppressed. This was the revolution of the heart of Dorothy Day.<\/p>\n