This study will examine Dorothy Day's autobiography The Long Loneliness, focusing on the development of Day's religious consciousness and her relationship with God. The study will argue that the spiritual and religious evolution of Day took place in two parts, the first including the confused years up to the birth of her daughter, and the second including the years after that birth.
There is much paradox in the process whereby Day's religious faith grew and deepened. Day's Catholicism, once it clearly emerged, was a strict one, based on conservative moral views. Yet her pregnancy and the birth of the daughter which took her fully into the territory of faith were marked on the surface by anything but religious elements. She became pregnant by a man to whom she was not married, a man who was staunchly opposed to the Catholic religion, and she gave birth to her child out of wedlock.
Nevertheless, as Day declares, the pregnancy and birth forced her to make decisions she had been putting off, or not even considering, for the first wayward part of her life. This is not to say that those earlier years had been ones particularly drenched in sin. What Day experienced was more confusion and aimlessness than dissolute behavior. She simply did not have a purpose in life before her daughter was born. She did not have another person for whom she felt responsible, for whom she cared more than she cared for herself.
This is not to say either that she was not active in those pre-motherhood years. To the contrary, she was quite active---too active, in fact, in her own analysis of her time writing the newspaper the Call:
Life on a newspaper, whether radical or conservative, makes one lose all sense of perspective. . . . You are carried along in a world of events, writing reporting, with no time at all for thought or reflection---one day listening to Trotsky, and the next day interviewing Mrs. Astor's butler. . . . Nothing stood out in...