just as often as we are stopped.
” the more I meet people, the more convinced
In her engaging letters to friends and
would-be friends, a gentle personal style
emerges. As in her diaries, the word “prayer”
is often on her lips. Especially during the
lonely years of the ’40s and ’50s, when sup-
port for Catholic Worker positions fell
dramatically, she writes often on the virtue
to be attained by suffering. Dorothy speaks
of “feathers torn out one by one,” but in the
same breath thanks God for taking care of
her pride and self-love. Only once in this col-
lection does she mention the abortion and
attempted suicide that came before her con-
version, in a beautifully tender missive to a
young woman “in distress,” with whom she
had had a long and intimate conversation.
In the 1950s she writes to a good friend
and frequent correspondent: “The older I get,
Interview by Betsy Shirley
Worship’s Joys and dangers
Author Enuma Okoro talks about life and liturgy.
ENUMA OKORO GREW up in four coun-
tries, including Nigeria and the Ivory Coast,
and describes her religious education as
“doses of Roman Catholicism washed down
with long gulps of multiflavored Protestant
theology.” Perhaps because of this broad
personal experience, Okoro has a down-
to-earth, generous perspective on churches,
worship, tradition, and the sometimes circu-
itous path to spiritual community. A former
director of the Center for Theological Writing
at Duke University, Okoro is the author of
Reluctant Pilgrim: A Moody, Somewhat Self-
Indulgent Introvert’s Search for Spiritual
Community (Fresh Air Books) and co-author
of Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary
Radicals (Zondervan). Sojourners editorial
assistant Betsy Shirley spoke with Okoro in
December.
Betsy Shirley: In your memoir, Reluctant
Pilgrim, you write about your experiences in
different churches and about your struggle
to find spiritual community. How have these
experiences changed your understanding of
liturgy?
Enuma Okoro: Liturgy really is the work
of the people—that’s the direct translation.
At this stage of my life, I’m more aware that
What happens when we engage with God
I am that we must only work on ourselves,
to grow in grace. The only thing we can do
about people is to love them.”
Editor Robert Ellsberg has supplied
masterful context and commentary to give
a good summary of her life at the Catholic
Worker, but it is for the intimate Dorothy and
her friends that one should read All the Way
to Heaven. In these letters, we see a Dorothy
Day who falls in love with God, and with
God in the thousands of people who came
into her life. Savor and delight in these let-
ters, the last of her once-unpublished words
we’re going to get. n
Rosalie G. Riegle has written several books
on the Catholic Worker, including Dorothy
Day: Portraits by Those Who Knew Her.
Enuma Okoro,
from the cover
of her new book,
Reluctant
Pilgrim.
we get the most out of liturgy when we fully
participate in it ourselves and recognize our-
selves as a necessary part of it. The ways in
which we’re transformed by liturgy is all
grace, but we need to be active participants
for that transformation to happen. So I’ve
come to a deeper understanding of what it
means to bring all of one’s self to liturgical
practices.
You’ve written, “Somehow the act of walk-
ing through the liturgy together on Sunday
morning makes us more pliable the rest of
the week ... more open to showing up just as
we are—cracks, fissures, duct tape, and all.”
through liturgy? I don’t fully understand
what happens when we engage in regular
habits of liturgical praise and worship, but
I know that it leads to more pronounced
ways of liturgical living. To me, that means
living in a way that honors the pattern of
what happens in church, a way of living in
which I allow room for praise and prayer, for
service and offering, and for receiving gifts—
all those things that happen in a service on
Sunday. If I naturally begin to translate those
things into how I live on a daily basis, that to
me becomes liturgical living.
What do you think are the joys and dan-
gers of liturgy? I think the biggest danger
is that we might get transformed when we
least expect it. The words we say and what
we enact in liturgy are serious business. That’s
part of the mystery of when the community
gathers together in Christ. The crazy thing is
that the flip side of those dangers are also the
blessings. During the Eucharistic rite, there’s
a section where the minister says, “Pour
out your spirit on us gathered here,” and I
always open my hands to receive the Spirit.
At the same time I always whisper “Lord have
mercy,” because every single time I’m aware of
how powerful the Spirit is. It’s wonderful and
beautiful because it’s only for our good, but
if we truly believe what we pray, then evok-
ing that Spirit to come upon us can be a very
frightening thing.
Once you start partaking in liturgy, you
become roped into the work of God. And the
work of God is rarely dull, but it’s not always
necessarily what we think. Transformation is
hard stuff. Seeking to bring about the king-
dom of God—caring for the poor, feeding
the hungry, visiting the prisoners, caring
for the sick, renouncing demons in God’s
name—you don’t do that in a 15-minute
lunch break.
What keeps liturgy from becoming rote and
stale? Actually, it will become stale and rote
sometimes. But I think that’s part of the dis-
cipline: remembering that journey with the
holy is not always about how we feel and
trusting that even when we don’t feel like
praying, our prayers are still received by
God. The simple act of coming to that space
when you least feel like it, that itself is wor-
ship. n
march 2011  sojourners  47