The Long Loneliness

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(c) Bob Fitch Photography Archive / Department of Special Collections / Stanford University Libraries

 

The Long Loneliness

​​“People have so great a need to reverence, to worship, to adore; it is a psychological necessity of human nature that must be taken into account. We do not like to admit how people fail us. Even those most loved show their frailty and their weaknesses and no matter how we may will to see only the best in others, their strength rather than their weakness, we are all too conscious of our own failings and recognize them in others.” TLL p. 84

 

Every strike was an unjust strike according to the newspapers, and every strike ended in failure to achieve the demands of the workers according to the same papers. The reader never took into account the slow and steady gains, wrung reluctantly from the employer by virtue of everyone of these strikes, the slow advance made to appear in the wrong when on the picket line. This is the most I had suffered in the cause of labor.  TLL p 100

 

When I was a child, my sister and I kept notebooks; recording happiness made it last longer, we felt, and recording sorrow dramatized it and took away its bitterness; and often we settled some problem which beset us, even while we wrote about it. TLL p 115

 

…of course the Church was lined up with property, with the wealthy, with the state, with capitalism, with all the forces of reaction. This I had been thought to think and this I still think to a great extent. ‘Too often,’ Cardinal Mundelein said, ‘has the Church lined up on the wrong side.’ TLL p 149

 

… I wanted to be poor, chaste and obedient. I wanted to die in order to live, to put off the old man and put on Christ. I loved, in other words, and like all women in love, I wanted to be untied to my love. TLL p 149

 

“The scandal of businesslike priests, of collective wealth, the lack of a sense of responsibility for the poor, the worker, the Negro, the Mexican, the Filipino, and even the oppression of these, and the consenting to the oppression of them by our industrialist-capitalist order—these made me feel often that priests were more like Cain than Abel. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” they seemed to say in respect to the social order. There was plenty of charity but too little justice. And yet the priests were the dispensers of the Sacraments, bringing Christ to men, all enabling us to put on Christ and to achieve more nearly in the world a sense of peace and unity. “The worst enemies would be those of our own household,” Christ had warned us.”

But I know nothing of the social teaching o the church at that time. I had never heard of the encyclicals. I felt that the Church was the Church of the poor, that St. Patrick’s had been built for the pennies of servant girls, day nurseries, hos of the Good Shepherd, home for the ages but at the same time, I felt that I did not set its face against a social order with made so much charity in the present sense of the word necessary. I felt that charity was a word to choke over. Who wanted charity? And it was not just human pride but a strong sense of man’s dignity and work, and what was to him in justice, that made me resent, rather than feel proud of so might a sum total of Catholic institutions. TLL p. 150

 

Many times we have been asked why we spoke of Catholic workers, and so named the paper. Of course, it was not only because we who were in charge of the work, who edited the paper, were all Catholics but also because we wished to influence Catholics. They were our own, and we reacted sharply to the accusation that when it came to private morality the Catholics shone but when it came to social and political morality, they were often conscienceless. Also, Catholics were the poor, and most of them had little ambition or hope of bettering their condition to the extent of achieving ownership of home or business, or further education for their children. They accepted things as they were with humility and looked for a better life to come. . .. TLL 210

 

Peter’s plan was that groups should borrow from mutual-aid credit unions in the parish to start what he first liked to call agronomic universities, where the worker could become a scholar and the scholar a worker. Or he wanted people to give the land and money. He always spoke of giving. Those who had land and tools should give. Those who had capital should give. Those who had labor should give that. “Love is an exchange of gifts,” St. Ignatius had said. It was in these simple, practical, down-to-earth ways that people could show their love for each other. If the love was not there in the beginning, but only the need, such gifts made love grow.

“To make love,” Peter liked to study phrases, and to use them as though they were newly discovered. (Honest to God was the title of one of his series of essays).

The strangeness of the phrase “to make love” strikes me now and reminds me of that aphorism of St. John of the Cross, “Where there is no love, put love and you will find love.” I’ve thought of it and followed it many times these eighteen years of community life. TLL p 224

“Eat what you raise and raise what you eat” meant that you ate the things indigenous to the New York climate, such as tomatoes, not oranges; honey, not sugar, etc. We used to tease him because he drank coffee, chocolate or tea, but “he ate what was set before him.” TLL p 227

 

“We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.” TLL p 286

 

While I was in Puerto Vallarta, my friend Richard was reading The Long Loneliness, the autobiography of the Catholic social activist, Dorothy Day. I have always been intrigued by her–a devout Catholic who sought not just to serve the poor but address the social structures can made them poor. Even as a youth, she had yearned to be with the poor, the hungry, the homeless, the disenfranchised, and the marginalized. This led her to be associated with leftist activists, communists and labor leaders, supporting their efforts to address the root causes of want. She worked as a journalist, writing about labor strikes and labor conditions; she protested with suffragettes in their cause to give women the right to vote, and supported pacifists during World War, not a popular stand. As a young woman, she had many tragic relationships and had an abortion. She finally found happiness with Forster Batterman, her common law husband, with whom she had a daughter, Tamar. But ultimately, she listened to her interior callings of the divine, and ultimately converted to Catholicism, which caused Batterman, who was an atheist, to break with her and her daughter. While Dorothy grieved the loss of the great love of her life, she believed that this was the price for following Christ.

