The Road to Character: Chapter 4: Struggle Summary & Analysis

On April 18, 1906, Dorothy Day got ready for bed in Oakland, California. She said her prayers, believing, even at such a young age, in an “immanent spiritual world.” Suddenly, the earth started shaking. Day was convinced that the earthquake was God visiting her as a tremendous and impersonal force. The city was in ruins after the earthquake, but the Bay Area banded together “as though in Christian solidarity,” according to Day. Day had an ideal nature and longed for some kind of spiritual heroism and a transcendent purpose.

Day’s father lost his job due to the earthquake and the family moved to Chicago. Her father was gloomy and distrustful, and her mother verged on a nervous breakdown, making the household a dull and unaffectionate place. Day went to church and prayed in the evenings, even though her family wasn’t religious. Growing up, she became fascinated with sex and experienced thrilling surges of longing. She was critical of herself for these feelings, not wanting to engage in the sensual when God is wholly spiritual. She showed her “hunger to be pure,” her intense self-criticism, and her preference for suffering over simple pleasure.

Day attended the University of Illinois, where she was a half-hearted student. She abandoned religion and joined the Socialist Party, wanting to wage war against society. When she was 18, she tired of college and moved to New York City. During her first lonely months there, she noticed the poverty around her and became indignant. She developed a love for the poor and desired to be with those who are suffering. Eventually, she got a job with a radical paper called The Call, where she wrote articles about labor unrest.

Despite this activism, most of her battles were internal. She became an avid reader of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. In those days, people believed literature contained wisdom. (Today, Brooks notes, people use cognitive science rather than literature to understand their minds and feelings.) Day also led a wild life, spending her time in bars. She witnessed one of her friends die from a drug overdose. She left much of her dissolute life out of her memoirs, seemingly ashamed of it.

In 1918, Day volunteered at King’s County Hospital during a deadly worldwide flu epidemic. She worked 12-hour days in disciplined conditions. During this time, she became pregnant. Her romantic partner suggested she get an abortion, and she agreed. Later, she attempted suicide with a gas pipe in her apartment. She left the hospital job because it made her numb to suffering, and she had no time to write.

During this time, Day was arrested twice. The first time, she spent 30 days in jail for participating in suffragette protests outside the White House. While in jail, she became depressed about the futility of human effort and began to understand that activism fails without faith. The second time Day was arrested, she was found visiting a friend who lived in a brothel and was assumed to be a prostitute. She criticized herself for her promiscuous lifestyle, accusing herself of pride. In actuality, she was lonely and hungry for spirituality.

Day still hadn’t found her vocation. She needed a calling that involved self-surrender and commitment to something pure. She tried to find this in writing: she published a book but was later ashamed of it and unsatisfied. Next, she believed romantic love would satisfy her: she fell in love with Forster Batterham, and they lived together on Staten Island. Although they fought over fundamental matters—Forster being a very scientific thinker—Day still loved him deeply. They secluded themselves from the world as if to create a place where their love could be pure.

But this seclusion was not enough for Day. She wanted a child even though Forster didn’t, and, in 1925, became pregnant. While pregnant, she wrote of her experiences, since very few accounts of pregnancy from the female perspective existed. Day was enraptured when her daughter Tamar was born. Without someone to thank for the gift of her daughter, she began to feel God’s immanent presence again. She surrendered to the belief that there is something beyond her will that gives meaning to life. Her child’s birth gave her a calling.

Then, Day turned to the Catholic Church. Although her religious feelings didn’t require a denomination, she wanted to join a community of sufferers. She saw that the Catholic Church provided structure for many poor families. Day’s religiosity expressed itself like Saint Teresa’s: she fears her own sinfulness, feels ecstasy in God’s presence, and ardently desires to help the poor.

When Day chose religion, her relationship with Forster suffered. His views were too skeptical and scientific to understand her faith. Enraged by her new spirituality, he thought she was mentally disturbed. Despite this, Day still loved him passionately. In fact, it was her love for him that turned her to faith. Her love of him opened her up to other kinds of love.

Day’s conversion to Christianity was unpleasant. She criticized herself at every stage, sometimes feeling like her spirituality came from self-satisfaction. For her, becoming faithful was a process of self-conflict. Often, people tend to think that religion makes life easier. In contrast, Day found it “complex, rigorous, and torturous.” She established a strict religious routine which created a spiritual center in her.

