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Good Letters

20100517-a-boy-named-day-by-david-griffithOn Thursday May 7th at 2:15 am, my wife gave birth to a boy: Alexander Day Griffith, 8 lbs. 8 oz.

Alexander is my middle name, so that requires no explanation, but “Day” is unusual, I guess, and so I’ve had many awkward phone calls with family and friends where at some point the person says, “now, ‘Day,’ is that a family name?”

Well, kind of.

“Day” is the Americanized spelling of “Dai,” which is a derivative of the Welsh “Dafyyd,” meaning “beloved.” And Dafyyd is the origin of my name (and my dad’s)—“David.” So, my son’s name is a roundabout attempt to pay homage to my dad, while also giving my son the opportunity to be not just another Dave.

But “Day” also has special meaning for me because it refers to Dorothy Day, the founder of the lay movement known as the Catholic Worker—one of the great American contributions to the Church, which, as of late, has been torn apart by scandal.

By giving him the name Alexander Day I wanted to make sure that he, should something ever happen to me, understands what my values were; that I believed that we must strive to not be the like the righteous goats from Matthew’s gospel who asked, incredulous, “but Lord, when did we see you hungry, in prison, sick, naked, etc.?”

I want my son to understand that ministering to the least of us is the essence of what it means to be a Christian, not Christian, but a Christian—one of the many who strive, struggle, and, most often, fall short of living up to the teachings of Jesus. I also want him to understand that names mean something, and that over time your name becomes you; that your actions and your name become one.

My relationship to faith and social responsibility has always been touch and go, hot and cold. Like Dorothy Day, I went through a period in my late teens and early twenties in which I wanted to be a journalist, lived like a libertine, looking for transcendence, truth, and meaning in the political and social causes.

My appetite for life was huge. I wanted to experience everything all at once, the good and the bad—this was the path to authenticity. I felt that transcendence could be achieved by communing or commiserating with the troubled and victimized. I thought that my great capacity for empathy was an indication of my moral fiber.

Of course, I was wrong.

It’s an odd feeling to look back and see how utterly wrong you were, how terribly misguided and deluded you were, especially when you reach the conclusion over and over again that had things been any different you might not be who you are and where you are today.

I would not have met Jess, my wife, which means I might not have returned to the Church, which would have probably meant not writing a book about the religious dimensions of torture and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, which would have meant I would not have the job I have today, or be the writer that I am today, or be the person I am today.

I’m sorry if this all smacks a bit of a Keanu Reeves “whoa” moment, but most startling is the realization that the world would be without Charlotte Mary Kinsey Griffith (our 4½ year-old) or Alexander Day.

Dorothy Day’s autobiography The Long Loneliness poignantly describes what I’m struggling to articulate. In 1916, as a young journalist working for socialist newspapers in New York, coming face to face every day with the abject poverty of the overflowing tenements, she felt a long loneliness descend on her, a feeling of disconnection and discontent that would not be lifted unless she could “go and live among these surroundings,” be in solidarity with those suffering.

The poverty of New York radicalized Day and led her to seek out a crowd of young socialists, populated by the likes of Mike Gold, founder of The Masses, and playwright Eugene O’Neil. She writes:

“[We] walked the streets of New York…sat on the ends of piers singing revolutionary songs into the starlit night, dallied on the park benches, never wanting to go home to sleep but only to continue to savor our youth and its struggles and joys.”

Looking back, Day writes that she considered herself a radical but “not a good one”: she was undisciplined, simply following the “Baudelairean notion of ‘choosing the downward path that leads to salvation.’”

As I discovered for myself, such a view, while exhilarating and capable of inspiring art of great energy and sentiment, also leads, as Day points out, to a subtle form of hypocrisy—a hypocrisy, François Mauriac writes, that is “worse than that of the Pharisees; it is to hide behind Christ’s example in order to follow one’s own lustful desires and to seek the company of the dissolute.”

Eventually, Day’s downward path led to becoming pregnant out of wedlock, and to a dark night of the soul after which she converted to Catholicism. So, I quote Day at length here not because she is so saintly, or because she helps me to better understand my own journey and fraught relationship with social justice, but because Day’s story is such a startling example of grace at work.

I understand that I’m saddling little Alex with a ton of responsibility and expectation. The last thing I want is for his name to guiltily haunt him. Sure, it would be great if one day Alex chose to live as selflessly as Day, and give of his time and talents to aid the poor and restore to them some lost dignity. But there are many ways that we can do this.

I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that the great guilt I feel for being so hot and cold, on again off again in my fervor for poverty, peace, and other social justice issues, is natural, human, which is not to say that we should dismiss the guilt or see it as damaging, but that we should, as Day suggested, embrace it, take it on as a perpetual penance for the great many times we act only in our self-interest, or take for granted the good fortune so many of us have.

Heavy stuff for someone only nine days old, I know. Right now I’ll settle for him seeing Dorothy Day as a model for how to discern how he will answer the radical call to be Christ for one another.

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The Image archive is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Written by: David Griffith

Dave Griffith is the author of Good War is Hard to Find: The Art of Violence in America. His essays and reviews have appeared in Image, The Normal School, Creative Nonfiction, The LA Review of Books, Killing the Buddha, Offline, and the Paris Review Daily, among others. He lives in Michigan with his wife, the writer Jessica Mesman Griffith, where he directs the creative writing program at Interlochen Center for the Arts. He recently finished a book manuscript titled Pyramid Scheme: Making Art and Being Broke in America.

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