This was the speech of a man who had been raised to check his impulses and had then been chastened by life. It was the speech of a man who had seen what human beings are capable of, who had felt in his bones that man is a problem to himself. It was the speech of a man who used to tell his advisers “Let’s make our mistakes slowly,” because it was better to proceed to a decision gradually than to rush into anything before its time. This is the lesson that his mother and his upbringing had imparted to him decades before. This was a life organized not around self-expression, but self-restraint.
CHAPTER 4
STRUGGLE
On the night of April 18, 1906, when she was eight years old, Dorothy Day was living in Oakland, California.
She had, as usual, said her prayers at bedtime. She was the only religiously observant member of her household and had become, as she wrote later, “disgustingly, proudly pious.”1 She had always had a sense, she wrote in her diary decades later, of an immanent spiritual world.
The earth began shaking. When the rumbling began, her father rushed into the children’s bedroom, snatched her two brothers, and rushed for the front door. Her mother grabbed her baby sister from Dorothy’s arms. Her parents apparently figured Dorothy could take care of herself. She was left alone in her brass bed as it rolled back and forth across the polished floor. The night of the San Francisco earthquake, she felt that God was visiting her. “The earth became a sea which rocked our house in a most tumultuous manner,” she recalled.2She could hear the water in the rooftop tank splashing above her head. These sensations “were linked up with my idea of God as a tremendous Force, a frightening impersonal God, a Hand stretched out to seize me, His child, and not in love.”3
When the earth settled, the house was a mess. There were broken dishes all over the floor, along with books, chandeliers, and pieces of the ceiling and chimney. The city was in ruins, too, temporarily reduced to poverty and need. But in the days after, Bay Area residents pulled together. “While the crisis lasted, people loved each other,” she wrote in her memoir decades later. “It was as though they were united in Christian solidarity. It makes one think of how people could, if they would, care for each other in times of stress, unjudgingly in pity and love.”
As the writer Paul Elie has put it, “A whole life is prefigured in that episode”—the crisis, the sense of God’s nearness, the awareness of poverty, the feeling of loneliness and abandonment, but also the sense that that loneliness can be filled by love and community, especially through solidarity with those in deepest need.4
Day was born with a passionate, ideal nature. Like Dorothea, the main character in George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch, her nature demanded that she live an ideal life. She was unable to be satisfied with mere happiness, being in a good mood, enjoying the normal pleasures that friendships and accomplishments bring. As Eliot put it, “Her flame quickly burned up that light fuel; and, fed from within, soared after some illimitable satisfaction, some object which would never justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self.” Day needed spiritual heroism, some transcendent purpose for which she could sacrifice.
Children’s Crusade
Dorothy’s father had been a Journalist, but the newspaper printing plant burned down in the quake and his job was gone. The family possessions lay in ruins. Day experienced the family’s humiliating descent into poverty. Her father moved them to Chicago, where he set out to write a novel that was never published. A distant, distrustful man, he forbade his children to leave the house without permission or to invite friends in. Day remembered Sunday dinners marked by gloomy silence but for the sound of everybody chewing. Her mother did her best, but she suffered four miscarriages, and one night she fell into hysterics, smashing every dish in the home. The next day she was back to normal. “I lost my nerve,” she explained to her children.
In Chicago, Day noticed that her own family was much less affectionate than the families around her. “We were never hand holders. We were always withdrawn and alone, unlike Italians, Poles, Jews and other friends who I had who were fresh and spontaneous in their affections.” She went to church and sang hymns with neighboring families. In the evenings she got on her knees and inflicted her piety on her sister: “I used to plague my sister with my long prayers. I would kneel until my knees ached and I was cold and stiff. She would beg me to come to bed and tell her a story.” One day she had a conversation with her best friend, Mary Harrington, about a certain saint. Later in life, writing her memoirs, Day couldn’t remember exactly which saint they were talking about, but she remembered “my feeling of lofty enthusiasm, and how my heart almost burst with desire to take part in such high endeavor. One verse of the Psalms often comes to mind, ‘Enlarge Thou my heart, O Lord, that Thou mayst enter in.’…I was filled with a natural striving, a thrilling recognition of the possibilities of spiritual adventure.”5
Parents in those days did not feel it necessary to entertain their children. Day remembered spending happy hours on the beach with her friends, fishing in creeks for eels, running away to an abandoned shack at the edge of a swamp, setting up a fantasy world and pretending that they would live there alone forever. Day also remembered long days of intolerable boredom, especially over the summer break. She tried to ease the tedium by doing household chores and reading. She read Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, and The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis, among other books.
With adolescence came a fascination with sex. She knew right away that she was thrilled by it, but she also had been taught that it was dangerous and evil. One afternoon, when she was fifteen, Day was out in a park with her baby brother. The weather was perfect. The world was full of life, and there must have been boys around. In a letter she wrote at the time to her best friend, she describes a “wicked thrilling feeling at my heart.” In the next passage, she remonstrates herself priggishly, “It is wrong to think so much about human love. All those feelings and cravings that come to us are sexual desires. We are prone to have them at this age, I suppose, but I think they are impure. It is sensual and God is spiritual.”
In her superb memoir The Long Loneliness, she reprints long passages from this letter. Her fifteen-year-old self continued, “How weak I am. My pride forbids me to write this and to put it down on paper makes me blush, but all the old love comes back to me. It is a lust of the flesh and I know that unless I forsake all sin, I will not gain the kingdom of heaven.”
The letter has all the self-involvement and paint-by-numbers self-righteousness that you’d expect in a precocious teenager. She’s got the basic concept of her religion down, but not the humanity and the grace. But there’s also an arduous spiritual ambition at work. “Maybe if I stayed away from books more this restlessness would pass. I am reading Dostoyevsky.” She resolves to fight her desires: “Only after a hard bitter struggle with sin and only after we have overcome it, do we experience blessed joy and peace…. I have so much work to do to overcome my sins. I am working always, always on guard, praying without ceasing to overcome all physical sensations to be purely spiritual.”
Reflecting on that letter in The Long Loneliness, which was published when she was in her fifties, Day confessed that it “was filled with pomp and vanity and piety. I was writing of what interested me most, the conflict of flesh and spirit, but I was writing self-consciously and trying to pretend to myself I was being literary.”6 But that letter displays some of the features that would eventually make Day one of the most inspiring religious figures and social workers of the twentieth century: her hunger to be pure, her capacity for intense self-criticism, her desire to dedicate herself to something lofty, her tendency to focus on hardship and not fully enjoy the simple pleasures available to her, her conviction that fail as she might, and struggle as she would, God would ultimately redeem her from her failings.