All is Grace by Jim Forest Critique - Book Report/Review Example

A Review of Jim Forest’s All is Grace Introduction The story of Dorothy Day still inspires, stabs our sense of right and wrong, and questions our integration in present-day American life by giving evidence to the viability of living a life led only by the values God professed. Although she started her crusade among the poor roughly eight decades ago and passed away three decades ago, she is still a contemporary figure, an icon which emerges from her autobiographies, The Catholic Worker, and the memories of those who collaborated with her in the Catholic Worker campaign. She is an icon which persuades us to evaluate our own lives, specifically, the way we live up to our spiritual conviction. In a remarkable biography, All is Grace, Jim Forest presents a forceful image of Dorothy’s daring attempts to perform the Gospel’s progressive message. Using the recently made public letters and memoirs of Dorothy Day, Forest narrates her amazing life, with particular stress on the exceptional faith that lies beneath her spectacular witness. Overview of All is Grace Dorothy Day was born on the 8th of November 1897 in Brooklyn, in the metropolitan setting where she would grow and mature, and to which she offered her life, time, and effort. She was the third child of Grace and John Day, and, even though relationship with her mother was well, her father was a cold and critical character (Signorielli 1996, 94). Her mother was widely referred to as ‘Mother Grace’ and was an enduring figure in the life of Dorothy. Her father, a follower of horse racing and a sports writer, was ill at ease in the presence of Dorothy and her often revolutionary insights (Signorielli 1996, 94-95). According to Fitch and Roberts (1984), Dorothy, even as a kid usually attracts trouble at home and school, displaying an untimely curiosity about sex and taking pleasure in stunning grownups with vulgar language and actions or little thefts. While a more grown-up Dorothy accepted the revolutionary ideals of communism and afterward formally accepted Catholic faith, her father renounced her. As she revealed in her autobiography, Dorothy thought that her beliefs gave her father overwhelming sadness. Her father thought that Dorothy and her comrades were putting the nation in danger with their revolutionary ideals and communist tendencies (Fitch & Roberts 1984). When she was jailed for the first time for protesting for the 1917 women’s suffrage campaign, nobody from her immediate family visited or kept in touch with her. Religion, which influenced a great portion of her mature life, was just an irrelevant factor as she was maturing. When she first came across a Bible in the loft of their rented home in Berkeley and extensively read it, not committing to memory its message, but sensing godliness from it (Fitch & Roberts 1984). Dorothy Day passed away on the 29th of November 1980 because of heart failure (Signorielli 1996). Her heritage is not the newspaper The Catholic Worker or any of the many Worker associations she supported. Instead it is a transformation in American Catholics’ worldview. She was devoted to radical or progressive journalism as the main instrument of the social advocate. She thought that the objective of The Catholic Worker was to affect the outlooks of its readers. She has faith in reporting events or stories and influencing the point of view of her readers. Aside from being a newspaper editor, for four decades Dorothy visited many parts of the country, communing with large numbers of people about her crusade (Signorielli 1996). She obtained resources that sustained the newspaper and the operations of the Worker houses; according to Fitch and Roberts (1984), she widened the horizon of two American generations, and her inspiration reaches two generations of social advocates. The basis of current peace campaigns and of those fighting for social justice rests in Dorothy Day: “Day and her colleagues were the single unbroken pacifist link in the United States over the past five decades” (Fitch & Roberts 1984, 108). Even though she was prohibited as a spokeswoman by a number of bishops and condemned by numerous clergy, her efforts were never blatantly criticized by the Catholic Church and no effort was initiated to discourage her. Nancy Roberts presented two explanations for this (Fitch & Roberts 1984, 108): There was the doctrinal purity of the Catholic Worker philosophy, with its irrefutable sources, the same as the Church’s. And the hierarchy could not fault Day’s emphasis on the works of mercy, or her active resistance to the works of war, positions rooted in the Gospel command to love one another. Besides her columns for magazines and newspapers, Dorothy also produced several books that function as her autobiography. Taken as one, her major books present “a lens by which we are able to see Dorothy Day in her multiple identities and thus answer questions about her self-understandings and moral sensibilities. In distinctively different ways, each lends insight into Dorothy Day’s moral concerns, convictions, and commitments” (Signorielli 1996, 98). Analysis and Criticism Jim Forest’s vividly and accurately written All is Grace: A Biography of Dorothy Day narrates the life of the organizer of the Catholic Worker campaign as an unusual saint. Yet, the book has some weaknesses like its undue appeal to emotion, making it vulnerable to fallacy. It also disproportionately uses the own writings and reflections of Dorothy of herself making the entire narrative of Forest a mere reflection or extension of Dorothy’s autobiography. But these limitations are overwhelmed by the book’s honesty and attention to detail. It does not skip any of the undesirable features of Dorothy’s early life. It reveals all, both the positive and negative. Prior to converting to Catholicism, Dorothy attempted an abortion, expecting that the decision would bring back the love for her of the unborn child’s father. Then, she went back to their house to discover her lover gone, and a letter advising her to put him out of her mind and measly cash that he had initially set aside to pay a saloon check, Forest narrates. After four years, Dorothy was happy to bear another child while in another love affair that, due to her conversion to Catholicism and her man’s atheism, she knew she should discontinue. Forest, who collaborated with Dorothy and had read her personal notes and letters for the book’s writing, states (Gyapong 2011, para 6): Whenever I think about the challenges of life in the bright light of the Gospel rather than in the gray