Category Archives: Autobiography

Autobiography

27 A VIGIL, A DEPARTURE, A BEGINNING OF SORTS

                           27   A VIGIL, A DEPARTURE, A BEGINNING OF SORTS

 

ONE OF THE JOYS of this pre-Christmas season, this Holy Advent, each year is to bring food baskets, clothing, toys, gifts to the poor.

 

Today my co-struggler, whose kindness to this poor priest has made a place for me to live during this sabbatical, and I, spent most of the day going to those who have little, to pick-up gifts for those who have even less.

Some of what we did was to bring needed furniture to recent refugees from a country in Africa torn by civil war.

These refugees, in their homeland, are persecuted because they are Catholic. Many of the family members have been murdered, the children sold as slaves.

Here they suffer multi-tiered pain. They are reduced to extreme poverty, suffer because of the colour of their skin.

Tragically even the locals who pride themselves on prefixing their own identity with the word ‘ African ‘ reject these refugees because they are too black, too African.

This evening as I walked about the neighbourhood praying the rosary, looking at all the multi-coloured lights, my heart reflected on how we ooh and ah at the colours of fireworks, Christmas lights, autumn leaves, seek out brightly coloured clothing, postage stamps, posters, etc., yet, when it comes to the variety of natural hues of skin created by the Father to make His children beautiful, we see those colours as a litmus test which is designed to render the other a stranger as if they were not one like ourselves.

All men are endowed with a rational soul and are created in God’s image; they have the same nature and origin and, being redeemed by Christ, they enjoy the same divine calling and destiny; there is here a basic equality between all men and it must be given ever greater recognition. Undoubtedly not all men are alike as regards physical capacity and intellectual and moral powers. But forms of social or cultural discrimination in basic personal rights on the grounds of sex, race, color, social conditions, language or religion, must be curbed and eradicated as incompatible with God’s design. [bg]

As this millennium of division, this century of fratricide, comes to an end and we enter the new millennium, the Jubilee Year, my ardent prayer is that we will come to love one another.

Most ardently of all I beg for enlightenment that wherever in my own heart there is a refusal to see anyone as my brother, my sister, and to love them truly, as Christ does, that I repent of my sinful arrogance, bow low before them, begin again in Christ to love.

AS I PEN THESE NOTES, gathering up once more the threads of this story of the immensity of Divine Mercy, I am in a hospital room, keeping vigil at the bedside of the oldest of our priests.

It is another night vigil, a time of solitude.

A blessed time.

When a soul, a human being, like this old priest, is so in possession of the Holy Spirit their very body is luminous, just being within the radius of their presence is to be bathed in holiness as surely as the earth is constantly bathed in light and warmth by the radiant sun.

We’ve, myself, other priests, men and women of The Community, been keeping this nightly vigil for a couple of weeks now.

Tonight Father seems better. At least the IV’s have been removed, the heart monitor is gone.

Through these nights I am coming to understand, though not necessarily yet fully integrate in my thoughts, feelings, trust, that the coming to terms with the end of earthly existence, is a holy, if at times emotionally terrifying, reality which, as a comedian has noted, simply means facing the fact that for all of us death is instantaneous.

Mostly takes us by surprise too, hence the urging of Christ [Mk.13:33,37], echoed by the Apostle [1Th.5:2], that we be ready.

There is, of course, no better preparedness than a holy life.

Yesterday, at dawn, I left here. Left a priest who at that time seemed already to have one hand pushing at the heavenly gates!

After a couple of hours sleep I was deep in the forest with the men cutting firewood.

My job is a simple one, suited to my age and health.

I make piles of tree branches where there are too many to be left to degrade naturally on the forest floor. Once I have a good sized pile I set it ablaze.

A little flame from a match, touched to dried twigs, and soon there is a larger and hungrier flame which devours the piles, the heat causing snow on nearby high tree branches to melt, fall into the fire in clumps which sizzle!

Now, by Father in this hospital, I am beside a flame lit by Divine Fire at his baptism as a child, fuelled with sacred chrism at his ordination.

It is good to be near this fire!

The fire, of course, is Divine, and we are salted, baptized, with this fire and called, for we are anointed with same, like Christ Himself to spread this fire He came to ignite [Jer.23:29;Mk.9:49;Lk.3:16;Lk.12:49;Acts 2:3].

 

 

 

Autobiography

25 “BE BORN…IN SILENCE…A THOUSAND TIMES”

                                         25   “BE BORN…IN SILENCE…A THOUSAND TIMES”

 

 

 

 

I am meditating again today on Pope John Paul II’s encyclical letter DIVES IN MISERICORDIA [On The Mercy of God] and my heart leaps at the radiant truth of:

The Cross is like a touch of eternal love upon the most painful wounds of man’s earthly existence. [ay]

This mid-Advent evening I return once more to the original notes as source material to continue this writing, my heart singing with gratitude that even now are my wounds being touched with the Cross — the kiss of His lips.

 

 

THE FIRST true spring rains of the season arrived during the night, applauded by thunder, backlit with lightening flash, dancing across valley ballroom a splendid cotillion, partnered by the wind !

When the ball had ended, the performers, long departed in their cloud-glass coaches beyond horizon hills, I went out onto the porch of this house of priests, breathed deep the fresh washed air, listening to the concert of frogs chanting their Matins at pond’s edge, down by the barns.

I sit here now, penning these thoughts, watch slow clouds drift across the, at this early hour, barely blue tinted sky.

Let us become like Christ since Christ became like us. Let us become gods because of Him, since He for us became man. He took upon Himself a low degree, that He might give us a higher one. He became poor, that through His poverty we might become rich (2Cor.8:9). He took upon Himself the form of a slave that we might be delivered from slavery (Phil.2:7&Rm.8:21). He came down that we might rise up. He was tempted that we might learn to overcome. He was despised that we might be given honour. He died that He might save us from death. He ascended to heaven that we who lie prone in sin may be lifted up in Him. [az]

 

My heart is moved, as I sit bathed in beauty, to reflect upon attentiveness to the Father through living and moving according to His Holy Will — like the wind, rain, clouds, chanting frogs — in a word, what we in this apostolic family call the duty of the moment.

The first thing that comes to my heart is the need to remember it is not a question of what, as in ‘ what am I to do in this moment ‘.

It is a matter of being aware of the ‘Who’ obedience is all about.

The duty of the moment is — for if it is not then it becomes a type of neurotic enslavement to a singular notion of self, and self-worth, based upon what I do — the duty of the moment is not what I do but rather who I am — a beloved responding to his Lover!

The duty of the moment is my response to my Divine Lover, and through Jesus who reveals His love in each moment of my existence, motivated by the Spirit of Love Himself, I come into communion of love with the Father.

