Dorothy Day, Malcolm X & Martin Luther King, Jr.

People find a spiritual message in different aspect of human life. Some find it in church, of course, but it can also be found in every aspect of human life, from the joyful to the hateful, from the good experience to the bad, from birth to death. Different people have written about their spiritual life and have shown how a knowledge of the spiritual can come upon one in the least likely circumstances. For each person, though, a spiritual awakening is above all a personal experience and while we read about the spiritual life of others in order to understand our own relationship to the spiritual better, we have to realize that each case is unique. Martin Luther King, Jr., malcolm X, and Dorothy Day all fought for human rights and found a link between the human condition and questions of values and religious belief. Yet, each came to his or her sense of both the spiritual and the human in different ways, as can be seen from their own writings.

Dorothy Day was a woman who fought for the justice promised in the American system and too often denied to certain classes of people in society. She was a founding member of the Catholic Worker Movement and remained a strong force in the movement thereafter. Her life inspired others, including men like Daniel Berrigan, who wrote the introduction to her autobiography, The Long Loneliness. In that book, Dorothy Day writes about her political commitment and her religious and how the two are related to one another, and in this way

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who could not make a living for themselves. They made decisions which brought them to this state of affairs. Often they drank. People would find evidence of this in the Bible and would transfer biblical citations to real life in order to blame these people for their plight. This was still the era when people who were destitute were expected to wait for the next world to get their reward, their "pie in the sky," as Day points out: This is the way my thinking finally led me. On the one hand there were the religious people I had come up against in church, and they were few I must admit, a sparse congregation meeting on Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings. They had enough money so that they did not have to bother about the things of this world (Day 39). At the same time, she began to question her faith because of the fact that so many people around her were hypocrites, and she did not understand how they could live in both worlds at the same time, the world that proclaimed a belief in God and the world that did not carry God's message into real action with real people. She began to consider the value of the Marxist message and was beginning to shed her faith when a professor she admired mentioned that religion brought co

Category: History - D