Dorothy Day And Thomas Merton Analysis

The lives of Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton represent journeys to wholeness from different starting points. Their spiritual journeys presents that sometimes in life we encounter God or pureness through our surroundings and that be the books we read, our friends, and most of all through nature and even the small things like the food we eat. Both of these write and share their spiritual journeys through their autobiographies. In her autobiography, The Long Loneliness, Dorothy day encounters early brushes with religion when she was young, she resist the church when she is in College because it is unfair to the poor. We later on see her spiritual turning point when she is jailed and starts reading the psalms and also when she is married to Forster and the birth of her child Tarma Teresa. Like Dorothy, Thomas Merton

He resisted the formal church during his years in Columbia. One day a friend of his, Lax. Merton about Lax and his influence in matters concerning both writing and spirituality. Lax was who first brought Merton to Olean and St. Bonaventure College. “We drove in to the grounds and stopped by one of the buildings. But when Lax tried to make me get out of the car, I would not. "Let's get out of here, I said”(). Merton didn’t like what he saw in that church, the crosses, the statues of Jesus didn’t make him feel comfortable. He didn’t like the church, he didn’t want to be there, and he wanted to flee this church. “Perhaps I was scared of the thought of nuns and priests being all around me: the elemental fear of the citizen of hell, in the presence of anything that savors of the religious life, religious vows, and official dedication to God through Christ. Too many crosses. Too many holy statues. Too much quiet and cheerfulness. Too much pious optimism. It made me very uncomfortable. I had to flee”(). Like Dorothy Day, this shows that Merton’s second stage was resisting church because he felt like he was unholy for