The Road to Character

Day did what sensitive people do when other people are in trauma. We are all called at certain moments to comfort people who are enduring some trauma. Many of us don’t know how to react in such situations, but others do. In the first place, they just show up. They provide a ministry of presence.

We cannot love God unless we love each other, and to love we must know each other. We know Him in the breaking of bread, and we know each other in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone anymore. Heaven is a banquet and life is a banquet, too, even with a crust, where there is companionship.44

Being a personalist, Day had a suspicion of bigness, whether it was big government or big corporations. Day even had a suspicion of big philanthropy. She was constantly urging her co-workers to “stay small”: Start your work from where you live, with the small concrete needs right around you. Help ease tension in your workplace. Help feed the person

She returned to this theme again and again, wrestling with her divided self: her solitary nature and also her craving for others. “The only answer in this life, to the loneliness we are all bound to feel, is community,” she wrote. “The living together, working together, sharing together, loving God and loving our brother, and living close to him in