Life at the Catholic Worker was very improvisational.

You just never knew what the day would hold for you.

And that was a kind of spiritual training that I wasn't experienced in to,

abandonment to divine providence, whatever might happen.

And it could be anything.

Someone could die. There could be a fight.

There could be an emergency.

There could be some call for protest. And so there was a kind of freedom also of, like, I don't have to be somewhere at a certain time. It was just kind of being present in the day. And interacting with people who were so different from anybody I had ever known before. And I learned a lot from that.

Welcome to the spiritual life.

I'm Father Jim Martin.

On this podcast, we reflect on how people experience God in their prayer and in their

daily lives.

And I'm joined by my saintly producer, Maggie Van Dorn.

Maggie, good to be back with you. It's great to be with you, Jim. I had a feeling you were going to go with Saintly for this episode because it is a theme throughout. I, of course, am no saint. But the person that we're speaking with is an expert on saints. He is, and he's a very good friend. I am no saint either, but we're speaking

with someone who's holy in his own way and who's written a lot about the saints. Robert Ellsberg.

Can you tell us about our friend Robert Ellsberg? Yes, happily. So Robert Ellsberg is a well-known

and celebrated Catholic author, editor, and publisher, best known for his work as editor-in-chief of Orbis

books. And the journey that Robert took to get to that point is no less interesting. So when he

was only 19, Robert dropped out of college, Harvard, no less, intending to spend just a few

months with the Catholic Worker Movement.

He landed up staying to become the managing editor of the Catholic Worker, that's the newspaper,

for two years, and this is a job that would introduce him to Servant of God, Dorothy Day,

...