The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography Of Dorothy Day

The Long Loneliness is the autobiography of Dorothy Day and ultimately the story of a woman whose loneliness drove her to the conversion of Catholicism. Dorothy Day was born and raised in a family who were strangers to religion. Her first exposure to God came when she was still young, as she attended church with some of her neighbors. It was here she found that she liked the feeling of worship in the collective body of the congregation. However, she also became disillusioned by those people who only attended church on Sundays, assuming their profession of the faith to others did not extend to outside the church itself. These church visits merely set the foundation for Day’s journey with God.

The major event of her childhood that pointed her

She also realizes that being Catholic will not solve her “long loneliness,” she must work to build relationships with people and join a community to provide a solution. Together, Peter and Dorothy started a paper called the Catholic Worker. In it, Day used her experience in journalism to write about the injustices facing the poor and gave tips to families who were struggling. When her daughter turned 17 and she was sent off to school, Day wrote she had never felt such a sense of loneliness (Day 239). This was because the person she was closest to, her daughter, was leaving. This was a lack of personal connection, a lack of family. This was the culmination of defining the “long loneliness” for Day. The “long loneliness”, through her own experience, was a lack of community, a lack of family and the personal connection that went with it. Above all, it was a lack of God. It was around this same time that Day opened a house that provided food and shelter to those in need. This house grew into several houses and many became

Her handling of Peter’s death speaks a lot of who Dorothy Day had become. Through enduring the loss of her former lifestyle, the termination of two marriages, the separation from a daughter coming of age, and dissociation of communism and activism from her time in college, along with finding comfort in the gains she experienced, such as her daughter’s baptism, her acceptance of God and Catholicism, her friendship and partnership with Peter Maurin, and her creation of homes to help the poor, Dorothy Day created a network, a community even, through which she overcame the “long loneliness”, or the separation from community, God and