I began reading Dorothy Day’s 1952 autobiography, The Long Loneliness, out of interest in her life’s combination of writing, service, and faith. Day was a journalist, social activist, and convert to Catholicism who lived 1897 to 1980 in the great northern cities of 2oth century America: Chicago and New York. This is important because she reached adulthood during the teens and 20s, taking part in the women’s suffrage and worker’s rights movements, and fraternizing with anti-capitalist groups like the communists and anarchists of the early 20th century. She endured WWI, the Depression, WWII, the Cold War, Vietnam,... This is a woman who witnessed the greatest suffering of last century.
Her early Bohemian lifestyle was one of radical political activism and literature. Day was a woman of singular mind and intention, doing as she pleased, struggling as she chose. This endears her to me. She averted spirituality for most of her youth, but upon having a daughter could no longer ignore her attraction to Catholicism. She lost her common-law husband and various friends in the process. But Day lived a life led by her own heart. And reading her account in her own very direct words brings her alive in the room, palpable, aromatic. However she also brings alive her particular perspective on suffering, poverty, self-denial; the qualities by which she found meaning (or perhaps comforting explanation) amid the Catholic Church.
Having struggled to untangle myself from the crippling ideologies of original sin, mortal sin, glorification of poverty (by the rich Catholic church), and sometimes glorification of suffering (by use of the Crucifixion story) for the better part of my adult life, a discordance began between myself and the book. I had turned to Day’s life story for inspiration at a tenuous time, instead finding the fear-based terrain of my childhood conditioning magnified tenfold.
How can we deny the body when the body is a miracle of creation? How can we proclaim poverty, when “riches” can be shared? When success is blessing found in achieving our highest potential? (Our highest potential = giving life to the Life within.) If we focus on suffering, on how terrible life is, on how our “cross” will take us to the Heaven of Thereafter, what are we creating in this life (which is a gift to be cherished)? How are we honoring the beautiful Mystery of Life by fixating exclusively on the prevalence of suffering and some “world” to come instead of relieving the suffering that is present now and reveling in the heavenly joy that is now?
Day must have asked some of these questions herself, for she quotes Saint Catherine (247) “All the way to heaven is heaven.” Perhaps she also struggled with the dichotomies even as she took refuge in the comforting Catholic rituals and long-standing presence. Perhaps the struggle between living in joy right now and believing that we are sinful creatures that need to deny body and life to “sit at the right hand of the Father in Heaven” is the exact source of the long loneliness.
I had to put the book down. At page 250 of 286, I had to put the book down out of self-preservation. Childhood conditioning holds too strong; it’s what we revert to in our weakest, most tired and dark moments. I want to rise above that. I choose to create a life out of love and joy and compassion, the exact humanity that Jesus preached about in the Gospels. The Judeo-Christian fixation on fear does not serve either love or joy, and certainly not compassion.
But Dorothy Day was no stranger to compassion. Instead she ultimately became the poster-woman for compassionate action. When recounting the time she was jailed and went on a hunger strike with other women in DC as protest against the unjust treatment received by arrested suffragists, she says this:
“What was right and wrong? What was good and evil? I lay there in utter confusion and misery.
When I first wrote about these experiences I wrote even more strongly of my identification with those around me. I was that mother whose child had been raped and slain. I was the mother who had borne the monster who had done it. I was even that monster, feeling in my own breast every abomination. Is this exaggeration? There are not so many of us who have lain for six days and nights in darkness, cold and hunger, pondering in our heart the world and our part in it. If you live in great cities, if you are in constant contact with sin and suffering, if the daily papers print nothing but Greek tragedies, if you see on all sides people trying to find relief from the drab boredom of their job and family life, in sex and alcohol, then you become inured to the evil of the day, and it is rarely that such a realization of the horror of sin and human hate can come to you.” (78-79)
Through the harrowing human conditions she witnessed, Day came to her own conclusions about remedying the long loneliness of modern life, indeed the long loneliness of human life.
“Community”, she says later, “...was the social answer to the long loneliness.” (224) And she’s right. But true community requires not only that we love and forgive and practice non-judgement toward others, but also toward ourselves, something that Catholic doctrine has historically overlooked. Self-awareness, then, could be seen as the spiritual answer to the long loneliness. You and I are both emanations of the Divine; we are the children of God as well as the Mother and Father. Each one of us is All as much as we are part. If I deny myself, how can I serve you? But if I know myself, how can I overlook you?
Revelations of suffering and injustice are often necessary to living an awakened life. In one sense, that is the gift side of suffering, to awaken us to our true nature, to awaken us to our capacity to love. But once we see suffering, feel it, become “inured” to its presence, we must move beyond. Day knew this too,
“One thing I was sure of, and that was that these fellow workers and I were performing an act of worship. I felt that it was necessary for man to worship, that he was truly himself when engaged in that act.” (93)
Action as worship. Community as solace. Self-awareness (self-acceptance) as the path to these.
So what of the Catholic Church’s fixation on suffering, sin, denial of the material body? How does it jive with the open heart advocated by Day and her Catholic contemporaries like Thomas Merton?
I found a possible answer while perusing a book called The Shadow Effect at the library. We must be witness to the whole. We must live whole lives, both experiencing pain and joy. Darkness is ever-present, but it’s the absence of Light we need to be concerned about. At the center of the heart we can witness whatever is present without turning away. Which means we can be truly open to compassion and grace, and truly capable of knowing ourselves, shadow and all, which is to say, knowing God.
I still struggle with Christianity’s exclusive language about the sinner and the evil body and the idea that humanity’s suffering can be explained by a “fall” from grace eating the fruit of knowledge.* I think someone got that story wrong. That story says to me: God and God (duality, i.e., Dark and Light) were tempted by God to taste God and in doing so found God. Self-awareness!
Dorothy Day somehow had the wisdom to integrate the obsessive aspect of her Church and focus on the immanent action of love. Of honoring and knowing the Other as herself. And living in fear of nothing, neither suffering nor joy. She recounts an Indian poem she read in a book about Gandhi:
“I died as a mineral and became a plant.
I died as a plant and became an animal,
I died as an animal and was a man.
What should I fear? When was I less by dying?” (248)
*Please check out this refreshing article by Michael Bindner, which suggests that the “original sin” was blame.