In this Jesus Himself became obedient that we who are terrified of being, and thus become lost in doing, might be once more. [cf. Lk. 2:51; Jn. 4:34; Jn. 13:15]

Now, obviously, we can only be faithful to Jesus and do as He has done, in the duty of the moment, be penetrated by what De Caussade calls the ‘sacrament of the present moment ‘ if we are fully present to, in, the moment.

Yet in those days, so many decades ago when I was originally with The Community, I was far too wounded, neurotic, sinful, restless, fearful to be still, much less present enough in any moment, to experience but a minute speck of the above truth.

      Partially the problem in those days too was the simple fact of youth — as youth we have a    distorted sense of time — it either is the overwhelming slow moving phenomena barely grasped but experienced as a terrifying slow death, that is commonly called boredom – or – it is the fragile, tiny container into which we try relentlessly to cram maximum, and frequently un-discerned, experience, immediately!

Thus in our youth we rarely, if ever, consider time as something precious, for it can seem as limitless as the depths of oceans, rejecting any sober second thought that even oceans are limited.

Even less so do we consider time as a grace-love-gift from the Father, a precious and unrepeatable flow of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years which we are blessed with in the exact quantity necessary to frame the reality within which we might become saints.

Sin is a misuse of the grace of time, a waste of potential sanctification in the pursuit of no-thing-ness.

When we have some years of living, as I do now, ebbed and flowed through, we begin to appreciate the limit of this gift, the importance of being present to the totality of each moment of time.

We discover too how time itself, having been taken up into the heart of the Trinity by the Incarnation, is a constant duty of ours to participate in.

 The sanctification of which we participate in by the fidelity and love we bring: our true baptized selves into the treasury of each moment.

..fantastic, incredible, holy words….THE DUTY OF THE MOMENT IS THE DUTY OF GOD…ANYTHING done for Him is glamorous, exciting, wondrous — if only we can see it for what it truly is! But we are human. And it takes a long time, my dearly beloved ones, to see reality through God’s eyes. Unless we pray exceedingly hard, it takes a long time to ‘make straight the paths of the Lord ‘in our souls. [ba]

Once again it becomes a matter of being with Him.

Prayerfully.

Alone.

With Him.

Inner spiritual training begins with these words of Christ, ‘When you pray, go into your room, and when you have closed the door, pray to your Father who is in secret. [bb]

Writing these lines today I am conscious these truths permeate my being because years of blessing have been poured into my being.

My trouble, and why eventually I would leave the faith and The Community, back in the sixties was simply I was too broken to retain anything I learned about true Gospel living.

I was both a dried sponge, which once placed in water, gorges itself until satiated, and a sieve.

I’d no sooner take in some truth when I would lose it.

Or spill it.

He did not live from the center as an affirmed son would, that blessed stance which is a more or less unconscious position…he lived very self-consciously out of a cluster of diseased attitudes and feelings toward himself. He was split. There was a terrible chasm of non-being within him. He therefore had the disease of introspection….stood, as it were, outside himself, analyzing, hating, rejecting, pitying, despairing over himself……. To live from that center is to live from that which is not real but illusory, an illusory person living in an illusory world…..As a Christian, he had a home within, a divine center from which to live, but he knew nothing of it…[bc]

 

There is within all our lives a continuous thread of Divine intervention: GRACE!

Now grace, obviously, works within the created order, for it is within that order we live.

Sin is a determination on our part to re-arrange the Divinely constituted order into something we fraudulently attempt to claim is more suited to our immediate gratification.

God permits our futile attempts at re-arrangement, for He respects the very order He has created, is faithful to what He has set in motion, especially our very being, even when we war against that Divine right order.

The ever flowing river of grace is His active love of us, but here too He respects our freedom, a freedom which He places within us when He creates us.

Grace then is NOT a Divine imposition.

It IS the True Lover’s invitation we accept the ultimate gift: Himself!

It is first and foremost, in the sacramental order, Baptism, which reorients us into a right ordered relationship with the Trinity.

There is a paradox in Baptism, for while this sacrament reorients us at the same time it removes us, that is, with Baptism we enter into that communion of love where, while we remain in the world, we are no longer to be of the world.

Through Baptism, in a real sense, our place becomes no-place!

This because in truth we are created and more vitally baptized to dwell, even here on earth, in the Trinity and, within especially our communion of love with the Father, to live and move and have our being.

This indwelling is itself a type of holy mystery, for we can only truly dwell within the Trinity who first dwells within us.

The holy import of this is tremendous and should move us to a constant state of awe and adoration!

We are gifted with free will and hence can, frankly, mess not per se with the effectiveness of grace, for grace is never defective, but with the hesitancy or fullness of our response to, and co-operation, with grace.

Significantly, as Leanne Payne rightly teaches, this whole movement of response to grace, of openness to the communion of love, is constitutive to my knowing, or at the very least seeking to know, become, the person He has created.

Thus the first great effective activity of sacramental grace in Baptism, by our being washed in the Blood of the Lamb, is our re-creation, our truly being born. This IS our true birth and through this being created anew we can discover the real I — I as child of the Father, disciple of the Son, temple of the Holy Spirit!

Once I know I am ‘I’, and the knowing means rejoicing, being thrilled at my very existence, an existence which is relational, communion of love — then I can authentically say YES!

My yes is to a person.

Not to some idea or rule of life or philosophical notion — though as I live elements of those necessarily become aspects of living.

My yes is to a real, living person, the Person par excellence for He is the Incarnate One.

My yes is to Jesus.

Yes to Jesus means opening wide the doors of my being to His communion of love, to His every word, and I make concrete this yes by heeding, following, living His word, the Gospel, hence my yes to Jesus is yes to communion of love, to life with, to having my being within, the Holy Trinity. [Jn. 14: 23-26]

DAY AND EVENING have come and gone!

As I begin to write again it is a tremendously fresh and beautiful Sunday afternoon.

A brilliant day as if the sunlight were dusting gold flecks upon every leaf and blade of grass.

The Eighth Day!

KRISTOS ANESTE EK NEKRON THANA CONPATESOS KAI TOIS EN TOIS MNEMASI ZOEN KHARI SAMENOS!

Sung during Holy Mass this day with all the passion, surely, of those Ointment Bearing Women as they returned from the tomb, knowing their tenderness was not needed: CHRIST IS RISEN FROM THE DEAD TRAMPLING ON DEATH BY DEATH AND ON THOSE IN THE TOMBS LAVISHING LIFE!

Truly, such as through the sacraments of Baptism and repeatedly thereafter in the sacrament of Confession, He lavishes life upon us even while we are yet in the tomb of original sin or actual sin.

The once brown fields this day are greening with new life, trees tremble with unfolding buds, birds sing more varied songs than ear can embrace for sheer wonderment at His once again making all things new!

In the soft sand of the winter- ice- retreating- gouges among the higher slants of the hills swallows build nests, as chipmunks, on my walk, scurried about the forest floor all a-chatter with indignation that a mere man dare walk into their world!

