4.5 stars

While I mostly enjoyed this autobiography by Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement (newspaper, hospitality houses, etc.), I preferred her book [b:Loaves and Fishes|203981|Loaves and Fishes|Dorothy Day|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1387732613l/203981._SY75_.jpg|1702507], where she talks more about the founding and functioning of the CW and less of her own life.

There were also a few random thoughts sown here and there that I disagreed with - for instance, Day makes a comment about how women are incomplete without a husband. The book was published in 1952 but, honestly, that's no excuse. Plenty of women before that time had been single and fulfilled - particularly Christian ones who understand that God created us first and foremost for Himself, not marriage.

She also referred to herself as a barren woman, though she has a daughter. This was not only factually inaccurate, but seemed inconsiderate toward those who truly are barren.

"Most of our life is unimportant, filled with trivial things from morning till night. But when it is transformed by love, it is of interest even to the angels." p 257 ( )

I have no idea how historically accurate Day's memoir is, but I find it hard to imagine anyone I admire more than the woman who appears in these pages. ( )

Summary: A memoir of the life of Dorothy Day up to 1952, describing her search for God and a meaningful life, her conversion to Catholicism, her catalytic friendship with Peter Maurin, and the early years of the Catholic Worker movement.

This is the memoir of a woman who grew up in a middle class family, the daughter of a sports writer, a teen who read Upton Sinclair and Doestoevsky, spent two years at the University of Illinois, then left to pursue life as a writer on the lower east side of Manhatten, working for several Socialist publications, getting arrested for the first time in 1917 (her last was as a 75 year old!). She went through several love affairs with the likes of Eugene O’Neill and Mike Gold. Along the way, she had an abortion, and lived what one would call a very “bohemian” lifestyle. An unlikely candidate for sainthood, you might say, and yet the Archdiocese of New York has opened the cause for her canonization, allowing her to be designated “A Servant of God.”

The memoir covers her early life and all these episodes although it devotes very little time to the period she spent in Europe. What we see is a woman haunted by a longing for God, struggling with “the long loneliness” of human existence, the sense of being alienated or apart from even those closest in life. She appears to find a happy existence in a Staten Island home she bought with proceeds from selling a screen play. She is in a kind of “common law” relationship with Forster Batterham, socially conscious but a principled atheist. They seem to enjoy an idyllic life until the birth of daughter Tamar, which intensifies Dorothy’s spiritual search as she reads Catholic literature and talks with several Catholic sisters and priests. First she brings Tamar to be baptized, and then at the end of 1927, enters the Catholic Church, and leaves Batterham, who loves her but utterly opposes this decision. She speaks of the struggle she has with the decision, which literally ended up making her ill. Yet in the end, when faced with a choice between Batterham and God, she chooses God. Nevertheless, they remained good friends for the remainder of their lives.

Dorothy struggled with reconciling her concerns for the poor and social activism with her Catholic faith. It wasn’t until the searching convert and a wandering social theologian, Peter Maurin meet up that these two strains are reconciled in her life. It is a catalytic relationship for both, resulting in the launching of the Catholic Worker movement. She chronicles the birth of this movement with its paper sold for a penny (to this day), its houses of hospitality (now 216 in the U.S. according to their website), and their farming experiments. The vision was of places where laborers could find food, welcome, and thoughtful conversation and retreats that addressed the spiritual side of their existence as well as sustained advocacy for workers’ rights. Maurin helped Day integrate Catholic social teaching with her faith, and I think Day helped Maurin translate his visionary ideals into actual communities.

The book concludes with Day’s beautiful account of Maurin’s death, and their acquisition of a new house in New York City, which she attributes to Maurin’s prayers. In her postscript she comes back to the theme of “the long loneliness.”

“We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.

It all happened while we sat there talking, and it is still going on.”

This memoir suggested several things to me. It reminded me that the externals of how a person is living is not a reliable indicator of their spiritual hunger or the work of God in their lives. At several points Dorothy was exposed to very “other worldly” versions of Christianity that failed to capture her imagination because they did not address life in this world. And the book exposes the power of community, and the reality that even with all our human foibles and flaws, people drawn together in Christ might indeed find the “only solution” to our long loneliness. ( )

Just read it! This is a classic book that illuminates Catholic social teaching and the need to compassionately reach out to everyone, yes everyone, while offering much food for meditation and contemplation. Deeply spiritual, deeply moving, and deeply personal. ( )

Wow! I have heard of Dorthy Day for years. The famous Catholic Anarchists. Being a radical myself I have been drawn to the idea for some time. In her autobiography I learn that she was much more complicated that I had originally thought.

I see so much of myself, and my wife, in her journey. My love of God no matter what, and no way to understand how one could ever live without him. My wife's content skeptism of the world and weariness of those outside of our immediate circle. An undying love for a child no matter how frustrating. A conversion story that occurs just as her loved one is strengthening resistance to religion.

