All the Way to Heaven

All the Way to Heaven gathers the correspondence of Dorothy Day, co-founder with Peter Maurin of the Catholic Worker movement in 1933, spanning from her twenties in the 1920s to the final years before her death in 1980. Day's personal papers, held at Marquette University, were closed for twenty-five years after she died; when they opened, Robert Ellsberg — who had worked under her as managing editor of The Catholic Worker — selected and annotated the letters that make up this volume. The title comes from Catherine of Siena: all the way to heaven is heaven, because Christ said, I am the Way. It is a fitting frame for a book in which the ordinary correspondence of a busy woman turns out to be the record of a life being converted.

What the letters do is dismantle the statue. Here is Day writing to Forster Batterham, the man she loved and left, in letters of raw longing that continue across decades after their separation; here she is writing to her daughter Tamar about childbirth, marriage, money, and grandchildren; here she is corresponding with Thomas Merton and Daniel Berrigan about war and vocation, and with bishops — including Cardinal Spellman during the 1949 cemetery workers' strike — with a deference that never quite conceals her refusal to yield. She writes to donors, to prisoners, to unstable house guests, to young volunteers she is trying to keep from burning out. The recurring theme is not strategy but endurance: how to keep loving people who are difficult, how to stay obedient to a Church whose officials she disagrees with, how to hold voluntary poverty without romanticizing it. The letters also show the cost — exhaustion, loneliness, worry over Tamar's collapsing marriage, and a persistent sense of her own failure that she never resolves so much as offers up.

The book has mattered because it supplies what the published writings could not. The Long Loneliness is a shaped autobiography; these are unshaped, dated, addressed to particular people, and often written in haste. They make Day's holiness legible as something assembled out of ordinary fidelity rather than heroic temperament, which is precisely what her cause for canonization has forced readers to consider.

Who should read this: anyone drawn to Day who suspects the saint-image has flattened her, and anyone attempting a life of service who needs evidence that persistence is compatible with doubt and irritation. Not the place to begin if you want her argument for the Catholic Worker vision — start with The Long Loneliness. Readers wanting systematic theology or a tidy narrative will find neither.