All my being seeks God...
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"All my being seeks God." Dorothy Day, one of the founders of the Catholic Worker movement, did not grow up with a strong attachment to the church, though there were times of piety and religiosity in her growing up and youth. But she came to believe that God meant human beings to be happy, and she saw far more destitution and misery around her and reported in the news that seemed to be right. She wanted everyone to be kind, not just the well-motivated few, to care for the poor, the lame, the blind. She read Jack London and Upton Sinclair, and became very concerned about the "class war," while there was a war going on in Europe. While in college she joined the Socialist party and spent many hours studying and writing and struggling with the question of the place of religion in her life and the contradiction she felt between religion as she saw it being lived around her, and the great needs of masses of working poor. She began writing for socialist newspapers and supporting the labor union movement. While living in a Catholic household, she felt drawn to Catholicism, but it was not until she had a baby some years later that she knew she had to become a Catholic herself. Yet her search did not end there. She continued to seek ways to gain more power and meet the needs of the poor, and with Peter Maurin, created the paper known as the Catholic Worker. Day's search for God was one that was deeply concerned with embodying God's will for human life around her. She would not separate the concrete, daily needs of human life from faith. For her they had to go together. -- Johnson-Hoy
