Dorothy Day - All the Way to Heaven: The Selected Letters of Dorothy Day

The publication of the letters of Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker, is a significant event in the history of Christian spirituality. Like her journals, these lettersby turns personal, frank, earthy, joyful, frustrated, contrite, hopeful, funny, and, above all, unmistakably humanwill change the widely held belief that Dorothy was interested only in her movement. Instead she is revealed as a woman deeply involved with her family, her friends, her church, her country, and her world. Her love letters to her common-law husband, Forster, will also challenge the popular notion of sanctity, which sometimes equates real holiness with a disinterested and disembodied love. Love is, in fact, the hidden theme of the letters of this astonishing woman: love for the poor, love for her fellow human beings, and love for God. Read these remarkable letters and come to know a saint. Study them and come to know what Christian action is about. Take them to heart and come to know God more fully.

JAMES MARTIN, SJ, AUTHOR OF MY LIFE WITH THE SAINTS

These wonderful letters (wonderful even in a merely human sense) can almost startle us with their revelationnatural, unpretentious, non-preachyof what it means to be holy. Dorothy Day loved our Lord in the darkness of a real world, one where she met with distrust, betrayal, grinding poverty, and anxiety. These sorrows did not keep her from God. They drew her into His own redemptive suffering. There are no letters like these.

SISTER WENDY BECKETT

Editor Robert Ellsberg has supplied masterful context and commentary to give a good summary of her life at the Catholic Worker, but it is for the intimate Dorothy and her friends that one should read All the Way to Heaven. In these letters, we see a Dorothy Day who falls in love with God, and with God in the thousands of people who came into her life. Savor and delight in these letters, the last of her once-unpublished words were going to get.

ROSALIE RIEGLE, SOJOURNERS

Readers continue to encounter Day in her own books and a growing number of thoughtful assessments of her life and work. In those we find an impressive, even saintly, journalist observer, a remarkable Christian witness and spiritual guide. But in her letters we meet her as a person very much like ourselves. If saints are people who, over a lifetime, try very hard to live out the gospel message of love and forgiveness, in the first instance with those whom they meet every day, then these letters provide a lot of evidence of Dorothy Days saintliness. But be warned: holiness in action, at least in the case of Day, is not an easy path.

DAVID OBRIEN, COMMONWEAL

These letters, along with her diary entries, give clear evidence of an extraordinary woman, one who herself spent a long life living the Christian Gospel, and one who undoubtedly deserves to be called saint.

R. KEVIN SEASOLTZ, OSB, WORSHIP

This book reveals a portrait of a remarkable Christian, one who throughout her life worked fiercely and relentlessly to put on Christ, to conform her life to his. From the beginning in 1933 until her death she chose to live with the poor and serve them, tirelessly performing the works of mercy. She spoke up faithfully and courageously against violence and oppression. All of this was rooted in and sustained by the prayer life of the church. The American Catholic church is floundering and deeply in need of heroes and models. This great and holy woman should be one of them.

ROBERT GILLIAM, AMERICAN CATHOLIC STUDIES

Taken together, the diaries and letters afford us a fuller appreciation of Dorothy Days spiritual genius, her courageous and loving heart, the depth of her suffering, and the gratitude that undergird her rigorous but ultimately triumphant life.

RACHELLE LINNER, SPIRITUAL LIFE

Thirty-five years after her death, Dorothy Day remains one of the most compelling and transformative personalities in the history American Catholicism. Robert Ellsberg has performed a monumental service by editing selections of her diaries and now her letters All future studies of Dorothy Day will necessarily take the letters and diaries into account, and even libraries that serve casual readers rather than researchers will find this inspiring and revealing collection to be a worthwhile acquisition.

DAN McKANAN, CATHOLIC LIBRARY WORLD

These letters offer an incomparable window into the heart and mind of one of the most inspiring spiritual leaders of the twentieth century. They are a treasure trove, the fruit of truly counter-cultural consciousness. Read them if you can. Most of us will not be Dorothy Days, but all of us can benefit immensely from her upside down understanding of the tasks to which God calls us in the world.

FRIENDS JOURNAL

This splendid collection of Dorothy Days letters offers a doorway into the ups and downs of her daily endeavors. Inside this wealth of correspondence both Days ordinary human struggles and her deep spirituality are revealed. I rejoiced at being able to peer inside this enriching view of Dorothy Days life. There I found a woman who both inspires and challenges me toward further peace and justice.

JOYCE RUPP, AUTHOR OF FRAGMENTS OF YOUR ANCIENT NAME

Diaries are one thing, letters often quite another. After reading Dorothy Days diaries (published in 2008 as The Duty of Delight), I couldnt have imagined a more unobstructed gaze into the heart and mind of this extraordinary woman. But this selection of her letters, stretching across almost sixty years, augments them wonderfully. Every letter is written to a particular individualher daughter Tamar, an old friend, a wayward Catholic Worker, a bishop, a poetso the tone and level of discourse alter almost kaleidoscopically from one page to the next. She is warm, funny, passionate, high-minded, withering, desolate, fierce, and self-effacing by swift turns, and before long you realize, as her reader, that you are in the presence of an absolutely human being who is evolving in plain sightand that it is an enormous privilege to be there watching. I cherish this book.

CAROL LEE FLINDERS, PH.D., AUTHOR OF ENDURING LIVES:
PORTRAITS OF WOMEN AND FAITH IN ACTION

Dorothy Day with her grandchildren, 1950s.

Copyright 2010 by Marquette University
Introduction and Preface 2010 by Robert Ellsberg

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Image Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

IMAGE and the Image colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Marquette University Press, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 2010.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Day, Dorothy, 18971980.
All the way to heaven: the selected letters of Dorothy Day / edited by Robert Ellsberg.
1. Day, Dorothy, 18971980Correspondence. 2. CatholicsUnited StatesCorrespondence. 3. Catholic Worker Movement.