And I was to find out then, as I found out so many times, over and over again, that women especially are social beings, who are not content with just husband and family, but must have a community, a group, an exchange with others. It just happened.Īlong the way on this journey and throughout it, though she was usually surrounded by people, Dorothy Day felt regularly The Long Loneliness, which she describes, in her view as unique to women: It was as casual as all that, I often think. We were just sitting there talking and someone said, "Let's all go live on a farm." Some moved out and that made room for more. We were just sitting there talking and people moved in on us. We were just sitting there talking when lines of people began to form saying, "We need bread.".If there were six small loaves and a few fishes, we had to divide them. We were just sitting there talking when Peter Maurin came in. The program he preached to her and which got implemented in stages over the next many years was a newspaper, a daily, the Catholic Worker hospitality houses in the big cities to help the working poor and rural farming communes.Īll of these did happen but in her autobiography Dorothy Day does not claim credit for them, rather she says they just happened as various of them were sitting around and talking: What Peter brought to her, rather what he insisted she undertake, was to put her faith into action in serving the poor. In fact three years after these last of these events, she was still looking for a direction in her life.īut when it came it was not a call to ritual, it was not a call to communion, it was a call to service, and it came in the form of a visit from one Peter Maurin, a Frenchman, a revolutionary, a proselytizer, a Catholic, who was referred to her by one of her publishers. It was not having herself baptized nor was it her first communion in the Catholic Church. It was not the systematic instruction in Catholicism. It was not the act of having her daughter baptized a Catholic, though that single act cost her a common law husband.
But when it came it was not a religious call. Dorothy Day spent almost half her lifetime waiting for her call, her spiritual call.
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