A Year With Dorothy Day

As some of you know I am converting to Catholicism. The response to my conversion has been interesting, and not often kind. I find myself listening to very silly rumors about Catholics along with challenging dialogues about some serious problems within the church itself. I am not unaware that there is much within the Catholic Church that I not only disagree but I find to be repulsive and ignorant. I often feel like I don't belong or that I can't ever really belong. I struggle with this decision every day which is why it took me over a year to decide to begin the formal process.  This Sunday I will participate in the Rite of Welcoming and I will baptised sometime next week by Archbishop Wilton D. Gregory.

This is not something I have often written about on my blog. I do not wish this blog to become a "religious" blog. However this is an important, complicated move in my life and to not write about it seems as if I am leaving out a chunk of my life. I've also avoided it because I'm a bit of a coward and I fear the hate. and I know there will be hate. It will come from my liberal friends who hate that I am joining a religious organization and it will come from my conservative Catholic friends because I am not a conservative Catholic. But I have decided to make the step to start publicly writing about my experience bring what it may.

I'm going to approach this in a bit of a different move though. I'm going to talk about my conversion through the relationship I have with the words and spirit of Dorothy Day.  You see I feel like Dorothy is holding my hand as I make this journey because I think in some ways we come from the same space. No I am not a single mom whose partner left when I converted. Nor am I planning on being single during my lifetime. I am married with four children. But like Dorothy I lived a wild life, and came from an extremely liberal place. We both had to learn to fit our social concerns into the Church. Dorothy in doing so blew open the rigid pathways that the church followed in terms of charity and peace. While I doubt I can ever live up to her works, I can use her as an inspiration.

And this does not mean that Green Tea Ginger is becoming a religious blog. I'll still have my other writings as well. This will just be one aspect of my life.