A Friendship of Letters
On the Correspondence Between Thomas Merton & Dorothy Day
by Jim Forest
In the spring of 2010 the Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University received a valuable gift: the papers of Joe Zarrella, a longtime collaborator of Dorothy Day. When I was invited to speak at the Merton Center the following October, I used the occasion to reflect on the special friendship that enriched the lives of these two remarkable people: Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day.
What put Merton on the world map was the publication in 1948 of his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain. It is an account of his growing up on both sides of the Atlantic, what drew him to become a Catholic as a young adult, and what led him, in 1941, to become a Trappist monk at Our Lady of Gethsemani monastery in rural Kentucky. He was only 33 years old when the book appeared, and, to his publisher’s amazement, it became an instant bestseller. The Merton Center has lost count of how many copies have been printed in English and other languages in the past 63 years, but we’re talking about millions.
Despite Merton’s renown and his many bestselling books, he was—and remains—a controversial figure. Though a member of a monastic order well known for silence and for its distance from worldly affairs, Merton was outspoken about racism, war, and other hot topics that many regard as very worldly affairs. He got into hot water for his writings on war and peace, as well as for his participation in both inter-Christian and inter-religious dialogues.
In the 1960s, there was a Berlin Wall running between Catholics and Protestants. To the alarm of many on both sides, Merton climbed over it. Even worse, he regarded conversation with people of other religious traditions—Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam—as a useful and necessary, not to say Christian, activity. Some people were scandalized that a Trappist monk would engage in dialog with the Dalai Lama. The idea got around that, if Merton had lived a bit longer, he would have waved goodbye to the Catholic Church and become a Buddhist. But in fact, his religious practice centered on the Eucharist, the rosary, the Jesus Prayer, and the daily offices of monastic prayer.
Dorothy Day, for her part, became famous for trying to weave together radical convictions about the social order with the Christian faith. She became a Catholic in 1927, at the age of 30, and six years later founded The Catholic Worker. From that eight-page journal, the Catholic Worker movement quickly emerged, a movement known for its many houses of hospitality for people who are generally unappreciated and unwelcome. If Merton’s books sold millions of copies, Catholic Worker communities have served millions of meals.
But the Catholic Worker is also well known for its acts of protest against war and social injustice. Many people associated with the movement have served periods in jail for acts of civil disobedience or for refusing to take part in war. Dorothy herself was jailed at least eight times. The first time was for taking part in a suffragist demonstration in front of the White House in 1917, when she had just turned twenty. Her last arrest and confinement was with striking farm workers in California in 1973, when she was seventy-five. If Thomas Merton was controversial at times, Dorothy Day was controversial pretty much full-time.
Much Common Ground
I first met Dorothy in December 1960. After reading some copies of The Catholic Worker, as well as Dorothy’s autobiography, The Long Loneliness, I decided to visit the community she had founded, so I made my way to Saint Joseph’s House, the Catholic Worker house of hospitality on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. This is now a fashionable area known as the East Village, but in those days it was called the Bowery and was an area for the desperately poor—people so down-and-out that some of them slept, even in winter, on the sidewalk or in tenement hallways.
A few days later, I visited the community’s rural outpost, an old farmhouse on the southern tip of Staten Island. In its large, faded dining room, I found half-a-dozen people, Dorothy among them, gathered around a pot of tea. I gave Dorothy a bag of letters addressed to her that had been received in Manhattan. Within minutes, she was reading them aloud to us. The only one I still recall was from Thomas Merton. I was amazed. Having read The Seven Storey Mountain, I knew that Trappist monks wrote few letters, usually to family members. But here was Merton writing not only to a non-relative but to someone who was as much in the world as he was out of it.
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