"We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community."
Having long experienced a peculiar kind of isolation, Day realizes that everyone can relate. The human experience is a lonely one. Only when she dives into community, does she find a release. The love of other lonely people can cure the solitary nature of one's existence.
"We cannot love God unless we love each other, and to love we must know each other. We know Him in the breaking of bread, and we know each other in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone anymore. Heaven is a banquet and life is a banquet, too, even with a crust, where there is companionship."
The process of becoming a Catholic brought Day from isolation into community. She finds the fullness of human experience in shared experience. Her faith comes to life in the people around her, as a parallel of her internal process of getting to know God.
"I felt that the Church was the Church of the poor . . . but at the same time, I felt that it did not set its face against a social order which made so much charity in the present sense of the word necessary. I felt that charity was a word to choke over. Who wanted charity?"
Day brings her activist mindset into Catholicism. She calls for the Church to cease being a passive agent of charity -- which, in Day's opinion, could be prevented entirely; instead she desires the Church to be an active agent speaking against oppressive ideas. That way no one needs to be subject to charity because they could be active in love and empowerment.
"I was lonely, deadly lonely. And I was to find out then, as I found out so many times, over and over again, that women especially are social beings, who are not content with just husband and family, but must have a community, a group, an exchange with others. Young and old, even in the busiest years of our lives, we women especially are victims of the long loneliness."
In her marriage, Day learns most profoundly that she needs community. Circumstantially she possess all that society tells her should satisfy her, but she's not content. She needs an entire community of people to satisfy the loneliness inside her, a characteristic which she associates with a woman's brain.
