by Tom Gallagher
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From The New York Times:
It's hard to picture St. Brigid writing a letter like this:
"I miss you so much. I was very cold last night. Not because there wasn't enough covers but because I didn't have you. Please write me, sweetheart, and I won't tear the letter up as I did the last one (but I saved the pieces) because I was mad at you. I love you muchly."
That's Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, who is not yet canonized but is definitely in the running. She was by wide acclaim a saintly woman who gave her life to peace and to the poor. Though not as a cliché: she was a cranky bohemian by way of Staten Island, Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side, and lived far closer to the here and now than anyone in "Lives of the Saints."
Now a new collection of her letters, "All the Way to Heaven," edited by Robert Ellsberg, brings her even closer. They trace her early adulthood and long relationship with a man, Forster Batterham. They shared a home and had a baby girl, Tamar. She converted to Catholicism — keeping her politics but adding orthodoxy, too.
