Day found herself suffering with Nanette and fighting off anger toward Forster. “I get so impatient at him and his constant fleeing from her, his self-pity and his weeping that I feel hard and must fight to overcome it. Such fear of sickness and death.”
On January 7, 1960, Nanette asked to be baptized. The next day she died. Day remembered her final hours: “This morning at 8:45 Nanette died after an agony of two days. The Cross was not as hard as this, she said. People in concentration camps suffered like this, she said, showing her arms. She died peacefully after a slight hemorrhage. She had a slight smile, calm and peaceful.”
Apotheosis
When the radicalism of the late 1960s came along, Day became active in the peace movement, and in many of the other political activities of the era, but she couldn’t have been more different from those radicals in her fundamental approach to life. They preached liberation, freedom, and autonomy. She preached obedience, servitude, and self-surrender. She had no patience for the celebration of open sexuality and the lax morality. She was repelled when some young people wanted to use a Dixie cup to serve the sacramental wine. She was out of step with the spirit of the counterculture and complained about all the rebellious young people: “All this rebellion makes me long for obedience—hunger and thirst for it.”
In 1969 she wrote a journal entry disagreeing with those who sought to build community outside the permanent disciplines of the Church. Day had always understood the flaws in the Catholic Church, but she also understood the necessity of the structure. The radicals around her saw only the flaws and wanted to throw everything away. “It is as though the adolescents had just discovered their parents were fallible and they are so shocked they want to throw out the institutions of the home and go in for ‘community.’…They call them ‘young adults’ but it seems to me they are belated adolescents with all the romanticism that goes with it.”
The years confronting genuine dysfunction in the shelters had made Day realistic. “I can’t bear romantics,” she told one interviewer. “I want a religious realist.” Much of the activism she saw around her was far too easy and self-forgiving. She had paid a terrible price to perform community service and to practice her faith—the breakup of her relationship with Forster, the estrangement from her family. “For me, Christ was not bought for thirty pieces of silver, but with my heart’s blood. We buy not cheap on this market.”
All around her people were celebrating nature and natural man, but Day believed that natural man is corrupt and is only saved by repressing natural urges. “We must be pruned to grow,” she wrote, “and cutting hurts the natural man. But if this corruption is to put on incorruption, if one is to put on Christ, the new man, pain of one kind or another is inevitable. And how joyful a thought that in spite of one’s dullness and lethargy one is indeed growing in the spiritual life.”
The word “counterculture” was used a lot in the late 1960s, but Day was living according to a true counterculture, a culture that stood athwart not only the values of the mainstream culture of the day—the commercialism, the worship of success—but also against the values of the Woodstock counterculture the media was prone to celebrate—the antinomianism, the intense focus on the liberated individual and “doing your own thing.” The Woodstock counterculture seemed, superficially, to rebel against mainstream values, but as the ensuing decades have demonstrated, it was just a flipside version of the culture of the Big Me. Both capitalism and Woodstock were about the liberation of self, the expression of self. In commercial society you expressed self by shopping and building a “lifestyle.” In Woodstock culture you expressed self by casting off restraint and celebrating yourself. The bourgeois culture of commerce could merge with the bohemian culture of the 1960s precisely because both favored individual liberation, both encouraged people to measure their lives by how they were able to achieve self-gratification.
Day’s life, by contrast, was about the surrender of self and ultimately the transcendence of self. Toward the end of her life she would occasionally appear on television talk shows. There is a simplicity and directness to her presence on these shows, and great self-possession. Through The Long Loneliness and her other writings she practiced a sort of public confession, which has attracted people ever since. She was open about her interior life, as Frances Perkins and Dwight Eisenhower never were. She was the opposite of reticent. The premise behind her confession was not mere self-revelation, though. It was the idea that in the long run our problems are all the same. As Yishai Schwartz writes, “Confessions are meant to reveal universal truths through specific examples. Through introspection and engagement with the priest, the penitent uses her experiences to transcend her own life. Confession is thus a private moral act with a public moral purpose. For in reflecting on private decisions, we better understand the problems and struggles of humanity—itself composed of billions of individuals struggling with their own decisions.” Day’s confessions were theological, too. Her attempts to understand herself and humanity were really efforts to understand God.
She certainly never achieved complete spiritual tranquillity and self-satisfaction. On the day she died, there was a card inserted into the final page of her journal, inscribed with a prayer of penance from Saint Ephraim the Syrian that begins, “O Lord and master of my life, take from me the spirit of sloth, faintheartedness, lust of power and idle talk. But give to thy servant rather the spirit of chastity, humility, patience and love.”
But over the course of her life, she built a steady inner structure. Her work for others yielded a certain steadiness in herself, which was so absent in the early years. And at the end there was gratitude. For her tombstone inscription she simply chose the words DEO GRATIAS. Toward the close of her life she met with Robert Coles, a Harvard child psychiatrist, who had become a friend and confidant. “It will soon be over,” she told him. And then she described a moment when she tried to make a literary summation of her life. She had been writing all those years and it would have been natural to write a memoir. She sat down one day to compose something like that. She told Coles what happened:
I try to think back; I try to remember this life that the Lord gave me; the other day I wrote down the words “a life remembered,” and I was going to try to make a summary for myself, write what mattered most—but I couldn’t do it. I just sat there and thought of our Lord, and His visit to us all those centuries ago, and I said to myself that my great luck was to have had Him on my mind for so long in my life!
Coles wrote, “I heard the catch in her voice as she spoke, and soon her eyes were a little moist, but she quickly started talking of her great love for Tolstoy, as if, thereby, she had changed the subject.”50 That moment represents a calm apotheosis, a moment when after all the work and all the sacrifice and all the efforts to write and change the world, the storm finally abates and a great calm comes over. Adam I lies down before Adam II. The loneliness ends. At the culmination of that lifetime of self-criticism and struggle there was thankfulness.
CHAPTER 5
SELF-MASTERY
George Catlett Marshall was born in 1880 and grew up in Uniontown, Pennsylvania. Uniontown was a small coal city, with a population of about thirty-five hundred, just then being transformed by industrialization. His father was a successful businessman—thirty-five years old when George was born—who had established himself as a figure of some consequence in town. He was proud of his old southern family. Supreme Court Justice John Marshall was a distant relative. His father was also somewhat stiff and reserved, especially at home, where he played the role of lord of the manor.