 

A few years after becoming a Catholic, she was introduced to Peter Maurin, a peasant scholar, who aligned with Dorothy’s inclinations to the poor, to live simply and put into effect the Beatitudes. Peter, who at one time had been a Salesian brother, taught her of Catholic culture and understandings: the Desert Fathers, the Catholic Church’s social teachings and theological understandings of the common good. Peter, who at one time had been a Salesian brother, sought to create a society where it is easy for people to be good. Together with other like-minded folks, they sought out to live out the radical teachings of Jesus, e.g. loving one’s enemy, turning the other cheek and living out Matthew 25’s commands. Peter and Dorothy founded The Catholic Worker, a newspaper that highlighted their lived Gospel values, papal encyclical teachings, contemporary labor disputes, and pacifist views. Catholic Worker Houses of Hospitality, run by single and married lay persons living simply in community, were established in many cities to feed the hungry and provide shelter for the unhoused. Some houses were established in rural areas for workers and families to live in community and till the land to raise crops and livestock.

 

I appreciated reading Dorothy’s first-hand account of her life. She strikes me as refreshingly human and real. She longed to have a man by her side that she loved and loved in return. “It was years before I woke up without that longing for a face pressed against my breast, an arm about my shoulder. The sense of loss was there.” And like all of us, she made mistakes and sinned. “Aside from drug addiction, I committed all the sins young people commit.” She struck me as a contemporary woman feeling empathy for the marginalized and disenfranchised even as a young person. She tells of protesting and participating in a hunger strike for women’s right to vote. She spoke of her admiration of communist and atheist colleagues who sacrificed lives of comfort for a greater cause, for the sake of others.

 

As a Christian, Dorothy seemed practical, not theoretical. Her words were rooted in the Gospel and her actions in seeing Christ in fellow human beings, and  loving them. Once a woman came to her door asking if Dorothy had visions and ecstasies, to which she responded curtly, “I have visions of unpaid bills.” Like St. Francis of Assisi, she presented a radical return to simplicity in how she lived her life: Blessed are the poor. Blessed are the peacemakers. Love your enemy. Turn the other cheek. Feed the hungry. Welcome the stranger. Clothe the naked.

 

She speaks embracing poverty and being depending on the providence of God. She refers to the miracle of the fishes and loaves, taking the little that you have and sharing it and watching it multiply. If you have $100, give it to the poor and watch it come back two-fold, five-fold, even ten-fold. And she speaks of community, as the early Christians lived or as a lay community of monks, living out the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience while serving the poor. She has no illusions that working with the poor or living in community are easy. The poor are often smelly and ungrateful. She cites many incidents where living in community fell apart, but the desire to love continues to be borne out in with others sharing a common purpose. 

 

As someone who is both drawn to and repulsed by those who are unhoused, Dorothy Day is a local saint. I recognize how dirtiness and bodily odors repel me but I admire their vulnerability and how they live with so little, wholly dependent on the kindness and generosity of others. And in this time of horrendous ICE raids on the undocumented in this country and the demonization of refugees, I look for her guidance. 

 

*****

“Aside from drug addiction, I committed all the sins young people commit today.”

 

“It is people who are important, not the masses.”

 

“We cannot love God unless we love each other, and to love we must know each other. We know Him in the breaking of bread, and we know each other in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone anymore. Heaven is a banquet and life is a banquet, too, even with a crust, where there is companionship.”

 

“I felt that the Church was the Church of the poor,... but at the same time, I felt that it did not set its face against a social order which made so much charity in the present sense of the word necessary. I felt that charity was a word to choke over. Who wanted charity? And it was not just human pride but a strong sense of man's dignity and worth, and what was due to him in justice, that made me resent, rather than feel proud of so mighty a sum total of Catholic institutions.”

 

“Once a priest told us that no one gets up in the pulpit without promulgating a heresy. He was joking, of course, but what I suppose he meant was the truth was so pure, so holy, that it was hard to emphasize one aspect of the truth without underestimating another, that we did not see things as a whole, but through a glass darkly, as St. Paul said.”

 

“I felt, even at fifteen, that God meant man to be happy, that He meant to provide him with what he needed to maintain life in order to be happy, and that we did not need to have quite so much destruction and misery as I saw all around and read of in the daily press.”

 

“I was lonely, deadly lonely. And I was to find out then, as I found out so many times, over and over again, that women especially are social beings, who are not content with just husband and family, but must have a community, a group, an exchange with others. Young and old, even in the busiest years of our lives, we women especially are victims of the long loneliness.”

“It was years before I woke up without that longing for a face pressed against my breast, an arm about my shoulder. The sense of loss was there.”

“I never was so unhappy, never felt so great the sense of loneliness. No matter how many times I gave up mother, father, husband, brother, daughter, for His sake, I had to do it over again.”

“Tamar is partly responsible for the title of this book in that when I was beginning it she was writing me about how alone a mother of young children always is. I had also just heard from an old woman who lived a long and full life, and she too spoke of her loneliness.”