light of money or the dim light of politics, her example has had its influence. Every time I try to overcome meanness or selfishness rising up in myself, it is partly thanks to the example of Dorothy Day… Every time I give away something I can get along without—every time I manage to see Christ’s presence in the face of a stranger—there again I owe a debt to Dorothy Day. When I read All is Grace I felt the same feeling of gratitude because it presents a truthful, empathetic perception of a woman who had a great charisma and a profound spiritual conviction, but experienced pain and misery for it and endured a great deal of sadness and misinterpretation. Forest is particularly successful in narrating Dorothy’s gradual integration into Catholicism—a gradual passionate liaison that proves how the Lord softly guided her to the Catholic faith, through desires and hopes that she in the end found fulfilled only in God (Gyapong 2011). Forest narrates empathically her romantic relationships with men. He recounts her occasionally lonesome life after her formal acceptance of Catholicism and her dilemmas as a single parent caring for her child while organizing the Catholic Worker campaign and writing. Forest was successful in building a framework for her beliefs and the sort of destitute living she experienced in the Depression (Signorielli 1996). The numerous old photographs present a framework for Dorothy’s life based on the development of the twentieth-century America. All is Grace gives a personal description of a complicated, perceptive woman who was eager to undergo tremendous personal sufferings to live up to God’s ideals and inspire God among the poor and those Dorothy thought were difficult to feel affection for. From the preface of Forest’s biography of Dorothy Day I immediately gathered that he is a talented teller of tales, overflowing with sufficient facts to be absorbing, vigorous and interesting enough never to bore. Interchanging the interesting realities of Dorothy’s life, the time and space in which it unraveled and the path of her personal existence, I learned a real story of religious struggle. And this looks appropriate for a woman who tried to involve humanity and all its splendor and misery. All is Grace is not only a biography of a devout woman; it also embrace the emerging community, and the own emerging family of Dorothy. I was surprised and moved by what Dorothy Day achieved. The biography is, sometimes, heartrending in its truthfulness because of sincerity and attentiveness with which Dorothy documented and pondered on her existence and Forest’s reading of these letters. The book is a rare reference for American history built from a revolutionary point of view, a result of Dorothy’s unshakable spiritual conviction and her performance of Christian rebellion. Her life and work illustrate with precision that she own an amazing responsiveness to and happiness before the Lord. We witness her rejoice the ‘everyday’ in life as marvelous; we feel her passionate affection for the people around her. Also narrated are her insightful and deep experiences of sorrow over people’s mayhems and mistakes. She constantly light the way for overpowering our social hierarchies and the different forms of discrimination and tyranny by viewing others Christ’s countenance. This is certainly a revolutionary message situated in the core of a civilization of materialism, violence, and prejudice. But the indoctrination approach of Dorothy is consistently knitted in remarkable tales of her countrywide journeys, imprisonment, and voyages through retreats and lecture visits. The biography covers countless of these experiences, communicating to the reader the bleak realities, wit, and delights of Dorothy’s journey all over the United States, Africa, India, and Russia. Forest shows that Dorothy’s relationship with the Catholic Church equaled in several instances the dealing of Christ with the religious structure of His time. In carrying out the law of the Church, she completely depended on principles and surfaced as perhaps the grandest mundane influence on contemporary Catholic Church. Forest (2011) vividly shows that Dorothy was a single mother, grandmother, organizer of many campaigns of generosity for the destitute, radical editor and writer of The Catholic Worker, Catholic convert, communist, pacifist, rebel with a cause, and social critic. As an exemplar for modern-day women, Dorothy is a varied one. Even though she joined in the first suffrage protest in the United States, and was jailed because of it, she admitted she was at the protest for the experience and thrill of it, and had meager backing for the suffrage campaign. Dorothy was neither just a supporter of women’s suffrage nor a feminist in a public, knowingly, or purposeful way. She despised feminism, declining to protest for women’s rights. She was not an unprofessed feminist, for she consistently denigrated the campaign as being quite self-seeking (Forest 2011). Dorothy, as mentioned by Forest (2011), embraced lots of conventional concepts about gender roles, but I see her to have a veiled feminist side, since her efforts are interspersed with analyses and advices that obviously express a critical view with regard to inequality in gender roles and a wanting to develop and enhance prospects for both men and women. But in the course of her activism she did express some radical criticisms of gender inequalities, showing sympathies with feminism, and she gave theological, personal, and social importance to the fact that a better equality or consolidation of gender roles was sought-after and plausible. Conclusions All is Grace is not a traditional biography. Although Forest sums up the fundamental realities of Dorothy Day’s story, he focuses on a profound representation. The vigor of Dorothy’s expression, and the relaxed mutual conversation between Dorothy Day and Jim Forest, furnishes the book a remarkable intimacy. Dorothy herself would be very happy by it but would never fail to inform the reader that ‘unremarkable’ or everyday lives, as well, are of immeasurable worth. That is the crux of her life and work. References Fitch, Bob & Nancy Roberts. Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1984. Forest, Jim. All is Grace: A Biography of Dorothy Day. Orbis Books, 2011. Gyapong, Deborah. “The story of Dorothy Day, warts and all” The Catholic Register (2011): http://www.catholicregister.org/features/item/13001-the-story-of-dorothy-day-warts-and-all Signorielli, Nancy. Women in Communication: A Biographical Sourcebook. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996. Read More