November 15, 2010 Issue
Robert Ellsberg
Generally speaking,” Robert Ellsberg (click here) writes in the November 15 issue of America,
“there is not much to say about the sex lives of saints.” So that is
why Dorothy Day’s letters to her lover Forster Batterham are so
surprising. They show the flesh-and-blood passion of a woman who many
Catholics believe will someday be declared an exemplar of the faith....
-Friday [March? 1928]
Dear Forster,--
I have been trying all week to write this letter and it is almost impossible for me to write it now. You make it much harder when you are kind to me. But we can’t go on in any but a friendly relation and I suppose you will say we can’t even have that... It is terribly hard to even mention my religious feelings to you because I am sure you do not think I am sincere. But it is not a sudden thing, but a thing which has been growing in me for years. I had impulses toward religion again and again and now when I try to order my life according to it in order to attain some sort of peace and happiness it is very hard but I must do it. Because even though it is hard, it gives me far more happiness to do it, even though it means my combating my physical feelings toward you....
Dear Forster,--
I have been trying all week to write this letter and it is almost impossible for me to write it now. You make it much harder when you are kind to me. But we can’t go on in any but a friendly relation and I suppose you will say we can’t even have that... It is terribly hard to even mention my religious feelings to you because I am sure you do not think I am sincere. But it is not a sudden thing, but a thing which has been growing in me for years. I had impulses toward religion again and again and now when I try to order my life according to it in order to attain some sort of peace and happiness it is very hard but I must do it. Because even though it is hard, it gives me far more happiness to do it, even though it means my combating my physical feelings toward you....
