The Long Loneliness

The Long Loneliness, by Dorothy Day, is a memoir about Day’s lifelong relationship with Christianity, and how it pulled her away from communism and socialism toward a movement that combined political theory with Christian love and community. The memoir also tells the story about how her devotion to Catholicism allowed her to meet Peter Maurin, another devoted Catholic and liberal who created part of the theoretical basis of the Catholic Worker Movement.

Day begins her book by discussing her childhood. Her family was not religious, but for some reason she experienced a strong pull toward religion at a young age. She would pray with neighbors and learn as much as she could about the bible and the Psalms. She was in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake as a child, and Day believes that may have played into her search for a greater power. Along with a love for God, she also loved her family, especially her little brother, John, whom she cared for. She viewed these two loves as linked.

When Day went off to college, she was drawn away from religion by the pull of socialism and communism. Communism views religion as an opiate of the masses, and Day wanted to be free of any bonds to institutions or strictures. She began to read Jack London and Upton Sinclair’s accounts of the poor and aspired to be a labor journalist like her older brother. She joined the Socialist Party and began to read Russian authors. The irony was Tolstoy’s devotion to religion was one of the things about his writing that stood out to Day. She began to go hungry on purpose in order to experience poverty firsthand.

When her family moved to New York City from Chicago, Day dropped out of college and followed them. She got a job as a journalist and began to become more ensconced in communist theory. She also learned about anarchism, distributism, and the worker movement. She participated in protests and marches in New York and Washington D.C. She eventually chose the International Workers of the World (or I.W.W.) as her union of choice. Day began to believe that the only ways to gain concessions or change for workers were class warfare or revolution.

Day’s viewpoints began to shift, however, when she was jailed in a suffragette protest in Washington D.C. She went on an eight-day hunger strike with the other women, and during that time felt so alone, hungry and frightened that she asked for a bible. She did not want to admit to her weakness, but the thing she relied on to get through that struggle was prayer. Later on, when she became a nurse during WWI, the only thing that helped Day get through long shifts marked by deaths from influenza was praying with a colleague. She began to feel like humans had to worship in order to feel complete.

Even though she went back to journalism after a year, something in her had changed. She moved back to Chicago and lived with Catholics who taught her more about the Catholicism. Day also continued to practice what she preached, living with few possessions and on little income. She did eventually receive some money for a novel and the movie rights to it, which she used to buy a house on Staten Island. There, she began to live with Forster, the love of her life. They were a contrast in many ways. He was content to be alone, fishing in the ocean, or have it be just the two of them together. Day wanted a larger community. He was also very practical and believed in concrete things, while she followed the idea that there was a supernatural force beyond humanity. She began to pray as she walked around the island. Though Day was still ashamed to kneel while praying because she maintained to her old communist beliefs about religion being a crutch, she could not stop herself from sending up some sort of prayer, and became drawn to Catholicism, which she thought of as the religion of the workers.

Day and Forster were also at odds about having a child. He did not want to bring a child into a world full of conflict and strife, but Day was optimistic about being able to change the world and wanted a child badly. Eventually, she had a daughter, Tamar Teresa, and realized that she wanted to baptize her. Day herself also wanted to be baptized. She realized that this would cause an irreparable rift between herself and Forster, but she took the plunge. Indeed, he ended up leaving—the first time  for a few months, and the second time for good. However, Day could not imagine a life without religion, or a life for Tamar where she would not have religious direction.

The time after Tamar and then Day’s baptisms was a lonely one. Friends and relatives did not quite understand Day’s passion for Catholicism and she felt a distance between them. When Day spent time in Los Angeles writing movie scripts, she felt physically separate, as well. The only solace she found was in her religion.

When Day returned to New York City, the Great Depression was in full swing. She lamented that she had spent so much time learning about Catholicism, she had taken time away from helping the wider community. After returning to New York City from attending protests in D.C. in her capacity as a journalist, looking to publicize the cause, she met Peter Maurin. Maurin was a Catholic from France who also believed in establishing rural communities along anarchist lines. With Maurin, Day ended up creating The Catholic Worker newspaper, which helped to establish the Catholic Worker Movement. This cause was predicated on ideas of helping the poor, establishing community, and fostering a love for each other and for God. They were also pacifist.

With Maurin, Day rented and purchased both urban and rural living spaces to house the homeless and poor. They also had soup lines in the city. Maurin espoused the ideas of “cult, culture and cultivation,” and this is the mantra that they lived by in both the city and the country, trying to subsist on the food that they grew and the work that they did.

Day’s mission was to help the poor and create community. Her work was not only a way to assist those around her, or a call from God, but what she asserts was also a way to stave off loneliness. By creating a large community with her fellow citizens and communing with God, she managed to feel less isolated.