She never meant to write about herself, and the autobiography only left me wanting more. How to live in peace with neighbors above all. How to love Christ with a heart, even when it seems like His world is not for us. Anarchy doesn't have to be about politics. Its...different. I long for more. I am certain her canonization process will be long and drawn out, and the body of Christ will have to grow before we can call her St. Dorthy Day. ( )

Catholic social activist Dorothy Day's autobiography is a fascinating story. I mostly enjoyed Dorothy Days formative years where she as a radical bohemian decided to move into poor areas of New York and there became aware of the downtrodden and disenfranchised masses and her struggle to speak up for them as a journalist and writer and activist - and later her conversion into catholicism. Her account of her time in prison and the hunger strike is both heartbreaking and profound.

I lost all consciousness of any cause. I had no sense of being a radical, making protest against a government, carrying on a nonviolent revolution. I could only feel darkness and desolation all around me. The bar of gold which the sun left on the ceiling every morning for a short hour taunted me….a heartbreaking conviction of the ugliness, the futility of life came over me so that I could not weep but only lie there in blank misery. I lost all feeling of my own identity. I reflected on the desolation of poverty, of destitution, of sickness and sin.

It's also a somewhat frustrating read because so many "facts" are missing - at least for me - in the union struggle in USA. A lot of names and events are mentioned with little explanation. That part of her story was difficult to figure out.

But I liked the strong sense of community. So often she felt alone also in the marriage that eventually ended in divorce.

The only answer in this life, to the loneliness we are all bound to feel, is community. The living together, working together, sharing together, loving God and loving our brother, and living close to him in community so we can show our love for Him. ( )

This book is autobiography, but is also about the author's conversion to the Catholic faith. A very significant conversion it was because it led to the creation of the Catholic Worker movement. From her youth Dorothy Day felt empathy for the poor. She wanted to work for social justice when she joined the Socialists and the Wobblies, but was unsatisfied with idealogies that denied God. So she explored Christianity and in time followed the Christian gospels—and her own instincts—into the realms of pacifism, direct service to the poor, and what she called voluntary poverty. Her meeting with Peter Maurin in 1932 provided the catalyst for the creation of the Catholic Worker newspaper and movement. Readers of this book will see the pieces coming together, falling into place, that made it possible, maybe even inevitable. Because to this day the Catholic Worker movement has its roots in her interpretation of the Christian gospels.

"We did not search for God when we were children," she writes. At university, she saw religion as "an opiate of the people and not a very attractive one." But by page 132 she writes, "I was surprised that I found myself beginning to pray daily." Then, "I began to go to Mass regularly on Sunday mornings." This book is about her gradual transformation from unchurched Bohemian to candidate for sainthood, how it happened and what she thought about it. The book is in three sections: pre-conversion, conversion, and post-conversion. Section three discusses Peter Maurin and the early history of the Catholic Worker community.

Her writing style is much like her life was, down-to-earth, simple, direct, personal. In section two she rambles a bit about her neighbors, but most of this book is action packed. And what food for thought! About spirituality and religion, practical philosophy, social justice, war and peace, family life and community. And history, of course, as she experienced it--and made it. Hers was an eventful life in the front lines of the struggles for peace and social justice, which makes for a riveting read.

Indexed. Illustrated with woodcuts by Fritz Eichenberg. ( )

My local library has a small cart of discarded and donated books. The items on it are a very mixed bag, and purchaseable at garage sale prices - $1.00 hardcover, $.50 paperback. It's a great little petty cash raising gimmick, and I invariably leave, after my weekly visit, with one or two books, of a genre or author I might never otherwise have encountered.

Thus I found myself perusing The Long Loneliness - the autobiography of Dorothy Day, an American journalist, social activist, and co-founder of the Catholic Worker. As an ex-altarboy, and secular humanist, I tend to hiss and emit clouds of steam, like a vampire sprinkled with holy water, when approaching literature concerning my former church. Why? Well for starters, too many childhood hours lost on catechism class, and Sunday Mass, when I could have been playing softball or fishing.

But I was hooked by Day's first person narration from page one - she begins in the interior of a confessional booth. She clearly had a journalist's chops. And she didn't, like me, start out a Catholic. Day was the child of a newspaper man, and traveled the country. She experienced the Great 1906 San Francisco earthquake. She was nine. Her family, struggling financially, then moved to Chicago, where she won a scholarship for her proficiency in Greek and Latin. As a young adult, she ultimately settled in New York City. Day was a voracious reader, a bit of a mystic, and preoccupied from an early age with social justice. Writers like Dostoyevsky, Jack London, Upton Sinclair and activists like Eugene Debs and the I.W.W. formed her world view.

In New York City, in 1917, when she was 20 years old, she began her own career as a journalist and activist, writing for The Call, and later, The Masses. One of the highlights of her story is her description of these years of political ferment from her perspective at the intersection of a movement that was part Socialist, part I.W.W., part anarchist, and part liberal.

Then came her Bohemian years during which she bore a child in a common-law marriage. The community she experienced during that time led to an epiphany that life without an engaged social community was like a long loneliness. This lead to her eventual conversion to Catholicism. It was not an easy choice because her common law partner was an atheist, and they could not marry or cohabit after her conversion.

