Chapter One

    I was almost eighteen when the Lord gave me to understand that one day I would have to write down the story of my life with Him. Now I am almost sixty, so it is probably time to get on with fulfilling His will for this assignment. I have been able to do the Lord's will in part, by draughting sketches, or supposed beginnings, for over twenty years, but it is not until now, if all goes well, that I have been give the inspiration and grace, the company of the Divine Muse unreservedly, for the final version. To have the Holy Spirit perfectly is not easy to come by, and is a great privilege. I hope that I do not betray such a favour, neither by haste or impatience, nor by human pride or ambition.
    The life in question is a spiritual one, the history of a contemplative, of a soul drawn by the power of the Almighty, in spite of that soul's sins and imperfections, into an understanding and experience of the Catholic mystical life in all it's fullness. It is the story of a life in the light, by the grace of God, virtually since infancy. Thus it is not a story that will please those who prefer to walk in darkness, at least in its entirety. Nor is it a story which will be completely understood fully, according to its own substance, by very many, although even to understand it in part is to share no little way in an immense and profitable aggregation of graces and glories. Therefore it can be said to be a story which can be good to read, but only if the reader enters into studying the chronicle with more humility than ambition to reach a perfect understanding. A perfect understanding is by no means impossible, but much more by the favour of God than by human will. It can come only through years of submission to God's will; only after years of the daily endurance of the most paradoxical combination of indescribable consolations and inspirations interspersed with an equal degree of quite terrible aridities, desolations, all manner of trials, even seeming annihilation in every feeling, sense, and imaginative and intellectual ability./ Mere human plans and dreams have to give way before the juggernaut of God's destruction of everything other than His plans and dreams, His intentions; even ambitions and proposals that seem to be Divine become excruciatingly subject to further and further refinement.
    In my own case, for example, I was utterly confident, at twenty-one, that I would be "rich and famous" well before I was thirty. I had known that I was to be a novelist since I was sixteen, had applied myself to my apprenticeship with constant attention, so I thought, and my two favourite examples of that year or so, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, had both done very well in their twenties, I had already proved that I could write voluminously, and as I knew that I was basically a happy and successful young man, my sense of achievement could not help but spill over into my stories and make them attractive to the average reader the common man or woman. Yet even by the time I was thirty, I had published no novels, and in fact I was not able to even find my final text of my first novel until I was forty-four, coincidentally the same age at which Saint Thomas Aquinas began his Summa Theologica. That book was not completed until I was fifty-two, and even now is being presented to a very small public, albeit in a manner most satisfying to the author, some seven years after the last page was typed.
    This is not from want of looking for a publisher, and with the assistance of agents. But finding a publisher for such a spiritual intensity of material is much harder than looking: what publisher has enough perfection in his own soul to let him believe in a general appetite for perfection?
    At this particular moment - even an autobiography cannot escape the process of time in this life - the discovery of such a man seems possible - if it is possible at all - only in the wonderfully unique civilization that is Ireland. Yet even in that historic land of saints and scholars, despite the enormous wealth of the Irish tradition, each generation must acquire and be granted the light of perfection through its own merits, must encounter God's challenges in whatever form they arrive and in whatever form. Yet one feels a great hope in the Irish: no other Catholic culture possesses a greater hold on the Mother of God; no nation or literature has a more automatic or co-natural sense of the need of her presence in any writing worthy of a spiritual man's attention. But Ireland too is struggling with the ancient tenets of an unchangeable Faith. I speak of substance, of the essentials. So the sense of need for perfection, the appetite for the greater realms of the spiritual life, the glorious haunts of passive prayer, can get lost, all lost, in the agitations that flow out from fruitless searches. Every age has its wasteful follies: ours has the foolishness of inclusive language, none of which will be found in this book, just as it cannot be found in the novel. yet inclusive language can be found frequently enough in certain Irish publications. Its chilling presence might do to my work what envy and sloth did to a truly sublime book, Louis de Montfort's True Devotion to Mary. This work of a real spiritual genius was buried in a trunk for one-hundred and fifty years. In the natural order it is only reasonable for an author to hope to be published in his own lifetime, but in the spiritual universe the spiritual man, especially when he and his associates really do know what they are talking about, must expect to be misunderstood, ignored, or outright rejected to the point of oblivion in their own era. The active Church trundles along much more hand-in-glove with the world than it thinks it does. This is outrageously true in my own country, and anyone who can read sees some of the same signs in Ireland although happily, at this point, the hierarchy there sees through the pitfalls of mere humans thinking they can change the language of the Son of Man and the Trinitarian Divinity that inspired the mysterious integrity of the Scriptures.
