The School of the Holy Ghost

An excerpt from "The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage" by Paul Elie.

Dorothy Day wrote: "Today the Commonweal came with a chapter from Thomas Merton's book in it about his entrance into the Trappist monastery in Gethsemane, Kentucky. He mentions the need we have in our religious life for a formal observance of prayer, the need for ritual."

She was keeping a journal of the year 1948 and planned to publish it. In bringing out "On Pilgrimage," as she called it, from Catholic Worker Books, she hoped to earn some money for the movement, and probably wished to give her son-in-law a book to sell through the mail from the Distributist Bookstall he had started. But she was doubtless motivated by literary ambition as well. Ten years had passed since From Union Square to Rome had come out. She was better known as an organizer and a pacifist than as an editor and a writer.

The excerpt from "The Seven Storey Mountain" spoke to her main concern that year: the struggle to cultivate the interior life amid the life of poverty. Although the abbot of Gethsemani had told her the Catholic Worker was "a companion order in the world," the Catholic Worker life as she found it was far from contemplative, and Merton's account of Trappist life in Commonweal doubtless made it seem even less so by comparison.

Merton described Trappist poverty as a means to detachment, which would free the monks for the interior life. Day had the same idea of "holy poverty," but in 1948 poverty seemed to her to get in the way of interiority. Everywhere she looked she saw obstacles. Banks and insurance companies "dispossessed the poor man." Advertisers stirred "his useless desires .... Loan and finance companies have further defrauded him. Movies, radio have enslaved him. So that he has no time nor thought to give to his life, either of soul or or body."

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