"As for ourselves, yes, we must be meek, bear injustice, malice, rash judgment. We must turn the other cheek, give up our cloak, go a second mile"
About this Quote
Meekness, in Dorothy Day's hands, is not a personality trait; it's a dare. She strings together the Gospel's most disarming commands - bear injustice, turn the other cheek, give up your cloak, go a second mile - and makes them sound less like pious decor and more like a program for living under pressure. The insistence on "we must" is doing heavy lifting. It's communal, almost disciplinary: Day isn't offering personal coping strategies, she's recruiting a body of people willing to accept costs that respectable politics tries to avoid.
The subtext is sharp: nonviolence isn't clean. It invites being misunderstood, exploited, even harmed. Day names the things that actually happen to activists and the poor - malice, rash judgment, the casual cruelty of institutions - and refuses the modern escape hatch of moral self-protection. "Meek" here isn't meek in the way power wants it (quiet, compliant, grateful). It's meek in the way that unnerves power: stubbornly refusing to mirror its violence, while still placing your body in the path of harm.
Context matters. Day built the Catholic Worker movement in the Depression and lived through war, McCarthy-era suspicion, and a Church often more comfortable with order than with the radical implications of its own scripture. This line reads like a rebuttal to two temptations at once: the temptation to romanticize revolution, and the temptation to baptize comfort. She frames Christian pacifism as a public practice - a form of resistance that looks like surrender until you realize it breaks the logic of retaliation and exposes the violence everyone else agrees not to name.
The subtext is sharp: nonviolence isn't clean. It invites being misunderstood, exploited, even harmed. Day names the things that actually happen to activists and the poor - malice, rash judgment, the casual cruelty of institutions - and refuses the modern escape hatch of moral self-protection. "Meek" here isn't meek in the way power wants it (quiet, compliant, grateful). It's meek in the way that unnerves power: stubbornly refusing to mirror its violence, while still placing your body in the path of harm.
Context matters. Day built the Catholic Worker movement in the Depression and lived through war, McCarthy-era suspicion, and a Church often more comfortable with order than with the radical implications of its own scripture. This line reads like a rebuttal to two temptations at once: the temptation to romanticize revolution, and the temptation to baptize comfort. She frames Christian pacifism as a public practice - a form of resistance that looks like surrender until you realize it breaks the logic of retaliation and exposes the violence everyone else agrees not to name.
Quote Details
| Topic | Humility |
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