In 1933, during the height of the Great Depression, Day started the newspaper The Catholic Worker. Its goal was to create a society, through Catholic teaching, in which people find it easy to be good. The newspaper also hosted a soup kitchen and hospitality houses. Day believed that “separation was sin,” so with The Catholic Worker, she combined inner thought and activism. As well as Catholicism, the newspaper championed personalism: the belief that every person is obligated to look after others.

Day worked for The Catholic Worker and its soup kitchen for the rest of her life. The work was endless and menial. Often, one thinks of a saint as someone who lives in an ethereal world. In reality, however, they often live more earthly, practical lives than everyone else. Day described her day as “a mixture of the sacred and the profane, cooking meals, book-keeping, writing inspirational messages, etc.”

Day was not naturally social, but she forced herself to be with people. She worked with people who had mental illnesses or who suffered from alcoholism and drug addiction. While working, she carried a notebook in which she wrote a mixture of personal and work-related entries. In order to resist self-righteousness, she tried not to desire gratitude from those she served.

For most people, happiness is the goal of life. However, people always remember moments of suffering that formed them rather than moments of happiness. Day “[sought] out suffering as a road to depth.” She avoided simple pleasures and sought out opportunities for moral heroism. When it isn’t connected to a larger purpose, suffering is damaging and leads to despair. However, when connected to a larger design and in solidarity with others, suffering is ennobling and transformative.

First, suffering draws a person deep into themselves. Pain reveals depth in a person that they didn’t know they had. It opens up buried places of pain and gives the sufferer the feeling that they are getting under the superficial to the fundamental. Suffering also reveals one’s limitations, removing one’s illusion that they can master themselves. Furthermore, suffering teaches gratitude: it humbles a person so that they feel indebted to what they’ve received from life.

In times of suffering, Brooks suggests, a person starts to hear their calling. They can’t control their pain, but they can control how they respond to their pain. The sufferer learns that the cure for pain isn’t pleasure but holiness: pain can’t be removed, but it can be transformed into something sacred, redeemed by making a self-sacrificial act in service of suffering at large. A person recovers from suffering not by healing but by transforming. Usually, they throw themselves more wholly into the commitments that originally caused their suffering. In so doing, the sufferer cultivates character, not pleasure.

Dorothy Day became renowned for being a living example of Catholic teachings. She carried out the teaching that all human beings are one family made up of individuals endowed with equal dignity. She published The Long Loneliness in 1952. She continued to work and was distant from her loved ones, none of whom understood her faith. Day felt this was a price she paid for her calling. She was even distant from her daughter and often felt she was a bad mother.

Day debated giving up The Catholic Worker because the work was so difficult. However, she decided to stay and built up communities around the newspaper which provided her a sense of family. Day’s work carried out the vision of life as seen through the Christian gospels; it addressed everyone’s brokenness, not just that of the poor. She embraced poverty in solidarity with the suffering to be close to God. Day experienced internal suffering and loneliness, but her outward life displayed community and joy.

In 1960, Day had been living with a woman named Nanette for 30 years. Nanette was struck with cancer, and Forster came back to help Day tend to her. Day was an excellent caregiver, taking care of practical matters and not frustrating her suffering patient with insensitive silver linings. Forster, however, couldn’t bear the situation. Day suffered for Nanette, and Forster’s self-pity made her angry. Nanette died peacefully on January 8, 1960.

Dorothy was part of the peace movement of the late 1960s, but not in the way many others were. While they preached freedom and individuality, she preached obedience and self-surrender. She disagreed with the movement’s attempt to create community outside the Church and advocated for the necessary structure of Catholicism. The movement celebrated natural human behavior, but Day believed humanity is naturally corrupt and needs to be corrected through self-repression.

According to Brooks, Day stood for a truer counterculture than most “counterculturalists” in those days. She stood against capitalism and the values of Woodstock, both of which promoted the liberation of the individual, urging people to value life based on self-gratification. Day’s life is an example of self-surrender. Although she didn’t achieve total peace, she developed an inner structure and felt gratitude. After a life of hard work and self-criticism, she felt nothing but thankfulness for the Lord’s constant presence in her mind.