Then began Day's lifelong association with Peter Maurin, and the founding of the organization known as the Catholic Worker. Together, they developed a journal with a wide circulation, helped fund a network of hospices, and supported the activities of a number of labor organizations. Their policies, such as opposition to Generalissimo Franco, did not always square with the Catholic Church. The highlight of this portion of her story is her detailed description of the communal living of the journal's staff. Abbie Hoffman once praised Day as "the first hippie". As one who recalls those days and that shared lifestyle, I have to agree that I got the same sense of deja vu while reading of the characters who drifted through the Catholic Workers offices and living quarters.

Day died in 1980. A movie has been made of her life, starring Moira Kelly and Martin Sheen. She has been proposed for sainthood, and deemed a "Servant of God" by Pope John Paul II (the first of four stages in an investigation of sainthood.) Whether or not she attains that honor, her life was fascinating and inspiring. In the tumult of The Great Depression, she made lemonade out of lemon rinds. Her example was a reminder that poverty can be a great virtue and a source of spiritual growth and community. In the times we live in now, and may face in the future, that alone is a reason to read her autobiography. ( )

A fascinating view into the life of an amazing woman. ( )

A fascinating view into the life of an amazing woman. ( )

Great autobiography of a 20th century convert to Catholicism whose road to conversion is as fascinating as her tremendous active works among the poor, setting up Hospitality Houses and developing the Catholic Workers Movement. She is an inspiration, albeit I felt a certain sense of her loneliness as I read this during my own soup kitchen days.... ( )

Dorothy Day was a social activist who began her work with the poor and outcast around 1915. Eventually she converted to Roman Catholicism, rejecting Communism. Not the best writing here -- it rambles occasionally -- and she talks a lot about "the mass" and "the proletariat", etc. With help from friend Peter Maurin, she started the Catholic Worker newspaper, which helped Catholics see their role as notthat of sitting in pews, but acting as Christ would on behalf the poor and outcast. "I have not done well," she said, "but I have don what I could." How many of us can say the same?

nother autobiography by an American Catholic convert who is remembered as one of the great leaders of social justice of the Twentieth Century. Unlike Merton, Day did not head to the cloister but to the streets and the farms meeting poverty and injustice head on. I'm impressed by her devotion and the way in which she incorporates her faith into a lifestyle. And she writes with both humility and humor. It's hard not to want to change my life after reading this book. I also think now that I may be an anarcho-syndicalists and never knew it.
Favorite Passages

Going to confession is hard. Writing a book is hard, because you are "giving yourself away." But if you love, you want to give yourself. You write as you are impelled to write, about man and his problems, his relation to God and his fellows. You write about yourself because in the long run all man's problems are the same, his sustenance and love.
People have so great a need to reverence, to worship, to adore; it is a psychological necessity of human nature that must be taken into account. We do not like to admit how people fail us. Even those most loved show their frailty and their weaknesses and no matter how we may will to see only the best in others, their strength rather than their weakness, we are all too conscious of our own failings and recognize them in others.
The Catholic Worker, as the name implied, was directed to the worker, but we used the word in its broadest sense, meaning those who worked with hand or brain, those who did physical, mental or spiritual work. But we thought primarily of the poor, the dispossed, the exploited.

Every one of us who was attracted to the poor had a sense of guilt, of responsibility, a feeling that in some way we were living on the labor of others. The fact that we were born in a certain environment, were enabled to go to school, were endowed with the ability to compete with others and hold our own, that we had few physical disabilities -- all these things marked us as privileged in a way. We felt a respect for the poor and destitute as those nearest to God, as those chosen by Christ for His compassion (p. 204).
What a delightful thing it is to be boldly profligate, to ignore the price of coffee and go on serving the long line of destitute men who come to us, good coffee and the finest of bread.

"Nothing is too good for the pour," our editor Tom Sullivan says, and he likes that aphorism especially when he is helping himself to something extra good (p. 235).
Once a priest said to us that no gets up in the pulpit without promulgating a heresy. He was joking, of course, but what I suppose he meant was that truth was so pure, so holy, that it was hard to emphasize one aspect of truth without underestimating another, that we did not see things as a whole, but in part, through a glass darkly, as St. Paul said. ( )

3812. The Long Loneliness The Autobiography of Dorothy Day (read 13 Oct 2003) Reading this is a result of my reading Paul Elie's great book The Life You Save May Be Your Own on Sept 1, 2003. This autobiography was published in 1959 and tells of Day's life to that time (she died in 1980). Her story is an inspiring one and I hope she is canonized some day, since she led a heroic and saintly life. I felt the book well worth reading, though I learned little I did not already know, having been a recipient of her paper, The Catholic Worker, since my days in college so many years ago. ( )

Referenced on page 33 in PRACTICING THEOLOGY. This is the beginning of Chapter 2: "Attending to the Gaps Between Beliefs and Practices," by Amy Plantinga Pauw.