A young man, visiting here, came up to me all eager and fair shouted: “Father!

What must I do to be baptized? “

“Say, YES, Jesus! “

Of course there is more to it than that, like careful instruction-preparation.

But in that moment naught more needed to be said.

No matter how much the men and women in office seem to wreck their part of the Church’s fabric by their humanness — hence sinfulness and unpleasant personality traits — it does not happen. Christ in their office does not allow the Church to be wrecked because of the weakness of the persons who represent Him……we are dealing with the MYSTERIUM ROMANUM…dealing with the passion of Christ and the behaviour of the apostles, who were not such hot potatoes. One denied Him, one betrayed Him, all but one ran away when He died. There are only two possible conclusions: either the Catholic Church IS divinely founded, and Christ is IN all the people who rule His Church, or there IS no Catholic Church and the whole thing isn’t worth belonging to. Take your choice. [bd]

Christ is risen from the dead, trampling on death by death, and on those in the tombs, lavishing life!

In what tomb, or tombs, do I languish?

Or hunker down in like a frightened lost child who seeks shelter against or within any place that appears to have about it a definitive solidity?

Certainly in those original years when I lived with The Community, because of my split-ness, I was making of the community life itself a type of tomb.

 

 

Autobiography

24 DEATH, THY STING, IF FAITH LOST

THERE is, as I reflect on yesterday’s question from my confessor, a type of urgency to complete this book.

I’m not sure if the urgency is in response to the goad of grace or the restlessness of my ego — but I turn once more to the original notes and am amazed at how His Mercy is always greater than our capacity for sin.

I AM DISTRACTED, anxious, grieving this morning.

 

 

 

 

The spring sun has shaken all the ice-glass from the trees, woven there by days of freezing rain.

The fields, washed of snow by warmer rain, reveal their yellow-brown last year’s fashion, clamouring for the new season’s outfit.

On this day a year ago I had arrived in the west at a new assignment with The Community.

Barely unpacked, I was summoned by a phone call.

Years before, and for years, there had been three buddies.

Now the middle one was telling me, the oldest one, of the youngest’ death.

Though by now priest, and supposedly man of faith, the act of death stung my being.

Death had stolen friend from among the earthly living and flung that friend beyond the tangible sense those of us, left behind, could easily touch.

What had started out as the sophomoric promiscuity of the young had, not without heated debate, struggle, matured into a pure and authentic male on male friendship.

The agent of death has been aids.

When the youngest had first been diagnosed he had called me, not as friend but now as priest-father, with one simple question:

“Do you think God has allowed this to happen to me so I might come home?”

Home being sacramental life with Christ.

I said: “Yes.”

This day of the phone call announcing the completion of his journey home seemed to have arrived so suddenly.

Not unexpectedly, perhaps. Suddenly, nonetheless.

Confusion that, during that Day of the Resurrection of Christ, death should still sting so mightily.

Last year, like now, Easter.

This year, like then, death stings still.

I cry out for the grace of help for in my belief I need help with my unbelief.

From the Stichera of Easter from the Divine Liturgy, this, from St. John Chrysostom:

O DEATH WHERE IS YOUR STING? O Hades where is your victory? CHRIST IS RISEN AND YOU ARE ABOLISHED, CHRIST IS RISEN and demons are cast down, CHRIST IS RISEN and the angels rejoice, CHRIST IS RISEN and life is freed, CHRIST IS RISEN and the tomb is emptied of the dead: for CHRIST being RISEN from the dead, has become the Leader and Reviver of those who had fallen asleep. To Him be glory and power forever and ever. Amen.

 

Autobiography

23 STANDING AT THE ENTRANCE OF THE GREAT DESERT

“HOW IS THE BOOK COMING?”, was the unexpected question from my confessor yesterday after I had spoken my sins, trusting in Divine Mercy.

At that point in the Sacrament the normal expectation is some direct word of advice on avoiding sin, trusting God, not a question about one’s literary effort.

The question was actually on point.

I have spent more time of late writing

letters, articles, doing research for other books than working on this one.

 

In a word my confessor had been enlightened by the Holy Spirit to ask the central question about fidelity to the duty of the moment.

So here I am this afternoon of the great feast of the Immaculate Conception of Our Blessed Mother, faithful to the duty of the moment, reviewing notes and beginning again!

TO HANG LOOSE, to be silent, to let God use me, to fear nothing, to love always, that is what I am in poustinia for…yet here I am writing notes for my book!

Poustinia – the desert – the hermitage – is NOT for writing books. It is for absolute stillness in being alone with the Divine Lover.

All else here is distraction, rest-less-ness, which is in direct opposition to being at rest in Him.

I think too much!

That’s how Adam lost the original experience of intimacy with God, as well as intimacy with self and other like himself, Eve.

Adam was so busy thinking about the relationship with God, rather than resting in trust of Divine Love, that he was susceptible to the diabolical suggestion God was not to be trusted.

That is, God is not a faithful lover.

Distrust the lover and you come to distrust love itself.

The point of being on the edge of the great interior desert, at the entrance of the great desert of aloneness with the Divine Lover is that I might come to trust Him, trust His Love.

We have, of course, been created by Love Himself, to be His beloved and to love one another, as He loves us, which means self-gifting to other.

From the very beginning the Triune God seeks us out on the holy ground of creation. He first speaks and awaits our response.

There are places of encounter, there is longing within us, His voice moves us and we cry out to Him.

We await Him, He awaits us, becomes more intimate to us than we are to our very selves, for in His Incarnate Being He enters all we must endure, He prays for us, sanctifies solitude for us and continuously knocks at the door of our being, begging leave to enter{Gn.2:18; 3:8-Ex.3:5-1Sm.3:10-1Kgs.20:9,12-Ps.42:2;46:11-Sg.ofSgs.2:10-Sir.35:17-Lam.3:25-Dn.10:8-Mt.4:1;14:23-Mk.1:35;6:31-Lk.9:18;22:41-Rv.3:20}.

Yes during my years with the community, as today in this poustina-desert as I pen these notes, meditate upon those passages, I had many times in solitude and did hear the knocking at the door of my being, but was too weak of faith to do other than lean against the door and yearn for the courage to open.

Yet the very gift of the time confronting — though not in a manner most would deem successfully — my inability to open did help me stay a member of The Community far longer than would have been possible without at least the struggle at the edge of the entrance to the great desert.

Those notes, re-read and typed this afternoon, suddenly revealed to my heart another type of desert – the solitude of the writer!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Autobiography

21 VIGILANT DURING THE NIGHT

WE HAVE entered the last Advent of the century and the millennium!

If the fearful pundits, secular and religious both, are right and the world will soon end then truly this writing is the ultimate futility!

 

 

Returning to the original notes I took a moment to reflect on the powerful words [Mt.26.40; Mk.14:34; Jn.18:1; Lk.22:46; Jn.14:31] of Jesus the night of the penultimate vigil of prayer.

