Dorothy Day's Journey To Christianity

“But if serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve. But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.” (Joshua 24:15) People choose Christianity for many reasons. One reason may be due to the fact they were born into the religion, leaving them with no choice but to follow in the path of their ancestors. However, this was not the case for Dorothy Day. Unlike several Christians, Dorothy wasn’t born into a religious household. She didn’t have parents who provided her a religion that would satisfy her. “I had no one to teach me, as my parents had no one to teach them.” (21) Instead, she was brought to Christianity through her own experiences. Conflicted with emotional affairs and cultural

As a child, Dorothy Day didn’t have much knowledge on God, and neither did she “search for him.” (17) It was when she was eight, she began to encounter religion with the help of her neighbor, Birdie. Her curiosity for God led her to begin reading the bible and to start her own rituals. “I became disgustingly, proudly pious. I sang hymns with the family next door. I prayed on my knees beside my bed. No one went to church but me.” (20) When she entered college, all of that changed. Her priorities began to shift. She took several classes to complete her degree while living with families in exchange for doing laundry and taking care of kids. She was keeping herself busy and thought religion would only slow her down. “I wanted to have nothing to do with the religion of those whom I saw all about me. I felt that I must turn from it as from a drug. So I hardened my heart.” (43) It wasn’t until years later when she was in a jail cell that began to read the bible again. “I read it with a sense of coming back to something of my childhood that I had lost.” (80) In Dorothy’s life, she had already encountered various hardships. “I reflected on the desolation of poverty, of destitution, of sickness and sin.” (78) However, she rejected religion once again after she was freed and went on to live the period in her life she claimed to have been wasteful. And then, “I read En Route, The Oblate, The Cathedral, and it was these books which made me feel that I too could be at home in the Catholic Church.” (107) There were times when she would wander away from God because her husband, Forster, wasn’t very fond of religion. Once Dorothy Day became a Christian for good, she never regretted it. She realized that true happiness came from knowing God. And with this happiness she was able to obtain lasting peace. “It was a peace, curiously enough,