In her life and writings, Dorothy Day was a great advocate for the poor, broken, and outcasts of society. Her testimony has inspired millions worldwide to exude goodness, beauty, and truth.
In her autobiography The Long Loneliness, Day writes about how reading writers such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, George Orwell, Jack London, and Upton Sinclair, as well as Jesus’ teachings about being a servant to all people, made her aware of the terrible poverty around her in Chicago and New York. Day was not content just reading about the poverty millions worldwide face. She sought to do something about it by being the hands and feet of Christ. Day then established many hospitality places for the poor, broken, and searching in New York, Chicago, and other parts of the world. Day also fought for equality during the Civil Rights Movement movement and participated in many protests against poor working conditions, racism, injustice, and the Spanish Civil War in 1936.
Reading the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John helps us see how Day modeled her life off Jesus’ teachings. Although Day was resistant to the call of God on her life for years, she eventually came to a place of surrender. Once she came to a place of true repentance, Day found freedom, joy, and hope in Christ. Day’s life was a great example of someone who could make a difference for the kingdom of God in the present by using her gifts through activism, protest, and great acts of mercy.
Day was born in New York in 1897 to Grace and John Day. Day’s father worked as a journalist, taking the family from New York to California and Chicago. Day was a gifted student who attended the University of Illinois between 1914 and 1916. Day did not find her academic pursuit fulfilling, so she moved to New York. When she lived in New York Day, she joined the artistic community in Greenwich Village and became a journalist, socialist, and activist. Day found the logical outworking of capitalism to be appalling in how it dehumanized people based on how much money they made and their social status. As much as Day became frustrated with capitalism, she also saw how socialism and other political ideologies were not the remedy for humankind’s struggle with sin and yearning for redemption but the gospel of Jesus Christ.
After many years of resisting Christ, Day’s life was in disarray. After experiencing a painful divorce, Day began a relationship with biologist Forster Batterham. Though they never married, both had a daughter named Tamar. After having her daughter, Day came to know Christ and was baptized in the Catholic Church in 1927. Day’s conversion to Catholicism gave her a great love for the liturgy and the Mass and a fulfillment in her life she had always yearned for since her early days of growing up in the Episcopalian tradition.
Her work particularly took inspiration from one Christian—Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone (born around 1181, died 1226), better known as St. Francis of Assisi. After many years of aimless struggle, Francis underwent a radical conversion to Christianity after having a vision of Christ. Francis founded the Franciscan order of Friars in 1210. These Friars took vows of poverty, helped the poor, and lived a very simple life. Day admired Francis’ love for Christ and helping others.
Day grew up loving Greek and Latin, reading the Bible, and writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, Edgar Allen Poe, and Sir Walter Scott. In her last year of high school, she was awarded a three-hundred-dollar scholarship to the University of Illinois.
After leaving the university in 1916 without finishing her studies, Day decided to move with her family to New York and pursue a career as a journalist. During this time on her spiritual quest for meaning and purpose, Day cultivated her voice as a writer and found a passion for activism. This activism was inspired by her communist political philosophy and desire to do something about the poverty around her in the city. Day worked for a socialist newspaper called Call and was a member of the Industrial Works of The World.
Day continued journalistic work in Chicago, Louisiana, and New Orleans. In 1932, Day and her friend Peter Maurin co-founded The Catholic Worker. This monthly newspaper became quite popular and was created to encourage people to show compassion, fight against racism, poverty, and hospitality, and become people of hope. To do something to combat poverty and bring healing and hope to people’s lives, Day and Maurin founded the Catholic Worker Movement. This Catholic lay movement helped thousands of people in dire situations have housing, food, and a sense of hope.
Day had a substantial impact on Christians during her lifetime, and continues to influence many Christians today. Two of the more notable Christian contemporaries she influenced were Thomas Merton and Daniel Berrigan.
Thomas Merton (1915-1968) was a Catholic Trappist Monk, poet, and author of such classics as The Seven Storey Mountain and New Seeds of Contemplation. Merton found Day’s pacifism and radical compassion for people experiencing poverty incredibly encouraging. The two began a letter correspondence in 1959 and became friends. Day highly praised Merton’s autobiography, which resonated with his teachings on compassion, anti-war, contemplation, and everyone being the beloved of Christ.
Daniel Berrigan (1921-2016) was an activist, Catholic Jesuit priest, poet, and author. Berrigan first met Day in the 1950s when he was pursuing his calling as a priest. He told her how The Long Loneliness and her writings in The Catholic Worker helped him find freedom in Christ in an existential crisis. Berrigan found Day’s authentic faith an incredible example of Jesus’ agape love, and recommended her writing to students like Bill Wylie-Kellerman.
Day is a great example to Christians today of someone who helped serve struggling people and longed for hope and redemption. This is what living out agape love looks like with one’s own life. Day knew what it felt like to be in the depths of despair and also what it was like to be truly set free by the love of Christ.
Even though all Christians might not agree with Day’s socialist views, believers can learn from Day’s testimony that it is important to live out the agape love of Christ, whatever one’s job or vocation is. The body of Christ is remarkably diverse. As Christians, we are meant to be people of hope in a broken world where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Christians are called to exude goodness, beauty, and truth and do good in the here and now in preparation for the marriage of heaven and earth.
We live in troubled times. Too often, Western Christianity is steeped in denominational warfare, scandal, and toxic fundamentalism and neglects practicing agape love by the power of the Holy Spirit.
We can look to Christians like Day to remind us of the importance of fighting against poverty, living out our faith by grace, and loving people of all worldviews. We show how hope and healing are possible by the power of the gospel of Christ. This same gospel, which began in the first century, still changes lives today.
Photo Credit: Public domain photo via Wikimedia Commons
Justin Wiggins is an author who works and lives in the primitive, majestic, beautiful mountains of North Carolina. He graduated with his Bachelor's in English Literature, with a focus on C.S. Lewis studies, from Montreat College in May 2018. His first book was Surprised by Agape, published by Grant Hudson of Clarendon House Publications. His second book, Surprised By Myth, was co-written with Grant Hudson and published in 2021. Many of his recent books (Marty & Irene, Tír na nÓg, Celtic Twilight, Celtic Song, Ragnarok, Celtic Dawn) are published by Steve Cawte of Impspired.
Wiggins has also had poems and other short pieces published by Clarendon House Publications, Sehnsucht: The C.S. Lewis Journal, and Sweetycat Press. Justin has a great zeal for life, work, community, writing, literature, art, pubs, bookstores, coffee shops, and for England, Scotland, and Ireland.
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