All four of them started in the late 40s and early 50s. Each found their own way to God.
Dorthy Day was a radical and an aetheist. After having an abortion she was told that she might not be able to have another child. When she became pregnant with her boy friend, forrester an anarchist, she was overjoyed and listened to a voice inside her and had he daughter baptized. This drove her boyfriend away and she was baptised shortly afterwards. She soon began to work among the poor and felt a true connection to them. She imagined that life could be better than it was for all people. With Peter Moran, she began a newspaper, the Catholic Worker. She believed that humans had a natural tendancy to help others. She believed this because after the San Fransiscan earthquake, she was there and saw as the people of Oakland assisted in any way they could the people coming across the bay. In her book, Long Loneliness, she stated that some said The Catholic Worker was about community, others about poverty, but she said it was about love.
Flannery O'Conner grew up and lived in the South, mostly Georgia. One day she was speaking to an English class, and a member of that audience, a young poet, Alfred Corn, wrote to her being to shy to speak with her that day. In her return letter she wrote at one point," I think this experience you are having of losing your faith, or as you think, of having lost it is an experience that in the long run belongs to faith; or at least it can belong to faith if faith is still valuable to you, and it must be or you would not have written me about this."
Walker Percy was a southern writer who attributed most of his technique not to southern or American writers but to French writers. He says that the novel is particular to the Christian west and, "Judeo-Christianity is about pilgrims who have something wrong with them and are on a search to find the way out. This is also what novels are about."
Thomas Merton found that midieval monks interested him, living cloistered improving their intellectual and spiritual lives through study and prayer. After seeing several examples of true Catholicism he joined a Trappist order at Gethsemani Abbey near Louisville, Kentucky. After several years of prayer and writing at the abbey, in 1968, Thomas left and visited the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India. They talked at length and had many discussions. At his hotel Thomas slipped after a shower and died from electrocution from a faulty wire. The Dalai Lama at this point had become a good friend and paid tribute to his deceased friend.
Paul Elie writes in his book that, " a pilgrimage is a journey taken in the light of a story. A great event has happened; apilgrim hears the reports and goes in search of the evidence, aspiring to be an eyewitness. The pilgrim seeks not only to confirm the experience of others but to be changed by the experiance." I believe what Paul says because i feel that even broader that lif is a story, and ours is but a small section of it. The story started before us and most likely will end after us, but we need to make our chapter the best we can.