As I write these lines out by hand in the middle of the night, this Holy Thursday morning, when such tremendous reality unfolds, I stand in awe before the holy elasticity of time, history, space, as lived reality experienced by those who live, move, have their being permeated by the Sacrament of Baptism, animated by the Sacrament of Holy Eucharist!

My heart has come to understand the angel given to Jesus in the Garden of Olives, [Lk.22:43] IS the Angel of Encouragement…encouragement that in my life I be like the olive and allowed myself to be torn from the tree of my self-existence, pressed into the chalice of oneness with Him, crushed with His Cross that the oil of my being be poured out as love’s salve in service to my brothers and sisters.

To keep vigil during the night is an ancient tradition in the life of the Church and one I am moved to keep – from time to time.

This vigil I struggle with the mystery of time…waste too much time writing about time.

NOW, on sabbatical, these many months later, much time having elapsed, I cut severely those original notes, shamed at the amount of intellectual pertinence I spent time putting into words on paper.

It is now Holy Saturday and I have kept vigil two nights in a row.

Yesterday was NOT a day for words.

Nor questions as kneeling before the Cross THE Answer to all possible questions, is contemplated.

Yesterday was a day to stand outside the brokenness of ordinary time in utter silence, bowed low to the ground before the crucified One, being bathed in His Blood and drawn by that rushing river of mercy into His own time.

It is to be immersed in the timeliness and timelessness of Unconditional Love.

Now we prepare for the essential vigil of all vigils: the Easter Vigil…to keep watch before the tomb knowing in the unknowing what shall happen has happened!

Time is indeed fulfilled by the very fact God, in the Incarnation, came down into human history….man rises from the earth and returns to it [Gn.3:19]: this is an immediately evident fact. Yet in man there is an irrepressible longing to live forever…Christian Revelation excludes reincarnation, and speaks of a fulfillment which man is called to achieve in the course of a single earthly existence…..through a sincere gift of self, a gift which is made possible only through his encounter with God. It is in God that man finds his full self-realization: this is the truth revealed by Christ. Man fulfills himself in God, who comes to meet him through His Eternal Son. Thanks to God’s coming on earth, human time, which began at Creation, has reached its fullness. “The fullness of time” is in fact eternity, indeed, it is the One who is eternal, God Himself. Thus, to enter into “the fullness of time” means to reach the end of time and to transcend its limits, in order to find time’s fulfillment in the eternity of God.

 In Christianity time has a fundamental importance……In Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, time becomes a dimension of God…..From this relationship of God with time there arises the duty to sanctify time……..In the liturgy of the Easter Vigil the celebrant as he blesses the candle which symbolizes the risen Christ, proclaims: “ Christ yesterday and today, the beginning and the end, Alpha and Omega, all time belongs to Him, and all the ages, to Him be glory and power through every age for ever.”….The meaning of this rite is clear: It emphasizes the fact that Christ is the Lord of time…The solar year is thus permeated by the liturgical year, which in a certain way reproduces the whole mystery of the Incarnation and Redemption, beginning from the first Sunday of Advent and ending on the solemnity of Christ the King, Lord of the Universe and Lord of History. Every Sunday commemorates the day of the Lord’s Resurrection.[ax]

 

 

 

 

 

 

Autobiography

20 TWO PRIESTS

I CELEBRATED Holy Mass before starting to write again. A votive Mass of Our Blessed Mother under her title, Pillar of Faith.

As I lifted the chalice, filled with Himself, my eyes fell upon the icon of the Twelve Apostles holding up the Church. My heart became instantly steeped in this awesome mystery of being priest.

A sudden urgency took hold to finish this book .

 

 

Then, just as suddenly, as I descended the chalice, my heart had a profound understanding of the mystery of His time.

One day in those turbulent sixties while I was working on a painting commissioned by one of the many cognoscente of surrealism, I suddenly found myself weeping.

A week or so later, while traveling by bus between cities, again tears streamed from some un-aware region of my being.

Over succeeding weeks these fits of sobbing became intense, and frightening.

I finally faced the fact something was terribly wrong and, through a doctor in a street clinic I volunteered at, found myself a psychiatrist.

By the second session the psychiatrist declared he could indeed cure me of my angst, but in so doing I would be drained of my artistic powers and that I should choose, art or inner peace, but that he could not give me both.

It is indicative of just how interiorly wounded I was that I believed him and opted for art.

The sixties!

So I returned to my self-destructive, walking beside myself, split from self, illusory existence, for it was no ‘life’.

However the All-compassionate, All-loving Father, who is constantly calling us to Himself….the sound of His voice is the beating Heart of Christ, IS Christ Himself, His word….takes even our most screwed up, our most unintended, inclination to prayer as eloquent plea from a pure child.

The Father does this through the inexhaustible movement of the Holy Spirit within the baptized soul.

Since we are so confused by emotion, wants, even needs, etc., etc., we really do not know objectively the grace needed, hence the Holy Spirit within the baptized speaks passionately and eloquently for us{Rm.8:26,27}.

The shrink may not have understood my tears but with each one taken, and folded into the Spirit’s inexpressible groaning, they became the Surgeon’s lance, cutting deep into my soul allowing the pus of sin to drain. {Deut.4:29, 30}

It was late one night, I was hanging out near the bus depot with a small band of fellow hippies, when a tall man, poorly dressed, long haired and bearded, yet older than most of us, approached.

He’d been tossed out of the depot by the cops and sent towards us, being told by them we knew where to sleep.

He followed us down into the cavernous reaches of an underground parking garage where a steam vent afforded warmth for sleeping in the exhaust laden air.

In the morning when the depot had reopened the man took us to its greasy spoon and bought us pancakes and coffee.

He told us of a place far to the north that none of the group but myself recognized from his description.

It was then that I knew this man of beard and pancakes was a priest!

Soon he was gone towards the bus bays and we wandered off towards the financial district to panhandle food and drug money.

As we walked I wondered about a priest who looked like that, slept on a steam grate, appeared so deeply sad, yet with some protective aura around him which, although he seemed not to want it, kept him from ultimate harm.

[ I would not see him again for many years until, coming from many adventures, even time in the desert caves of the Holy Land, he too would join The Community and we would become the closest of brother priests…….but such lay years into the future from the period of which I now write.]

It was a short time later that a letter arrived from, of all the women in my life, exception of the primacy of Our Blessed Mother, THE woman in my life, the Foundress of The Community.

Our correspondence, since the late fifties, had been unusual and erratic.

 Her letters always short and totally on point.

      Mine, as I look back, rather self-serving pathetic!

This time she wrote, commandingly of : “…a priest I know will be good for you. He is a former..monk like you and he has come to join us. You should really meet him.”

Even as I write these recall lines my being burns with an inner fire, for in that brief letter was contained an ineffable grace for the rest of my life.

