Chapter 14

    Everybody falls in love, usually more than once, and it seems that far too great a proportion of lovers do little or no thinking about the ratios between the affection of one soul for another and the affection of either or both of those souls for God. Too late, if ever, do we come to the mystic's realization that the most profound of human joys in the love of another human, especially of the opposite gender, is no more than the middle act of the Divine Comedy. God is the cause of love - He it was, after all, who made the hearts in question - and He is also the ultimate goal and union of all our best longings. In our mature wisdom in fact, if we are so fortunate as to acquire it, we come to understand that our human romances are no more than occasions for our romance with the Virgin and the Trinity, the angels and saints, and it is only through understanding this sublime pattern and procedure that we can make the best of our human adventures of the heart. That is, human as they might seem merely to be at first, in our inexperience, and then, as we grow wiser, perhaps more Divine than human, keeping in mind that once we have been purged of sensuality and egoistic pride, we are good instruments for participating in the operations of care for each and all of mankind that come from the heart of a God who, is after all, in His own essential nature nothing but love. The opportunity to learn this fundamental law of life here, as well as in the hereafter, begins with the earliest experiences of childhood - "Suffer the little children to come unto Me." - but inadequate formation can obscure this reality. God is ever and everywhere teaching, but we are slow and unwilling to learn. Or, as I said, not correctly instructed.
    Thus the ravages of purgatory, for the saved but imperfect, because we must know how to love, and be loved by, perfectly, every soul in Heaven. There is no passing through the pearly gates for those who fail at love, that is, are still lacking the fullness of charity and wisdom in every corner of every faculty.
    Man, in his foolishness, in the habitual condition of what, in his fallen nature, he calls his instincts, rebels radically at such a contractual stipulation. The terms are too high, nobody can be both perfectly perfect and perfectly natural; a God who loves cannot possibly expect us to be so hard on ourselves; people who do wish themselves to know perfection - and actually act on such desires - are only indulging a prideful ambition. And so on and so forth. The world yaps, the flesh complains, the devil alternately whines and bullies. And life is lived at so much lower a level than it was intended to be.
    No quantity of merely human romance, of course, can teach us the essentials of perfection. Perfection belongs to God alone, and so jealously does He husband its particulars that claims of perfection that are only human are of all false claims the most severely punished. Yet in any romance reasonably well conducted, especially in a romance where innocence remains a predominant factor, there is much that is analogous to the relationship between a human heart and the Divine one, and many lessons, which if well studies in the beginning that is man and woman, go far to illuminate the end that is man or woman and the Infinite.
    Then, when this perfect union is accomplished, between the individual soul and God, there comes a final, totally fulfilled, understanding of what it is to perfectly obey the two great commandments of Christ - the love of God and the love of neighbour - according to their divinely intended destinies. The heavenly perfection of this state is comprehensible only to those who have been given it, in spite of their unworthiness, in this life, and it cannot be explained univocally, as the philosophers say, in words. The science of the mature mystics is not subject to ordinary observation by anyone, just as the experience of the beginners is hardly intelligible even to themselves.The demands of faith are never stronger. Yet the results are readily discernible, even where mere common sense, short of a genuine Christian faith, are the best the observer can call upon. Those who have been to Heaven, as it were, and returned, exhibit an astounding simplicity, and clarity of purpose, as well as an unshakable humility based on the scientific certainty of their experiential knowledge of the ultimate ways of the Way, the Truth, and the Light.
    Yet, of course, their journey toward such a lovely state was incapable of avoiding the most indescribable discomforts, trials, mortifications, predicaments of absolute detachments, losses, rejections, abuses, contempts, frustrations, contradictions. Some of these - the lesser part - were provided by man, and the others by God, or by God letting the devil have his hours. The ineffable treasure of the Seventh Mansion is not for the unsteady of will, the sluggish mind, the complacent and unpurged soul. For such a prize, there must be an awful lot of testing, not only at the initial levels of the spiritual life, but also much farther along than even ordinarily learned men might think. Saint Teresa utters the most dire warnings in such a lofty state as the Fifth Mansions, and John of the Cross discusses the refinement of faults even in the final dispositions of the Seventh.