    In spite of the obstacles, real or imagined, the spiritual man must keep writing - if he is genuinely called to write - about spiritual things. Someone, somewhere, sooner or later, will want a contemporary interpretation of the great doctors of the prayer life, especially from someone who, in spite of his innumerable sins and failings, has been yarded about as much of the spiritual universe as on can get in this mortal life. Most of those who follow the interior life do not have to write books about it, and God is no less pleased with them. After all, they have more time for prayer and contemplation pure and simple. They are allowed to labour just with their souls faults; they do not have to bother with the faults of their writing as well. No doubt they write letters, and one of these letters could be more valuable than this entire book, but they do not have the compelling labour and anxieties of a large and supposedly comprehensive text. I am not complaining, because for the most part I have always loved the labours of the writer, no matter what the field of endeavor of the moment, but I do feel the need to insist that contemplation's efficacy depends not at all on the ability to write about the factors of the interior life.
    Yet, of course, someone must offer the fruit of his or her experience in these matters. While the principal teacher and mover in the spiritual life has to be God, and often God alone - whoever heard of a lonely mystic? - yet the texts and their explanations, their confirmations or cautions, are also most necessary. I cannot bear to think of life without John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, and these after and with the writings of so many great theologians. What else can be the contemplative's daily bread? Who else can defend the spiritual man against the devil, who hates contemplation as he hates nothing else on earth, unless it be the mass and the sacraments? So the written tradition must continue, and certainly God has put much time and effort in trying to continue that tradition through me, even though, unlike all the greatest writers of the mystical tradition that I know, I am only a layman, not a priest or religious.
    And, even more paradoxical, this lay state of mine does not prevent God from demanding all the prayer and meditation out of me that He can possibly get, so far as I know. A mind, a body, a temperament in the years of youth almost addicted to activity and production - though I always love to read - has been mightily slowed down for the sake of endless hours, year in and year out, of contemplation. I have been let out, as it were, from time to time, usually as one or more of the arts - including writing - seemed to require me - but the priority has almost always lain in prayer, or the quiet study, direction, discussion that must accompany it.
    For those who know metaphysics well - that is, in the Aristotelian, or perfect sense - the reasons for this priority are clear: God Himself does not run about here, there, and everywhere. In the corrupted human estimation, in fact, He seems quite inert, although the spiritual man finds God's quiet, God's stillness, the most alive and vigorous entity that ever could exist. So the matured contemplative must imitate the calmness of the unmoved Mover, must in fact, by various ligatures and suspensions, be made to imitate that apparent lack of motion, even mentally as well as in the body. And this in spite of any amount of talent, passion, or ability that God may have granted to the soul in His original creation, or even in subsequent not-so-ordinary bestowals of grace. We must be conformed to the Immaterial One, sooner or later, and the initially punishing predicaments of passive prayer, of mysticism, are the most efficient methods this life, in God's grace, has to offer.
    And when I say initially punishing I mean in the sense that there is a profound initial shock that God can and will do such a terrible thing to one's soul. (There is also, either subsequently or in company, a great joy and sense of security in God, unequaled by any other kind of grace, but these factors, marvellously happy as they are, do not diminish the agony and the horror of, or, on a lesser scale, the puzzling annoyance of the various degrees of purgative aridity.) The purgations of the life of passive prayer remain punitive. As soon as one's own sins and faults are overcome by the kind but corrective hand of God then what comes to be borne but the follies of others; and as the mature contemplative knows, to his glory and his shame in the Church, these can come from very high and surprising places indeed. In the field of personal attachments alone - to talent, persons, native culture - what soul, even the soul of an archbishop, a cardinal, an abbot, a pope, has become totally free of unsteady allegiances before entry into Saint Teresa's Seventh Mansion?
