The Long Loneliness

“This was one of those occasions when my small heart was enlarged and I could feel it swelling in love and gratitude to such a good God, for a friend like Mary, for conversation such as ours; I was filled with a natural striving, a thrilling recognition of the possibilities of spiritual adventure.”

Day experienced one of her first affinities with religion when her friend, Mary, told her about the saints. Prior, Day hadn’t even known that saints existed. She was struck with a sense of thankfulness and joy for her friend, as well as God and the world, and the possibilities that spirituality presented. She wanted to be like a saint and looked to pray and accomplish as many altruistic acts as she could. 

“‘Only after a hard bitter struggle with sin and only after we have overcome it, do we experience blessed joy and peace.’”

When Day was 15, she wrote a letter to a friend from school about what she felt was the conflict between the desires of the human flesh and the human soul and spirit. The letter goes into her restlessness and her experience of physical sensations that she wants to fade away so that she can solely experience spiritual feelings. She points out that sin is something that humans must battle and surmount in order to find peace, or even some sort of self-actualization that allows one to be more Christlike.

“I wanted life and I wanted the abundant life. I wanted it for others too. I did not want just the few, the missionary-minded people like the Salvation Army, to be kind to the poor, as the poor. I wanted everyone to be kind. I wanted every home to be open to the lame, the halt and the blind, the way it had been after the San Francisco earthquake. Only then did people really live, really love their brothers. In such love was the abundant life and I did not have the slightest idea how to find it.”

Day wanted a positive and happy life for herself and everyone else. She did not want the poor to be targeted by charities because they were poor. She wished that the more fortunate would lift the less fortunate up so that they were all equal. She recalls a time during the earthquake in San Francisco when everyone helped each other because they were all equal in their need after the tragedy. She wants things to always be this way, where everyone loves each other because they are all humans with needs like food, clothing, and happiness.

“Anarchism has been called an emotional state of mind, denouncing injustice and extolling freedom, rather than a movement.”

Many of Day’s close associates and friends are anarchists. Here, she makes an attempt to explain the much misunderstood and maligned political theory. Anarchism, she writes, is more of a way to support the freedom of the people. It actually advocates for small federated states rather than an entire abolition of government. The theory is that the people will be freer if they have direct control over the way they are governed.

“The supernatural approach when understood is to turn the other cheek, to give up what one has, willingly, gladly, with no spirit of martyrdom, to rejoice in being the least, to be unrecognized, the slighted. I was making no pretensions to being a Christian at the time, but I was professing to be a radical. But I was not a good one. I was following the ‘devices and desires of my own heart.’”

After the incident where Day shoved or slapped the anti-conscription activist who had been following her around and caught her off guard by hugging her at a dance, Day reflects on her reaction. She thinks that she should have taken the high road, or the Christian approach of turning the other cheek, even though she was not yet a Christian. However, Day surmises that to be a radical, one has to keep to the philosophy of the movement, not stray into emotional moments. Lashing out and losing control in the wrong ways does not help the movement.

“It is a mysterious thing, this feeling of violence in a mob. Eugene Debs said that even a friendly mob has the smell of the beast.”

Day has the opportunity to participate in many pickets and marches, some of which turn violent. There is something alive and inspiring about a mass of people grouped together with one motivation. However, there is also something dehumanizing and dangerous about many people being crushed together. They can feed off of each other in both positive and negative ways.

“Our function as journalists seemed to be to build up a tremendous indictment against the present system, a daily talk of horror which would have a cumulative effect of forcing the workers to rise in revolution. Our editorial heads trusted in legislation and education, but we younger ones believed that nothing could be done except by the use of force.”

As a journalist for a socialist newspaper, Day was supposed to provide evidence against the government, which would lead to unrest among workers, and eventually a revolution. Day was for the revolution, but as a young person at that time, she thought that the old guard was supporting a process that would be too slow. The young journalists and radicals wanted immediate results, and the best way to get those results was through force. This shows the desperate nature of the times, and also the tendency of youth to want change everything right away, instead of through incremental gains.