    And, as odd as it may seem to those who assume that real religion is all severity - the curse of Calvin and Knox, and any other so-called thinkers illiterate and unimaginative enough to follow them - the experience of those who have come to know the fully matured love of God in this life have the habit of recalling that a good proportion of the rules of Divine love were there to be studied and applied in the first experience of human love. Our Lord, after all, the acknowledged master of lovers, wastes no time with His pupils and proteges, and where He allows and even promotes the heart to open to the light in another soul, has certain elements of Himself to insert into the process. He tries to teach that all genuine love comes from Him, and indeed, must return to Him, and from time to time He fully succeeds, in an earthly life. In the final analysis, in the resolutions of purgatory and hell, He succeeds absolutely, of course; yet we like to think that some men and women can be genuinely sensitive enough, spiritually wise enough, to allow Him to succeed within them in life before ordinary death.
    So what is the formula for giving Jesus that freedom? Humility, in the first place. Then gratitude for an adventure that unfolds one day at a time, as Providence may dispose. Without question, a mighty dollop of fear of the Lord, and an equal commodity of the preferential option for innocence and purity.
All of these are infinitely precious, to society as well as to an individual, yet no civilization or culture in the history of mankind has possessed any great abundance of such qualities within that civilization or culture taken in its entirety. They do not come naturally to associations of fallen man, but rather spring up in individuals who then set an example - and a preaching, if they are so ordained - that attracts those who feel any inclination to be lifted out of the mire of self-interest. The apostles and martyrs of the first centuries of Christianity were such individuals, but they were no more than a light in the midst of the general darkness of pagan Rome and a Judaism now failing for lack of prophets, the last of these having been John the Baptist. Their successors, especially in Egypt, were the desert fathers - and mothers and sisters as well, in time - who became the light in the midst of a legalized Christianity and the moronic dominance of the Arian heresy. Then came Benedict and the monks and mendicants of the West, and a leaven and a light that almost succeeded in making these lovely qualities an everlastingly accepted norm, for, in a sense, they almost governed the civilization they had created and inspired for a thousand years; yet the saints of those centuries could never relax against the Devil's puppets, and in the end, in Luther, Henry VIII and so forth, humility, obedience, chastity, were swept under the rug, to the degree that they functioned as a ruling standard, and once again society's only chance of sanity came from the radical holiness and organizational abilities of certain inspired individuals: Ignatius of Loyola, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Francis de Sales, Pius V. To such a large extent, northern Europe turned into a vast home for the mentally unfit, and its strange form of culture proved its own unique identity by creating the various styles of psychotherapists professions. Northern Europe began its modern history by rejecting the Christian papacy and wound up, in a sense, being ruled by two sons of Abraham, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. Both these men were brilliant in their own way, and have had a vast influence on recent social philosophy, but only intellects without a well-rooted obedience could think for a moment that they had any kind of complete description of the nature of man, either singly or together. To abandon Rome is to abandon common sense, scholasticism, and very likely all or most of the most fundamental dispositions of the whole mind.
    This may seem like a very long and unnecessary digression, having nothing at all to do with the romantic life of a nineteen-year-old, and for a moment I myself wondered if I were not wandering, but the Muse reminds me, from His lofty perch, that my circular track has certain utility. Philosophers, even very young ones, fall in love within a certain disposition, and novelists as well - they have to watch that they do not try it out just for the sake of the experiences from which stories come - so Providence must do its best to ensure as real an experience as possible, even in these affairs of the heart that are not destined for the binding journey to the altar.
    I don't think I'm exaggerating anything in this narrative, although I must admit that it's taken me many years to see to the bottom of it, and that accomplishment might never have come along had I not again turned to a thorough read of a book I first became aware of in the early '70's, Gabrielle Bossis' lovely dialogue with Christ, He and I. It was in that book, not so many days ago, that I saw Him say to the little French actress and contemplative, "There is a little of my Mother in every woman." 
