Story Circle Network
Austin Chapter
Reader's Guide

June 2000
The Long Loneliness

The Long Loneliness
by Dorothy Day

  1. "The path to one's buried self runs through the unearthing of one's corporate past, however that has (like our private pasts) been betrayed, its vision lost, its call unheeded. The best things in the church, as in a nation, or in individuals, are hidden and partially disowned, the vital impulse buried under all our cowardly misuses of it*as the life of a nation lies under and is oppressed by its crude governing machinery; as the self lies far below the various roles imposed or adopted by it; as covenant and gospel run, subterranean, beneath temple and cathedral. Life's streams lie far down, for us, below the surface of our lives* where we must look for them. It is time to join the underground."
    --From Gary Wills, Bare Ruined Choirs: Doubt, Prophecy & Radical Religion
    Dorothy Day was a champion of society's disowned, "the underworld of victims, the excluded, the urban poor," defining herself in opposition to violence, injustice. While she maintains that she had nothing to regret or leave behind in becoming a Christian, what do you make of her attitude toward marriage, remarriage, divorce, sexual conduct and the church in light of her own decision to chose between "God or man." Was her choice a 'disowning of self' or do you agree with Berrigan that in "Catholicism she came . . . to her true self?"

  2. "Do I contradict myself?
    Very well then I contradict myself
    (I am large, I contain multitudes.)"
    --Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
    How can we reconcile the seeming contradictions inherent in Dorothy Day's roles as anarchist, pacifist, Catholic, feminist, mother, socialist, traditionalist, liberal, contemplative/mystic, activist, converted agnostic, journalist, bohemian, publisher, 'disciple' of Peter Maurin, 'daughter' (within her own family) and as a 'daughter of the Church Fathers', founder and director of Catholic Worker houses for activism and later of retreat houses for contemplation.

    What contradictions are you aware of in the roles you play in your own life?

  3. Catholics like Dorothy Day, the Berrigans, Cesar Chavez; Protestants like Martin Luther King, Dietrich Bonhoeffer paid a high price for their 'cost of discipleship' rejecting a 'cheap grace' in favor of "roots instead of rockets, tradition over progress, tragedy over arrogance, weakness over power, gospel over Caesar."

    Are you aware of any choices you have made on your own spiritual journey that have 'cost' you for the discipleship in your life?

  4. "What is generally regarded as success*acquisition of wealth, the capture of power or social prestige*I consider the most dismal failures. I hold when it is said of a man that he has arrived, it means that he is finished*his development has stopped at that point. I have always striven to remain in a state of flux and continued growth, and not to petrify in a niche of self-satisfaction."
    --Emma Goldman
    In your estimation, did the Catholic Worker movement accomplish Peter Maurin's goal of 'building a world in which it was easier to be good'; or, was the movement a "well-intentioned but ineffectual pietistic activism?"

  5. What are your thoughts on the title of the book, The Long Loneliness? Do you feel that Dorothy Day succeeds in convincing us of the depths of this loneliness given her reticence about her past and even her then-current affairs? In light of her comment that writing a book about oneself is 'giving oneself away'. Do you think she does 'give herself away' in relation to:
    1. the father of her first child;
    2. her relationship with her father? (who was distant and preoccupied with the racetrack).
    3. her relationship with her mother? (Who refused to worry when things were going badly).
    4. the family's periods of poverty?
    5. her relationship with Forster?
    Why or why not?