But whom to thank? Whom to worship? A sense of God’s reality and immanence came upon her, particularly on her long walks, when she found herself praying. She had trouble praying on her knees, but while she was walking, words of gratitude, praise, and obedience seemed to leap from her. A walk that began in misery could end in exultation.
Day was not answering the question of whether God exists. She was simply made aware of a presence beyond herself. She was surrendering to the belief that independent of one’s own will, there is something significant that gives shape to life. If the life of a radical was a life of assertion and agency, a desire to steer history, she was turning to a life of obedience. God was in charge. As she later put it, she came to see that “worship, adoration, thanksgiving, supplication—these were the noblest acts of which men were capable of in this life.”21 The birth of her child began her transformation from a scattered person to a centered one, from an unhappy bohemian to a woman who had found her calling.
—
DAY HAD NO OBVIOUS outlet for her faith. She was a member of no church. She was not comfortable with theology or traditional religious doctrines. But she felt hunted by God. “How can there be no God,” she asked Forster, “when there are all these beautiful things?”
Her attention turned to the Catholic Church. It was not church history that drew her, or papal authority, or even the political and social positions taken by the church. She knew nothing about Catholic theology and only knew the Church itself as a backward and politically reactionary force. It was the people, not theology. It was the Catholic immigrants she had covered and served—their poverty, their dignity, their communal spirit, and their generosity toward those who were down and out. Day’s friends told her that she didn’t need a religious institution to worship God, certainly not one as retrograde as the Catholic Church, but Day’s experience as a radical taught her to associate herself as closely as possible with those who were suffering, to join in their walk, which meant joining their church.
She observed that Catholicism already organized the lives of many poor urban families. It had won their allegiance. They poured into its churches on Sundays and holy days and in moments of joy and mourning. In the same way, the Catholic faith would provide structure for her life, and she hoped it would provide structure for her daughter. “We all crave order, and in the book of Job, hell is described as a place where no order is. I felt that ‘belonging’ to a church would bring order into [Tamar’s] life, which I felt was lacking in my own.”22
Day’s adult faith was warmer and more joyful than the faith she’d experienced as a teenager. Day was particularly attracted to Saint Teresa of Avila, the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic and nun whose experiences closely paralleled Day’s own: the deeply spiritual childhood, the terror in the face of her own sinfulness, the occasional moments of what could be described as sexual ecstasy in His presence, the intense ambition to reform human institutions and serve the poor.
Teresa lived a life of renunciation. She slept under a single woolen blanket. There was no heat in her convent except for a stove in one room. Her days were filled with prayer and penance. But she also possessed a lightness of spirit. Day said she loved the fact that Saint Teresa wore a bright red dress the day she entered the convent. She loved the fact that one day Teresa shocked her fellow nuns by taking out castanets and dancing. When she was the Mother Superior and the nuns under her became melancholy, she had the kitchen serve them steak. Teresa said that life is like a “night spent in an uncomfortable inn,” so you might as well do what you can to make it more pleasant.
Day was becoming a Catholic, but she wasn’t close to any practicing Catholics. But she encountered a nun walking down a street and asked her for instruction. The nun was shocked by Day’s ignorance of Catholic teaching and berated her for it, but she welcomed her in. Day began attending services weekly, even when she didn’t feel like it. She asked herself, “Do I prefer the Church or my own will?” She decided that even though she would have found it more pleasant to spend Sunday mornings reading the papers, she preferred the church to her own will.
The path to God eventually meant breaking with Forster. He was scientific, skeptical, and empirical. He bet his life on a material universe, clinging to his conviction as fiercely as Day ultimately would to her view of a divinely created one.
Their separation took some time and required much tearing. One day, over a meal, Forster asked the questions many of Day’s radical friends were asking: Had she lost her mind? Who was pushing her to an archaic and backward institution like the Church? Who was the secret person in her life corrupting her in this way?
Day was surprised by the passion and power behind his questions. Finally she quietly said, “It is Jesus. I guess it is Jesus Christ who is the one who is pushing me to the Catholics.”23
Forster turned white and went silent. He didn’t move. He just sat there glaring at her. She asked if they could talk some more about religion. He didn’t answer her at all, or nod, or shake his head. Then he clasped his hands together on the table in a gesture that reminded Day of the way schoolboys act when they want their teachers to think they are good. He sat for several seconds in this posture, then raised his clasped hands and brought them smashing down on the table, rattling the cups and dishes. Day was terrified that he would lose control and start striking her with his clasped hands. But he didn’t. He got up and told Day that she was mentally disturbed. Then he walked around the table once and went out of the house.24
These scenes did not end their love, or their lust, for each other. Day still pleaded with Forster to marry her and to give Tamar a real father. Even after she had effectively renounced him for the Church, she wrote to him, “I dream of you every night—that I am lying in your arms and can feel your kisses and it is torture to me, but so sweet too. I do love you more than anything else in the world, but I cannot help my religious sense, which tortures me unless I do as I believe right.”25
Dorothy’s love for Forster paradoxically opened her up to faith. Her love for him broke through her shell and exposed the soft and more vulnerable regions of the heart to other loves. It provided her with a model. As Day put it, “It was through a whole love, both physical and spiritual, I came to know God.”26 This is a more mature understanding than her tendency, as a teenager, to divide the world between flesh on one side and spirit on the other.
Conversion
The conversion process was a dreary, joyless affair. Day, being Day, made it hard on herself. She criticized herself at each moment, doubting her own motives and practices. She was divided between the radicalism of her former self and the devotion to the Church that her new life required. One day, walking to the post office, she was enveloped with scorn for her own faith. “Here you are in a stupor of content. You are biological. Like a cow. Prayer for you is like the opiate of the people.” She kept repeating that phrase in her head: “The opiate of the people.” But, she reasoned as she continued her walk, she wasn’t praying to escape pain. She was praying because she was happy, because she wanted to thank God for her happiness.27
She had Tamar baptized in July 1927. There was a party afterward, and Forster brought some lobsters he had caught. But then he quarreled with Day, telling her again that it was all just so much mumbo-jumbo, and then he left.