In case you missed it a couple of weeks ago – Dorothy Day’s Advent reflections, penned in 1966 for Ave Maria magazine. From week 3: on chastity.

HOW PRESUMPTUOUS it is to try to treat of such a subject in a short article, when great books (like Dietrich von Hildebrand’s In Defense of Purity )have been written on the subject. I can only put down a few thoughts, a few incidents, perhaps a few things I have read which influenced my thinking profoundly.

A few years ago a young woman came to our farm-retreat house to spend a few days before Pentecost, on which great day she was going to be confirmed together with two or three other adults in the local parish. You could not say she was spending her time in silence and recollection, because she was an ardent and lively creature and shouted rather than talked and moved swiftly rather than with the thoughtful deliberation one might expect for such an occasion. She was as happy as a lark and after the great occasion when we all sat down to table to celebrate with a good Sunday dinner, she snatched the short breviary from her pocket and called out loudly, "Listen to this! Listen to St. John Chrysostom: ‘. . . the grace of the Holy Spirit . . . has been poured out abundantly and has transformed the whole world into heaven; not by changing of natures, but by correcting of wills. For it found a taxgatherer and transformed him into an evangelist; it found a persecutor and made him into an apostle; it found a robber and conducted him to Paradise; it found a prostitute and rendered her equal to virgins; it found the learned and showed them the gospels. . . .’ A prostitute–equal to virgins! That’s me. That’s me today. A miracle!"