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 she demonstrates how her beliefs were put into action.
Her beliefs started as the sort of unquestioned views most children have, views they have inherited from their parents and from their early experiences with the Church: "We did not search for God when we were children. We took Him for granted" (17). She says that as children they learned right and wrong. A later understanding was the social attitudes toward sin, and she uses as an example the case of ...