Although I originally had no intention of going to see this priest I was nonetheless curious at least to see The Community, meet the woman with whom I had over the years exchanged letters.

However, left to myself, I would probably never have made the trip but within days of receipt of the letter my father announced he and my uncle where going to that area to fish, their wives to shop in country stores, why didn’t I come along and go visit the community I often spoke of.

My next memory is of standing alone in the cold rain of a fall day, heavy mist rising from the great river, a small grouping of buildings looking rather poor, and a man not much older than myself rushing towards me as if we were long lost brothers.

It was the priest she had written about.

He was dressed in secular clothing with an unfamiliar styled cross hanging from a slight chain around his neck.

He ushered me across the muddy lot into a tiny log cabin, its shelves lined with rocks and crafting equipment.

A small card table stood in one corner laden with unknown tools and a couple of ash trays.

He lit a cigarette and began to talk at a rapid, enthused pace, peppering me with his answers to questions I hadn’t asked.

Questioning me with his answers.

I smoked one cigarette after the other, my mind dazed by nicotine overload and swirling emotions triggered by this accelerated flow of energy from the priest.

I have no memory of conversational detail.

Just a series of memories of rapidly moving events, for suddenly the priest told me not to move and he rushed out of the cabin.

My eyes, being as I was having a massive panic attack, searched the rocks on all the shelves as if I were looking for a clue.

The door of the cabin swung open, the priest came in followed by a man with slicked black hair, wearing a cross like the priest’s, but not a priest, and I do remember this man’s words: “ Father has told me all about you and you are just the kind of man we need to help with our summer program. I want you to go home, settle your affairs, come back and join us! See ya!”

He left.

It all seemed a done deal.

The priest said he thought it would be a good idea that I take time over Christmas for a retreat in my former monastery before coming to join The Community.

He blessed me and left the cabin.

I recall sitting there, smoking, listening to the rain beat against the tar paper shingles of the roof, wondering what had just happened, suddenly aware that, at least in the moment, I was no longer panic filled.

The woman I had sought to meet, I never did see on that trip.

Once home, within weeks I had quit my job, packed my few belongings, boarded a train for the monastery.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Autobiography

19 EXISTING EXISTENTIALLY IN THE MYTHOLOGICAL SIXTIES

MY SPIRITUAL FATHER recently reminded me that: “ A priest is a real fighter when he can begin again at every moment! “

He is here paraphrasing the wisdom of those most wondrous of all fighters in spiritual warfare, the Fathers of the Desert!

What does it mean to be a real fighter?

 Who has shown us how to fight?

 Why must we fight and whom?

 

 

 

 

There is within us..a warfare…[aq]

It is by means of thoughts that spirits of evil wage a secret war against the soul. For since the soul is invisible, these malicious powers naturally attack it invisibly. Both sides prepare their weapons, muster their forces, devise stratagems, clash in fearful battle, gain victories and suffer defeats. But this..warfare lacks one feature possessed by visible warfare: declaration of hostilities. Suddenly, with no warning, the enemy attacks the inmost heart, sets an ambush there, and kills the soul through sin. And for what purpose is this battle waged against us? To prevent us from doing God’s will as we ask to do it when we pray ‘Thy will be done’. [ar]

We know from Sacred Scripture the evil one is the real warring enemy [Rv.12:17] seeking always to seduce us into forgetting whom we truly are and by Whom we are truly loved [Rv.2:4, 5].

 St. Paul, for example, [Ep.6:11, 12] is clear on precisely what this warfare really is.

The reality of spiritual warfare is on my heart today not only because of this section of the story of Divine Mercy at work in my soul, just as He is lavishing Himself upon you in this moment, but also because in the mail today letters arrived from souls for whom I am spiritual director.

I see in their lives the battle rages on.

It is a day to dwell humbly in the virtue of trust, to admit that Christ alone is the Real Fighter, the True Warrior, the Victor. Our only weapon is Him, His Holy Name. Our constant battle cry, simply: LORD JESUS CHRIST, SON OF THE LIVING GOD, HAVE MERCY ON ME A SINNER.

It would take decades after I stepped down from that train which brought me back from the monastery, – decades after I sought out the hanging tree and gave myself over to the enemy, became a traitor to the Gospel, embraced the death of distrust rather than the solace of the embrace of Trust Himself, – before I could even admit there was such a thing as spiritual warfare.

As I turn again to the original notes which I use in this writing I am struck time and again by how often, as I lay severely wounded on the field of battle, Jesus and Mary came to my rescue.

SOME years ago I was visiting one of the many cities which, during the sixties, had within it one of the large concentrations of hippies, of flower children.

I strolled in that former area of hippies, now given over to expensive shops, restaurants, galleries, lofts.

In a small urban square is a large bronze figure, put there during that decade about which no one seems capable to recall the truth that, once ideals were displaced by drugs the flowers became thorns, the communes places of rage and despair, where a generation of children were born never sure who was their actual mother and with no hope of certainty as to whom had fathered them!

The statue is charcoal coloured, neither male nor female, bent in upon itself: rigid, hardened by time, mute.

Lead kindly light, amid the encircling gloom,

Lead Thou me on!

The night is dark, and I am far from home —

Lead Thou me on!

Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see

The distant scene — one step enough for me.

I was not ever thus, nor prayed that Thou

Shouldst lead me on.

I loved to choose and see my path; but now

Lead Thou me on!

I loved the garish day, and spite of fears,

Pride ruled my will; remember not past years.

So long Thy power hath blessed me, sure it still

Will lead me on,

O’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent, till

The night is gone!

And with the morn those angel faces smile

Which I have loved long since and lost awhile.

 — John Henry Cardinal Newman

 

To say that I was in a state of culture shock, future shock, traumatized by the speed at which I had gone from seven years of total isolation from the world of the late fifties into the world of the mid-sixties, is to hardly convey the emotional, intellectual, spiritual, sexual, linguistic, attitudinal, confusion which I experienced.

It was not only among my family, the very city streets and people on them, I moved as a stranger in a most strange land.

The Church itself seemed to be casting off all that had held secure within her for the centuries since Trent, in favour of some apparently ill-conceived attempt, at least by clerics and nuns, to become so relevant they no longer appeared to have a clue as to whom they really were.

Though since I had abandoned faith this latter was rather irrelevant.

Within a week or so of being back in the city I was on the prowl, with limited success.

The appetites were similar to before the monastery; the skills of the hunter were less.

Seven years of chaste living had taken their toll.

Thanks to the tradition of nepotism in the postal service I soon had a job as a postal worker.

I was the typical postman from hell — interested only in the money, often getting addresses wrong, not caring at all about how I did the job — and thanks to the power of the union I had no fear of being fired.

Typical of my attitude was the day I broke a tooth during lunch and so I just dumped the undelivered mail into a corner box and took the rest of the day off to find a dentist.

I was years away from understanding, let alone accepting, the implicit moral contract between employer and employee — a just day of labour for a just wage.