    So the spiritual soul that has been brought to these ultimate freedoms and powers, to this virtually infinite scope of mediation, as thunderous in their vehemence as they are brilliant in their infused clarity, must continue to experience the interior trials that initially saved and then perfected him. Nor is he or she absolutely free from a personal need of refinement, as John of the Cross points out in the beginning of "The Living Flame." A little earlier I said that in my youth I seemed almost addicted to activity. As our basic nature and temperament does not change, for it is in them that we were created, so I would continue to roar off in all directions simultaneously if I were not constantly held in check by a stronger will than mine. One loves many persons, many places, many things; yet only God knows which of these should be focused upon at any given time in His all-seeing providence. His love, after all, is the greater, and therefore we must be guided by it. Our own affections must take the lower place. This is the rule for avoiding imperfection just as it is for avoiding mortal sin.
    These are hard lessons to learn, and the vast majority of souls, even devout souls, learn much of them the hard way. Yet, finally, by a little of our own effort, and much of His, we come to the happy state in which we admit the wisdom of giving Him the first place in our affections. We stop choosing the things and actions with things that make us grave sinners; we learn to avoid what can lose or weaken our grasp on perfection. Finally, we learn to grow up, to live, learn, and think according to the Original Design. God is neither fool nor cruel tyrant, we realize, and knew all along what He was doing. That was in His first creation. And in his second creation, the Church, he was even more brilliant. With the doctrines of Catholicism, with the sacraments and the teaching and example of the saints, we can - almost - do no wrong! Paradise Regained indeed. Adam again walks in the garden, and this time Eve, knowing why, does what she's told. The speculative and practical reasons finally walk hand in hand. Our souls are filled with light, most of the time. And, albeit with opposition here and there, we assist in the recreation of that light where ever we go. The soul in the state of grace is more valuable than any other created thing, rational or non-rational not in the state of grace; the fully perfect soul has a value and purpose not too unlike, in a specifically limited context, the value and purpose of Christ Himself. This via a divinely given participation of course, but a participation nonetheless. The world might not see this; the world might not want to hear this; but the world is affected, nonetheless and in spite of itself.
    In the present day as well, there is no small part of the membership of the Church Militant - or at least a nominal part of it - that does not want to hear this either, because the manifestation of wisdom and its blessed light interferes mightily with an heretical agenda. In one form or another, the snake is always with us, and the recovery of paradise takes unrelenting vigilance. To turn around a very precious Biblical phrase: the people who walk in the light regularly behold a great darkness, and this is their co-religionists, and not merely certain of the laity. Just last night, for example, I opened the pages of a well known Catholic periodical to behold, rooted in the darkness so firmly that he was a perfect model of the devil, a much too highly placed professor of canon law, calling for a definite weakening of the Papal authority. He was appealing for a return to the old high medieval errors regarding the supposed collegial powers of the bishops. In order to become competent in canon law, must a priest forego the study of history?
    Obviously this poor cleric had forgotten the priorities of his calling. The priest is not ordained to promote sin and error, but rather to preach and act against them. Mortal sin and the conditions and attitudes that create it are supposed to be his enemies, not his allies. But the investigation of mortal sin and preaching and writing against it seem to be the lost art of our times, especially in the culture I have had most often to do with. This priest and his like, apparently invited and supported by bishops, merely swim in the current spiral of darkness, the huge, revolving, vortex of inane rejections of all that is not only the shining best of the Tradition of the Church, but also the necessary. Fundamental ruptures in the fortress of truth are neither progressive advances, nor even merely venial sins. They are mortal wounds, from which the life blood flows in a grave volume. The soul is poured out like water. The fortress is left an empty shell, an abandoned city, a house in ruins that should have been full of lighted rooms.
    We are, or we should be, a might castle, says the incomparable Teresa of Avila, full of a great variety of the most useful rooms. I use the royal we, even if my predicate is singular, because we also are, or should be, kings and queens. Yet only if we have striven, like the prince and the princess in the fairy tale; only if we have been brave, nimble to read the magic signs, enduring in the face of the most unusual trials.
    Christ is the light. He shines all around us. We were born to bring that light into ourselves, to make it glow so clearly and warmly that the cold and sinful world will at last be overcome.