(ignatiansolidarity.net)

[Dorothy Day] identified with everyone around her, each sorrowing and in need. The via negativa of prison helped to empty her of ego so that she learned compassion in a deep way.

The blackness of hell was all about me. The sorrows of the world encompassed me. I was like one gone down into the pit. Hope had forsaken me. I was the mother whose child had been raped and slain. I was the mother who had borne the monster who had done it. I was even that monster, feeling in my own heart every abomination.

Dorothy Day’s experiences of the via negativa in solitary confinement in jail led her into what felt like “the blackness of hell.” Her sense of self disintegrated such that she became one with every victim and every victimizer. This is where divine compassion ultimately leads, to our identification with all aspects of humanity.

–Matthew Fox in Dorothy Day and the Darkness that Accompanies Glory

(dailymeditationswithmatthewfox.org)

*RHS stands for Releasing the Hidden Splsndour, a Prosperos class which seeks to do something similar to what Dorothy Day is talking about. More info about RHS can be found here: https://www.theprosperos.org/teaching

Dorothy Day (November 8, 1897 – November 29, 1980) was an American journalist, social activist and anarchist who, after a bohemian youth, became a Catholic without abandoning her social and anarchist activism. She was perhaps the best-known political radical among American Catholics. Wikipedia