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 3 november 23, 1996 We’re hoping for a few extra moments of the sacred during these long secular days. I first heard the words I am using as the title for this column from the lips of Dorothy Day—and therein a story. In the middle-1950s I was a medical student in New York City, at Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. In my spare time I worked in a Catholic Worker soup kitchen, and so doing, often felt confused, torn by various and conflicting feelings—a desire to be of help to needy others, but also a fear of them (their unpredictability, their enormous vulnerability, their not rare outbursts). It was one thing to work with poor, hurt, even unsettled or unstable people in a clinic or hospital, under the protection of medical authority, with all its established procedures and rules; it was quite something else to be “out there” on a serving line, handing food to people, trying to make conversation with them. Years later I pointed out the difference to Dorothy Day, asked her why such an evident disparity in my attitude or feelings. She smiled faintly—a prelude, I knew, to one or another of her sharply knowing observations—and then this: “At the medical center you were working in an imposing setting, and the people who came there knew it. If they ‘misbehaved,’ they’d have to leave and a policeman would have helped 4  them [do so], if they were reluctant! Here we’re trying to offer a ‘home’ to people for an hour or two (or more): some food, some clothes, some attention and concern. They’re not ‘on guard,’ as they were when they came to see you doctors.” She paused, but only to catch her breath, gather her strength for an elaboration that obviously meant a lot to her, I realized, because she spoke with considerable intensity and quite personally: “I’m not sure you’ll agree with what I’m going to say—I’m not even sure I’m right; but I wonder whether the difference isn’t spiritual in nature. I mean, a hospital offers the best of the secular world—at least when the doctors are doing a good job. Here we are trying hard to do the work of faith, of love,andImeanweareaddressingourselves,ourcondition,aswellas[that of ] these people we’ve just given some soup and coffee. I know there are similarities—that a truly good doctor wants to offer his or her heart to a patient, as well as put knowledge into action. But I do think that people make distinctions and act accordingly. You go to the hospital and try to be on your best behavior; you come here, and if you’re in despair, it’s all right to cry out, because the people who run the place, they’re also crying out at times, just as Jesus did!” Againapause,andthenanefforttoconcludeafurtherlineofreasoning :“Ithink—Ihope—allofushaveourseculardays,butwe’reluckyifwe can find our sacred moments. I think a doctor treating a patient capably and with respect can be a witness to the sacred, right there in the midst of the secular world. I hope and pray we have our times of witness here, witness to the sacred. You can say that here we’re dedicating ourselves to the pursuit of that—the sacred—though with no guarantee that we’ll succeed. I guess it always comes down to the same tension—those sacred moments allowed us in our secular days. Maybe we’re just a little more  5 ambitiousinthisplace—ambitiousspiritually:adangerouskindofaspiration , because pride can certainly fall upon us, get in our way. But we keep trying. We’re hoping for a few extra moments of the sacred during these long secular days, whereas the doctors up there [in the medical center] have other matters on their minds, I’m sure.” This was a not untypical kind of a conversational journey with her, I had by then come to know—an effort to make a spiritual distinction or clarification that was at least partially and ironically thwarted by a surge of humility, a willingness to be candidly self-critical, even to the point of summoning a skepticism of her own conceptual thinking. She was “stumbling,” she went on to say, but she was willing to uphold, with whatever necessary qualifications, her sense that most of the time we live our all too (morally, psychologically, spiritually) finite (secular) lives, whereas on occasion (by...

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