With the good money I was making I soon was able to buy fine cloths, lots of books, material for writing, painting, indulge my passion for movies, going to bars.

I was getting a rapid education into this new culture and learnt quickly how to hold down a job during the week and blend into the hippie culture on the weekend.

Authentic religion was a no go, yet my being hungered for some intellectual affirmation of purpose, of existence, so I studied existentialism and Marxism in my spare time, bought the whole angst idea and Marxist theory.

The imperative impulse for revolutionary re-ordering of society was intensified within me through the experience of delivering mail in the projects, the allegedly wonderful alternative to tenement clusters of inner city slums.

The buildings themselves were not that old but since the poor had been put in there with no change in their educational opportunities, social skills, employment, as is all too well known they quickly became jungles of violence, despair, abuse of drugs, alcohol, children, each other, peopled by the hopeless and the angry.

The buildings were filled with graffiti, garbage, unsupervised children, sullen and violent juveniles, mainly fatherless little families cared for by overworked and exhausted women.

It is the coal I’ll never forget.

The coal which lingers, is treasured, deep in my being as the rock hard symbol of why welfare fails as a substitute for true charity — the dignified loving service of one another.

In the old slums, the thick tenements, part of the rental deal was you kicked in your share of bags of coal or slum-lords would cut the heat.

I had a court-order registered letter which had to be signed for. When the woman had me step inside her apartment, as she searched for a pencil to sign for the letter, I could see the usual chaos of a poor little home, right through to the bathroom and the tub filled with coal.

Had no one from the housing authority bothered to explain oil or gas fired boilers?

THE gas furnace in this little house kicks in regularly as I write this very chill late fall evening.

One great thing about being a priest is I can, during Holy Mass repent, of my failure to be a good, caring postman and rest in the mystery of His Mercy, pray for that woman with the coal filled bathtub and trust in the mystery of His Mercy, rejoice in the Church’s predilection, Her preferential option for the poor.

Her preferential option for everyone!

As my wonderful teacher of writing used to say: “Interruptions ARE my work!”

A soul, utterly fearful of everything about life, just phoned long distance. So I stopped this writing to be attentive.

The Church’s, every Christian’s, preferential option MUST be for everyone, for, truly, we are ALL poor.

IT IS LATE in the night as I resume this writing.

The two main rail lines which run through this neighbourhood rumble as great freight trains haul the materials and goods from this industrial city across the expanse of this great continent.

The factories run twenty-four hours, churning out a seemingly endless supply of cars, trucks, vans, cd players, stoves, refrigerators.

On and on relentlessly workers produce in order to consume what their sweat has made.

Their fear of being alone, poor, urges them to consume, consume, consume, until their muscles burn out from the effort, their hearts suddenly stop beating, drained of all life because they have been devoured empty by their very consumption.

Instead of going into a church and stillness before the Real Presence, when I needed solitude, which an inner ache seemed to be pushing me towards, I’d go back to those places of the waterfront, the old fortifications, abandoned factories, the breakwater, sit, gaze out at the ocean, wonder were the freighters were headed, and what had become of me.

I was living in the family’s home, which was terribly crowded and where I felt like a boarder among strangers.

Parents and siblings alike tried valiantly to assimilate me back into the family as if those seven years of separation had not happened. But I was unwilling to be assimilated.

Even when my father announced he had retired from the navy and accepted a foreman’s job at a major factory in the industrial heartland and the whole family would be on the move again, I welcome to come along, and I agreed, it was simply as one accepting passage in steerage to yet another foreign land.

Deep in my heart was the inner hope that in that place of workers I could affect a Marxist stirring of great social change in the thriving city of factories.

It was also a city of universities, tv and movie production, theatre.

It would be a good place for the restless, needy, famished heart of the hunter to prowl.

The house we were to live in was not quite ready so we all crammed into a little cottage some miles outside the city.

My father traveled back and forth to work each day, while my younger siblings were bussed to school and a couple of the older ones found jobs.

I initially seemed unable to function.

 

Perhaps it was that the stress of the past few months seized the silence of that isolated cottage.

Perhaps it was simply I finally had no fight left within me.

I had some type of nervous collapse the first weeks there, surely, for I did nothing except sleep for eighteen hours at a stretch, rising only for a bit of food, some water or pop, then slept again.

By the time we moved into the city, ( I had a small room in the basement with the elder of my younger brothers), my brain was mush and I knew if I didn’t force myself to find work and stimulate my intellect I’d sink into such a complete depression I might never recover.

The fastest way to get work, money for books and other pleasures was to take the easiest job, so, back to the Post Office.

The city we were in had lots of flights to other cities, such as the not so distant one where the exploding so-called sexual liberation was at its most unbridled.

My job often afforded me a four day weekend because of alternating shifts and I was making an unnecessary huge amount of money given I had none of the usual expenses of a single person.

 Living at home as I was, long weekends of dissipation were easily indulged in.

Here is a peculiarity of a man with appetites:  he is always dissatisfied and bitter, like someone who is hungry……it is plain that the appetites are wearisome and tiring for a man. They resemble little children, restless and hard to please, always whining to their mother for this thing or that, and never satisfied……A man with desires wearies himself, because he is like someone with a fever whose thirst increases by the minute and who feels ill until the fever leaves. [as]

 

In the city where I traveled most often to satisfy my appetites lived a cousin whose own confused hungers were a cover for mine.

She was only too happy to accommodate my need for secrecy as she knew I would likewise never reveal her life either.

Little by little, with my poetry, looks, intellect, radical ideas, capacity for drink and drugs, I began to move in circles of the art world, hippie world, emerging radical politics, the drug world, with ease and increased popularity.

Not knowing, but when I suspected suppressing, that each movement in those various worlds was splitting me off from myself more and more, I came to accept the constant terror of knowing I was incessantly walking beside myself.

The double life I was leading, dutiful hard working son in the city of my family, acting out various roles in the city of my degradation, meant a constant increase of tension and anxiety.

Fear was the only constant in my life which transcended all the roles I was acting out.

The only antidote to such inner fear is exterior terror and so, like most addicts, I became addicted to danger.

In a movie theatre.

Early afternoon.

Maybe six people in the place.

Hunters all.

Man sits right next to me in a row where all other seats are empty.

Makes his gesture, and then gets up.

I know where he is going.

Accept the invitation even though all my instincts scream: danger.

It is the scent of danger which has me seduced.

Mid-activity I am being strangled with my own scarf.

Couple of vice-squad wandered in at that point.

The man and I covered for each other.

The cops left.

The man had lost interest after that and left without saying a word.

The real horror of that experience is not what it appears to be, that I was almost murdered.

In so far as that fact goes it was not my first brush with a possible violent death.

Nor would it be my last.

The real horror was that I was getting so out of control, becoming so controlled by my appetites and addictions that the experience of being strangled was a hedonistic elixir.

