Dorothy Day: The Greatest Connection To God

Throughout her early life, Dorothy has been confused about her call of being a Christian. As a little girl, Dorothy was always taught things about Christianity, whether that meant how to behave, how to pray, or even how to think. The reason she began to lose trust in her faith is because no one ever told her why she was doing things a certain way. For her, one of the greatest source of inspiration was the Psalms. “...through these Psalms and canticles I called on all creation to join with me in blessing the Lord. I thanked him for creating me, saving me from all evils, filling me with all good things” (29). Dorothy felt connected to God by reading the Psalms. She felt joyous and enthusiastic to communicate with God in such a way. Another religious influence she had was a volume of John Wesley’s sermons in her early teens. As she grew older and more attached to the materialistic world, her faith slowly became a part of her life that held little or no importance to her.

After coming back from jail and going back to Washington, she turned toward the church again, because she felt the need to connect to God again. “Certainly I felt again and again the need to go to church to kneel, to bow my head in prayer...I put myself in the atmosphere of prayer- it was an act of the will,” (85). She gradually began to realize that her mind, body, and soul can be brought into harmony through the peace she gets from practicing her faith. When Dorothy decided to become a nurse and help out victims of the war, she began to question the way of life and her thoughts began to change about religion. “I felt that it was necessary for man to worship, that he was most truly himself when engaged in the act,” (93). It was almost as if she found her true self when she went to