A Few years ago I had to call in a woman doctor, an exile, who had been in a concentration camp in Germany for refusing to sterilize epileptic children. She was taking care of one of the women in the house. As she left she said, recognizing the apparent hopelessness of our work for the most destitute, “The only thing you can do for these sick and aged ones is to make them happy.” I have often thought of that since, when people have asked us about the work, what we were trying to do; it seemed very simple to say, “We are trying to make people happy.” Father Faber has three conferences in one of his published volumes on kindness.
Kindness seems a simple enough virtue, little of the heroic about it, and rather naïve and fatuous, not very much to the point these days when righteousness, wrath, and grim fortitude seem to be more in order. But these conferences make good spiritual reading.
We want to be happy, we want to make others happy, we want to see some of this joy of life which children have, we want to see people intoxicated with God, or just filled with the good steady joy of knowing that Christ is King and that we are His flock and He has prepared for us a kingdom, and that God loves us as a father loves his children, as a bridegroom loves his bride, and that eye hath not seen nor ear heard what God has prepared for us!
Source: Robert Ellsberg, ed., Dorothy Day: Selected Writings, as found in Michael Leach, et al., eds., The Way of Kindness: Readings for a Graceful Life, pp. 211-212.
The reference is to Father Frederick Willian Faber (1814-1863), British; Anglican theologian and spiritual writer and convert to Catholicism.
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