Torment and affliction is the…kind of damage the appetites cause in an individual…similar to the torture of the rack, where a person has no relief until freed from the torment of being bound by these cords…A person is tormented and afflicted when he reclines on his appetites as is a man lying naked on thorns and nails. Like thorns, the appetites wound and hurt, stick to a person and cause him pain….[at]

 

FINALLY the urgency to get beyond the passages written this day has eased and blessed fatigue is setting in.

How hard it is to recall those terrible years, knowing that they are not the darkest yet to be written about.

Were it not this sabbatical duty of the moment to write this I would likely have taken the binder notes and burned them…then suddenly my heart understands it is a good and holy thing that confession be wearying, painful, cause for weeping, experience of true penthos.

What a gracious and all merciful Father You are to forgive us so much!

How You infinitely honour the sacrifice of Your Son who poured Himself out drop by drop to the last drop of redemptive love that we might have mercy, again, again, again, again.

THROUGHOUT human history, within the ebb and flow of every civilization, cascading across time as bearer of the nation’s, the tribe’s, a family’s hopes, dreams, joys, sorrows; erupting from the deepest regions of the human heart; firing the imagination, pleading for mercy, lamenting, praising, vibrating a tiny bone which electrifies the brain and shudders the heart; soaring across the planets; strolling through the seasons; as solitary as a single voice lulling the Newborn to sleep in ancient cave, after the glorious clamour of celestial hosts, as tempestuous as the heated blood of opera, music is as if there were a permeable spot within heaven’s veil through which, under no doubt the incalculable interior pressure of the infinitude of Beatitude eternally sung, drips into creation angelic love song to Love.

Resonating within the human heart and soul, man takes his own capacity for speech and it is uttered melodiously, mingling with the sound of wind, dance of sunlight, choral of bird, tintinnabulation of first rounded metals, sensing too if tree were but dried and shaped and strung the very tears of angels would vibrate as violin, viola and join the every growing orchestra of the Children of God crying, crying, crying: Hear us O Father, bring us through the veil into the eternal dance and never ending song of Your glory!

These thoughts began to stir in my heart as I strolled about the neighbourhood along the railroad tracks, praying over the pulsating city, this dark, wet, late fall evening, praying the Sorrowful Mysteries as the millennia of sorrow seeps away into the dark mists of history’s night, while among the small houses of the countless factory workers strings of Christmas lights perform their own dance of anticipation that He will be born anew and hope will be the most universal aspiration of the human family as we cross the threshold of the new millennium.

Then I sat here at my desk, fired up the old computer to begin this writing and was moved to place a new CD in the machine…..ah how this poor priest is humbled by the stuff of his art…no music of fountain pen as it dances across paper, not even the experience once mine to sit, eyes closed, fingers barely touching a friend’s violin as I, the hearing one, kept my other fingers on the cheek of a deaf child to show her how the fingers could hear and through my fingers on that shaped wood, bowed with love by the elderly musician I heard for the first time!

 Now I listen as Chopin’s Ballade No.1, Op.23 in G minor, played exquisitely upon a finely tuned piano, travels through the mystery of lazar and electrical wire, magnified in headphones, sweeps through my ears, and dances across the pathways of my mind, dagger like plunges into my heart wounding my being with sheer delight!

….the pilgrim Church on earth lifts her gaze to heaven, to the immense throng of men and women to whom God has given a share in His holiness……Dear friends, this is our future! This is the most genuine and universal vocation of all humanity: to form the great family of God’s children……[au]

 

The sixties!

Sometimes I wonder if all of us who were young adults in the sixties need some kind, still, of spiritual purging of the impact upon us, physically, psychologically, intellectually, socially and above all within the depths of our souls.

Art, literature, music, hair styles, scientific effort, weapons of war, terrorism, drugs, sex, religion, Berlin Wall, Cuban missile crisis, drought, revolution, civil wars, Viet-Nam, assassinations, riots, Vatican II, the pill, Humane Vitae, the love which dare not speak its name by then never hesitating to scream, the Green Revolution, the millions of Red Guards terrorizing an entire nation, walking on the moon: and seemingly an entire generation either face down dead in rice paddies or walking dead stoned all across the globe in search of the ultimate affirmation of their being, denied them by the very means, mostly, of their searching.

My heart sees in the sixties generation the breaking out from the dusty shelves of philosophical disputation in the lives of the children of flowers and communes a nexus between the theories of the Enlightenment and the completely selfish determinism of the Utilitarianism mindset, resulting by century’s end in the inevitable materialist satiate of soul.

It is said that modern man has lost the experience of sin; unfortunately for him, he has not. Frequently he has no experience of anything else………Where sin goes unrecognized, so does salvation. More precisely, when the Christian word ‘sin’ no longer  evokes the modern experience of that reality, the offer of ‘salvation’, so expressed, will find few takers. People will look elsewhere for what they need to be saved from time experienced as dread and the bringer of death. [av]

 

Only now in my life do I dimly begin to understand that the immense effort and energy expended, so I thought, in the search for self and for some tangible affirmation of my being, was indeed that horizontal opposite: flight from true self.

Because I was fleeing the true self, my very being, this necessarily drew me into the constitutive flight from the Original Being, the Eternal One, the unique source and sustenance of my being: God the Father.

By this time in my life flight became not only a pedestrian activity, an interior struggle, nor merely flight by means of the drug induced wings which sheared the normal functions of the human brain off from any true experience of the mind as a touchstone for grace, but, the actual experience of flying.

With the need to replace immense inner panic with some more controlled fear, hence a powerful antidote to the fear I could not, would not face, flying was the ideal solution being at one and the same time terrifying in its experiential definitude and symbolic in its obvious aloofness.

Of course it also allowed me to extend the range of my hunter’s roaming for hedonistic adventure and enhanced anonymity.

I began to fly to various cities virtually every weekend, exhausting myself with terror and pleasure, arriving at work the following Monday barely aware of my environment, pulsating with the determination to forge through time with a frantic rapidity towards the advancing Friday of flight.

To use the old adage I was indeed burning the candle at both ends and my life was as a result becoming a pool of pungent tallow.

Like most other human beings my first flight was of those incredible first experiences which become a litmus test before which subsequent repetition of the activity always fails to excite as sweetly.

The jet left the city near midnight during a snowstorm and seemed, by sheer force and shudder of its engines to claw its way up some atmospheric mountainside until it reached the peak!

I was as one inside a Jona whale’s belly of steel and aluminum, not though as fleeing prophet, though now I understand the prophetic aspects of flight.

Once we were high enough in the night storm that I could no longer marvel at the toy-town aspects of lit city beneath I became so totally aware there was, discounting the jets hull, nothing beneath my feet, nothing but this throbbing jet belly between me and the ground, the sought for definable terror took hold and overwhelmed the normal state of panic in which I existed.

