Day and Merton: A Downward Path to Salvation
Review
In "The Meaning of Conversion," we saw that conversion results in our being more the person God created us to be (“in God’s image and likeness”).
We also considered the tensions that would prevent us from making our personal “You-Turn”: (1) the human condition, (2) the collective sinfulness of humankind, (3) our own personal sins, and (4) peer pressure against change.
I now want to present those same concepts through the lives of two great 20th century figures (Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton), both of whom ran from God until they could run no more. They each reached a point in their lives when they could do nothing else but face God and yield their lives to God.
Perhaps in some way you will catch a glimpse of yourself in these stories.
Dorothy Day (1897-1980)
At the age of 21, Dorothy Day—who was not a Catholic—was running with a crowd that included the literary giant, Eugene O’Neill (Long Day’s Journey Into Night). After a night of heavy drinking, Dorothy stopped into St. Joseph’s Church on Sixth Avenue in New York City.
In her journal she recorded what she was thinking: “Sooner or later I would have to pause in the mad rush of living and remember my first beginnings and my last end.”
• In "The Life You Save May
be Your Own,"
Paul Elie writes about Dorothy Day:
“All her life she had been haunted by God. God was behind her. God loomed before
her. Now she felt hounded toward Him, as though toward home; now she longed for
an end to the wavering life in which she was caught.”
• During that night of boozing with her
buddies, Eugene O’Neill had recited the entire
Francis Thompson poem, “The
Hound of Heaven,” the opening lines of which are:
I fled him, down the nights and down the days
I fled him, down the arches of the years
I fled him, down the labyrinthine ways
of my own mind; and in the midst of tears
I hid from him.
That night, Dorothy felt that the poem was directed at her heart.
She found in St. Joseph’s Church—and in the Catholic Church—that morning (in Paul Elie’s words) “a place of pilgrimage, a home, a destination, where city and world meet, where the self encounters the other, where personal experience and the testimony of the ages can be reconciled” (page 29).
Dorothy’s questions at that time were:
(1) What are we here for?
(2) What is the meaning of my life?
It would be nice if the next part of the story had her running to God and living happily ever after as a good Christian woman. That’s not what happened.
• She fell in love for the first time and began an affair with a man named Lionel Moise.
-- She got pregnant, attempted suicide, then had an abortion (“. . . and in the midst of tears I hid from him”).
• She fell in love again and married Berkeley Toby, a wealthy man twice her age. That marriage failed within a year.
• She entered a
common-law marriage with an atheist named Forster Batterham, whom she
calls in her journal, “the man I love.” Batterham was the first good man she
had loved.
-- Dorothy got
pregnant, but Batterham didn’t want children, so they divorced while she
was still pregnant. (Later, he actually enjoyed being a father!)
-- It was during her pregnancy, she writes
in 1925, that she is “surprised
that I am beginning to pray daily.”
- She began to read Scripture and
The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis.
-- She gave birth to a daughter, Tamara Teresa.
• Dorothy hardly knew anything about the Catholic Church, but she wanted to have Tamara baptized, hoping that in time the faith would take hold of her indirectly.
• Dorothy was baptized Catholic on Dec. 28, 1927 – the day after she ended her marriage!
-- “A conversion is a lonely experience,” she said. “We do not know what is going on in the depths of the heart and soul of another. We scarcely know ourselves.”
• From there, Dorothy set
out to find own voice and her own calling.
-- She founded the
Catholic Worker Movement and
dedicated her
life to the
poor and to
social justice.
-- Because she was an absolute pacifist, she lost many of her followers during WWII.
Thomas Merton (1915-1968)
Born in France of American parents. At 16, he was an orphan.
• His key questions at that time were:
(1) Who am I?
(2) Who am I meant to be?
At 18, he was in Italy having a great time.
• He experienced a significant dream:
His father appeared at his elbow. In a flash, Thomas saw that his own soul was corrupt and he longed to be free. He wept, calling out to God and his dead father. And for the first time in his life . . . he prayed, really prayed to be set free (Elie, p. 34).
Paralleling Dorothy Day’s path to conversion, Merton would not be set free yet. First, he would bottom out.
• He went to university in Cambridge, missed a lot of morning classes because he was out drinking all night. He became a womanizer. He also got arrested on some minor charge
-- He got a girl named Sylvia pregnant and ran off to New York. All that is ever known of the son that was born to Sylvia is that he probably died in the London bombings (the “blitz”) during World War II.
• Merton bottomed out when he suffered a breakdown on a train from Long Island to New York City (Elie, p. 76).
-- He said later of this experience: “My defeat was to be the occasion of my rescue.”
-- One after another, these guideposts persuaded him that a life lived in search of God is real life, the only one worth living.
- One of those guideposts was the British Catholic poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Jesuit priest.
• In 1939, Merton was baptized a Catholic. He knew very little about Catholic teaching, because his “instruction” had come through reading. In other words, he encountered Catholicism second hand.
-- After he became a Catholic, he was surprised to find how little conversion change a person.
• Later became a Trappist monk at Gethsemane Abbey in Kentucky.
Common Traits in Day and Merton
(1) Both of these great people “read themselves into the Church”—little formal training, no community to support them, no RCIA in those days.
(2) Both were outstanding writers:
· Day wrote a novel, The Long Loneliness, that thinly disguised her own life. For decades, she was the “voice” and heart of the Catholic Worker newspaper.
-- Once said she wished she could gather up every copy and burn them.
· Ten years after becoming a Catholic, Merton wrote the story of his conversion in one of the most important books of the 20th century—The Seven Storey Mountain (1948). It has sold over one million copies and has been translated into twenty-eight languages.
Reflections of Paul Elie, author of The Live You Save May be Your Own
Elie found a common ground in the conversion stories of Day and Merton.
“They are sinning their way to God . . . following a downward path to salvation. For a while, they will press forward without anyone to guide them, plunging directly into experience. As they hit bottom, they will discover God—or more precisely, their desire for God. Slowly, painfully, faith will follow” (Elie, p. 32).
“Although they do not record it in all its details, the experience of sin is crucial, because, for them both, only direct experience of the life of sin—evil, greed, violence, despair—will justify the life of faith that is to follow” (Elie, p. 32).
Recommended reading: The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, by Paul Elie (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Discussion Questions
What, if anything impressed or inspired you as you listened to these two conversion stories?
How do you relate in some
way to Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton?
Conclusion
As you can see from our discussions of conversion, Catholics understand conversion to be “a process, not an event.” We are always in need of conversion and we are always on the road to conversion.
Moral: “Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.”
A fitting conclusion is to quote the poem, “Falling in Love,” by Pedro Arrupe, S.J., that applies to the lives of Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton.
Nothing is more practical than finding God;
that is,
falling in love in a quite absolute, final way.
What you are falling in love with,
what seizes your imagination,
will affect everything.
It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning,
what you will do with your evenings,
how you will spend your weekends,
what you read,
who you know,
what breaks your heart,
and what amazes you with joy and gratitude.
Fall in love.
Stay in love.
And it will decide everything.