    It is actually Mothers' Day, 1999, as I write this, and the mood of the celebration reminds me to recollect that all men who have had the great fortune to be brought to a perfect relationship with the Virgin Mary - it is She who bids me say such a thing - can easily recall certain aspects of the Divine maternity in their own mothers, and other female relatives, even when those women, by the particular slant of their ethics, were not aware of the omnipresence of the perfect Woman expressed in the wonderful formula, on of the most wonderful in all Catholic theology, "What God is by nature, Mary is by grace." For those who Mary favours with an invitation to come to the fullness of friendship with her that Catholicism makes possible, she will be at work as early as possible in their lives, using any goodness in any female as a sign and promise of the infinite goodness God has created in her. Later, when the child has grown to the man, and has lived up to the promise the Divine Mother held out for him, he will even create that reflection in other women, sometimes in the most wretched of other women, simply because this is one of the spiritual powers that may come with a divinely instilled perfection.
    It goes without saying that this same reflective grace, to be genuine, and beyond suspicion of wrongful intentions, should ordinarily shine equally on men and children.
    At the same time, it can also be pointed out that there are always a great many women it cannot seem to affect, simply because they are not spiritually disposed for it. This favour is something bestowed primarily from the power of God, and the human bestower is only a vessel of that power. In its most profound manifestations, moreover, it as a rule cannot happen unless the recipient has the remarkable virtue necessary for its reception, and it will not happen unless there is some good reason according to God's intentions.
    And the fact that it happens once does not mean necessarily that it will happen again. Many are called, but few are chosen, very much applies. Or, it may not happen again for a considerable time. Of all vocations, the spiritual life requires the most patience, because of all vocations, it contains the hardest sayings. It has all the vicissitudes of romance, but every one of them much more intensely.
    And thus I am returned to the place where I started - with, then, no anticipation of such a digression - in the beginnings of what seemed at the time like a normal affair of the heart. Grace must build on nature, and the skills of grace must build on the skills of nature. Nor was the digression all that digressive. I suspect that most of the elements of the previous paragraphs had a bearing on the human adventure. Even before I went on to university, in the months before I was done with high school, I had been moved to think of giving a sympathetic and appreciative look at socialists and socialism, of which Marx, of course, was no small factor; and in the university academic year that concluded with my romantic adventure, I had been a quite faithful member of Dr. Margaret Ormsby's Medieval History class, History 304, wherein I had heard a great deal about monks and other clerical contributions to the culture of Europe.
    Moreover, in that class, I had my first experience of beholding a Roman Catholic priest from up close. He was simply introduced to us as a new member of the History department and the man who would be marking our essays, and he did not stay for more than a few minutes, and said only a few words, but I was left with an indelible impression, both as a curious student and an even more curious novelist-in-the-making. And as he impressed me, so I was later, for at least a short time, radically to have an effect on someone. And this also, I think, was a kind of "first time" experience, for that person. I do not wish to draw too close a parallel between the two events, but there is a similarity, that occurs to me in my efforts to recollect these key details with a full accuracy; I cannot help but wonder if the God who knows every hair of our heads also found - or promoted - an interesting likeness.
    Just as I had never thought of myself as being especially interested in priests - my fictional heroes of those days, that is, in my own fiction, were young men of action: athletes, loggers, fishermen - so the young lady that was about to tip me head over heels had, at that point in her life not, it seemed, thought about taking up with a young man who would live out his working days as an intellectual. In the months when I was first getting to know her, she was going out with her high school boyfriend, if I remember correctly, and he, like her, had gone straight to work as soon as he graduated. I think she had broken up with him at least once, then got back together with him, and was not finally calling it quits until the night of our interesting encounter. I had met the boy once or twice in the family home - she was still living with her parents, and would do so until she herself was married - and found him to be a handsome fellow, but because of her older brothers, also still living at home, her most immediate social life was filled with university students, one of whom she would finally decide to be the man for her.
    But this happy conclusion was not to be for a few years, and I, in the meantime, was summoned to the noble task of stand-in, or proxy, or understudy. It was to be considerable of a sacrificial role, as I was to learn, which is why the adventure was such a good introduction to, and image of, the spiritual life, and of course, as the Bard said, it is better to have loved and lost then never to have loved at all. And a good scholastic philosopher might add that it is not only better, but required, to have lost and lost more than once before finally loving for good, as love is a school much in need of more than one course or one classroom.