“There were no doubt those whose souls glowed with belief, whose hearts were warmed by the love of God, on all sides of us. But mingling as we did, in our life together, and in our life apart, with radical groups, we never met any whose personal morality was matched by a social morality or who tried to make life here for others a foretaste of the life to come.”

Here, Day is referring to her friend, Rayna, whom she met at the University of Illinois. Rayna was a dedicated communist who ended up going to China, and then Russia, where she passed away suddenly. Day writes that Rayna had never met a Christian person—someone who had a combined sense of social morals and personal ones. To Day, this would have made Rayna even more perfect because she would have been concerned not only with making workers’ lives better on earth but also ensuring that they were comfortable in the hereafter.

“I was to find that one of the uglinesses of jail life was its undertone of suppressed excitement and suspense. It was an ugly and a fearful suspense, not one of normal hope and expectation.”

Day goes on a hunger strike with the suffragettes in a jail outside Washington, DC. It is her first experience of being incarcerated. She observes that a sense of anticipation hung in the air at all times. However, this anticipation had to do with the threat of violence, or some unexpected development in the strike. They did not know what would happen and it made them afraid.

“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.”

Day’s jail experience makes her contemplate the functioning of society, the constant disappointment of which makes us ignore sin in the world. However, when she is able to sit by herself and stew in her anger and hunger, she realizes that the world is full of sin and human hate that needs to somehow be counteracted by love and good deeds.

“It seems to me a long time that I led this wavering life, in my ignorance not knowing that we are of body, mind and soul, and that all our faculties can be brought into harmony. I felt strongly that the life of nature warred against the life of grace.”

Day thinks that the body is at odds with the mind, and the mind at odds with the soul. She is constantly contemplating how our lives on earth are sinful, evil, and difficult, and do not jibe with leading a successful spiritual life. However, she later realizes that all of the parts of ourselves can be brought into harmony with the earth and the afterlife.

“Nursing was like newspaper work. It was impossible to suffer long over the tragedies which took place every day. One was too close to them to have perspective. They happened to continuously. They weighted on you, gave you a still and subdued feeling, but the very fact that you were continually busy left you no time to brood.”

Day becomes a nurse during World War One, which coincides with the famous influenza epidemic in 1919. Many of her patients die. She finds that she is so busy caring for them, it’s difficult to grieve for any one of them. This turns out to be akin to newspaper work, which necessitates going from story to story without taking the time to process each, singular tragedy on a personal, human level.

“This was not just a social gathering, people of one nationality and background coming together for recreation. They were coming to listen to long and tiresome speeches. They were part of a movement, a slow upheaval. Among them was a stirring and a groping and they were beginning to feel within themselves a power and a possibility.”

Day writes about the workers’ meetings that she attended in Chicago. The attendees are a diverse and international group who have become the exploited workers. They want to find out about how they can be part of change, including unionization and a change in the political structure. These meetings make them feel like they can gain power, like change is possible.

“Now I was to have a solitary taste of the injustice, or the ugliness of men’s justice, which set me more squarely on the side of the revolution.”

Here, Day refers to the second time she was arrested. This time it is for staying overnight at an IWW house with an unstable friend. Day is caught up in a “red raid” and the police think that and her friend are prostitutes and treat them badly. The way that Day is leered at by police officers, who are supposed to be the keepers of the system of justice, make Day realize how necessary the revolution is.

“Forster, the inarticulate, became garrulous only in wrath. And his wrath, he said, was caused by my absorption in the supernatural rather than the natural, the unseen, rather than the seen.”

Day is always drawing contrasts between her partner, Forster, and herself. The first is that he is mostly quiet and keeps to himself, whereas she is more social. He gets angry when she talks about abstract concepts, like religion, whereas his ideas are firmly rooted in the natural world and are more practical. This gets to one of the dichotomies that Day highlights in her memoir—the natural versus the supernatural. One is a part of the solid world, the other is a leap of faith.

