What It Means to be a Child of God

To us the retreat was the good news.  We made it as often as we could, and refreshed ourselves with days of recollection.

The last year of the war, we decided to turn one of our farms into a retreat house where people could come to study and pray, and begin to realize what it meant to be a son of God, what responsibilities such a position entailed. If people did not go away from the retreat examining their consciences as to the work they did in the world, their material goods, their attachments, then it was a failure. Such a retreat should be like a shock treatment, we thought, putting the "old man" to death, bringing us to new life.--Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness, pg. 225