“I had been passing through some years of fret and strife, beauty and ugliness—even some weeks of sadness and despair. There had been periods of intense joy but seldom had there been the quiet beauty and happiness I had now. I had thought all those years that I had freedom, but now I felt that I had never known real freedom nor even had knowledge of what freedom meant.”

After she finds Catholicism, Day realizes that all of the little stresses and joys she felt before the birth do not compare to life after her enlightenment. Everything now feels new, calm, and harmonious. Through this feeling of contentment, Day discovers real freedom.

“Yet always those deep moments of happiness gave way to a feeling of struggle, of a long silent fight still to be gone through. There had been the physical struggle, the mortal combat almost, of giving birth to a child, and now there was coming the struggle for my own soul.”

Finding Catholicism, coupled with the birth of her daughter, Tamar, gives Day joy, but she knows that she wants to have Tamar baptized, which will place distance between herself and Forster, her family, and her friends. As a result, she delays what she knows she wants and what is inevitable. This delay causes her to struggle internally and feel as if she is in a battle between life as she knows it and the state—or fate—of her soul.

“But the newspapers had to have their story. With scare heads, yellow journalism, and staccato radio, the tense, nervous stories built up, of communism at home and Communist atrocities in the rest of the world.”

Newspapers often publicized marches as being full of violent, evil communists who stop at nothing to hurt law-abiding citizens. Day rallies against this hysteria, which she views as being engineered by the press for the benefit of politicians and the government. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy, too, as she notes that journalists themselves ask their editors for gas-masks before going out to report on protests.

“[Peter] wanted [men] to be able to produce what was needed in the way of homes, food, clothing, so that there was enough of these necessities for everyone. A synthesis of “‘cult, culture and cultivation,’” he called it, as he tried to give me the long view, the vision.”

Peter Maurin believed that people should go back to nature and provide for themselves. He thought that with a mixture of community, the creation of culture, and a cultivation of the land and the soul, people would be able to provide for themselves in mind and body and be happy. Day was enthralled by his vision.

“Peter saw only the land movement as the cure for unemployment and irresponsibility, and the works of mercy as the work at hand, ignoring the immediate needs of the workers in the unions, their conflicts and demands.”

Maurin could be a little myopic in his desire for a purely “green” revolution. Day wanted to focus on all workers, but Maurin was only interested in espousing a movement that included going back to the land. This is where the conflict lay between them, and in their respective visions for The Catholic Worker newspaper.

“We have lived with the unemployed, the sick, the unemployables. The contrast between the worker who is organized and has his union, the fellowship of his own trade to give him strength, and those who have no organization and come in to us on a breadline is pitiable.”

One of the foundational tenets of the Catholic Worker Movement was living in poverty so that everyone was on the same economic level. However, in observing the people that came to eat and/or stay at the Catholic Worker houses, Day noticed that the workers who already belonged to unions were more goal-oriented and ideological; that is, they knew what they wanted. Then there were non-unionized or uninformed workers who were aimless and starving. Day wanted to give the latter group some sort of goal or motivation.

“Community—that was the social answer to the long loneliness. That was one of the attractions of religious life and why couldn’t lay people share in it? Not just the basic community of the family, but also a community of families, with a combination of private and communal property.”

The answers to Day’s conundrum about how to solve “the long loneliness” and to Maurin’s idea of farming communes seemed to be the same—bring a bunch of families together to build community with one another and share in all of the social and economic benefits.

“It is not only for others that I must have these retreats. It is because I am too hungry and thirsty for the bread of the strong. I too must nourish myself to do the work I have undertaken; I too must drink at these good springs so that I may not be an empty cistern unable to help others.”

Day began her own Catholic retreats, first at the house on Staten Island, then at the one in upstate New York. She is saying here that those retreats were not just for others, but for her own communal and spiritual nourishment. They were for combatting “the long loneliness.”