Some hours later as we began the descent towards the city I was traveling to the sheer beauty of flight, its mystery, the incongruity of the earth bound out distancing the winged creatures for whom the sky was originally blessed, took hold and I almost prayed.

But I did not.

To pray implied a taste for reality, for which, at that juncture, I had a total aversion.

For this is a characteristic of the person who is blinded by his appetites; when he is in the midst of the truth and of what is suitable for him, he no more sees it than if he were in the dark. [aw]

 

IT IS, [as I continue this written pilgrimage across the mystery of a life wherein the truth where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more, must by now be surely self-evident], the last morning of the last day of the last Liturgical Year of the last century of the Second Millennium of His Holy Incarnation!

For some weeks now I have written many letters, articles, poems, traveled, in a word struggled against this, which means frankly I have struggled against the ‘goad’ of His Holy Will, until finally grace conquered.

Truthfully I was given the grace to say yes to grace, and these past couple of days I have resumed this work, having been granted the further grace to accept a particular poverty, difficult for any writer, that my obedience is NOT, per se, for my writing ever to see the light of day.

No!

{There was just a phone call, which has left me smiling, for I had outlined my whole day on a separate sheet, alternating this work and prayer, and planned an evening’s painting. My spiritual father has stressed the need during this sabbatical for suitable time for recreation and friends have offered a movie, right in the middle of MY schedule! }

No!

My obedience is the Holy Will of the Father, which is, that I write.

Publication is His will to permit or not.

{I said yes to the movie.}

Again I draw from the original notes for this:

THE OVERCAST sky is swollen with yet another winter storm, soon to be born upon the wind.

The chickadees gorge themselves on seeds from the feeder outside my window, while frequently blue jays swoop down from the cedars trying to steal the food of the little ones.

Here in this priests’ dorm the raspy coughing of brothers not yet healed of the flu mingles with the constant hum of the blower, pushing wood furnace heat from the basement into each of these small rooms, which house the awesome mystery of weak men strengthened by sacramental ordination so that even our experience of the flu becomes a fragment of oblation!

It is the seventh and last Sunday of this season of Ordinary Time.

We have touched today the threshold of Great Holy Lent!

Lent!

The turning, returning, season of grace.

The time to turn away from sin, self-preoccupation, other idols, and re-turn, or rather by a yes to grace be turned once more towards, enter the embrace of, the One Holy God, Father, Son, Holy Spirit.

O that every breath I take be Triune!

The season of metanoia, conversion, change of heart.

Those embraced in my childhood with all the passionate exuberance of giving up candy and saying extra prayers with exhilarating fervour; the less childlike Lents of my monastic days, when the fasting was deep, the hunger true, the silence profound, the metanoia exquisite, if painful.

As Lent most often in these climes occurs in the dead of winter, one of my un-Lent-Lents, my non-turn-return ones, was, unbeknownst to me at the time, a lent of great grace in the person of a woman.

I’d been doing community work with ex-cons, becoming rather close to one in particular. Sadly, not from any altruistic motive. He shared much in common with me, age, artistic talent, brokenness.

One day he suggested I come with him to the city where his family lived and meet THE woman in his life.

At first I was disturbed by this, rather desiring there be no woman in his life. But in spite of my own weirdness we were friends and I was always up for another trip.

It was an uneventful journey, and no surprise at all his family lived in the local projects.

His family embodied all the unfortunate stereotypes of project housing family life, yet their kindness to, and acceptance of me was genuine, though I was a bit taken aback at their casual assumption my friend and I would be sleeping together.

It was an approach to homosexuality I’d never encountered before and its affect upon me was to cause an inner sense of shame and confusion, feelings I immediately suppressed due to their potential danger of twisting into mature reflection.

After being there for two days and still not having met the woman of his life, in the evening while we were having beer and shooting pool in the neighbourhood hall I pressed the point, suggesting she was a mythical cover-up among his wider group of friends, those ignorant of his actual predilection.

He ignored my dig by assuring me I was to meet this very real woman the next day.

Morning came and he awakened me early.

We had some coffee and then got in his car and drove to the downtown, stopping in a lot across from an immense grey stone building, clearly built at the end of the nineteenth century.

It was a hospital!

Even at this very moment as I write these lines, reliving what I now know to have been, with the woman, a major graced friendship in my life, I recall nonetheless the deep sense of unease, indeed of being appalled, as we walked ever deeper, it seemed, into the bowels of that huge hospital complex, filled with the chronically, terminally ill.

Not the well insured ill either, but the poorest of the poor.

The hospital itself was poor: paint peeling, worn linoleum floors, ancient, rebellious elevators, windows of cracked glass in warped wooden frames which teased light through brownish grime to the music of incessant drafts while the entire place smelled heavy of the detritus human beings.

After walking some time down a particularly pathetic corridor in that palace of pathos we entered a room which seemed medieval in its atmosphere of the dark and hopeless rage of a putative existence.

I could not have been more wrong.

The putative existence was not that of the person in this room, rather it was the chosen state of attitude, purpose, of late twentieth century medicine which seeped into that room like some overflowing cesspool, whose waves slapped against the diamond hard soul of the room’s occupant, yet were incapable of drowning her.

As my senses tried to interpret the paradox experience of repulsion and being drawn towards the image before me, ‘ it ‘ , moved slightly and announced ‘ I AM ALIVE.’, and I staggered backward a step for the announcement was not of the fact of this woman.

It was He who spoke within me.

That was too much to bear.

On the bed before my eyes lay a mere hint of a human being, a woman whose body was all skin, bones, every limb twisted out of normal shape, eyes sunken as if they almost were not there, yet as they moved to search who has entered the room they flashed like the turning lamp of a lighthouse!

Tubes were running from various parts of her body, some upwards towards glass bottles of clear fluid, or cylinders of oxygen beside the bed, or downwards towards containers hidden under the bed.

The tv, small, black and white, fuzzy of picture, hung from a short chain embedded in the ceiling. It swayed ever so slightly, as if asserting it would un-expectantly crash to the floor. All the while the sound blared. A film of plastic was crudely tapped over the window, billowed by the pressure of winter’s wind, sounding as if enraged at its denied entry. An old iron radiator leaked steam with a constant hiss, but appeared unwilling to heat the room, which was cold indeed.

My entire being wanted to flee.

My entire being wanted to be accepted.

THIS was THE woman?

My friend motioned me closer to the bed in which lay what appeared to my rational being as more a creature of some medieval peasant’s nightmare than a human being, must less a woman whom I had just seen my friend bend down and kiss as if she were the Blessed Mother herself!

Indeed my friend, as he turned and motioned to me after he kissed her, was radiant. His eyes, normally hard, cold, cosmic black-holes, shimmered with brightness and tears.

I approached as easily as one cutting a path through dense jungle or swimming in a sea of molten lead, trembled as I bent down and barely brushed with reluctant finger tips the protruding collection of small bones which hinted at being a woman’s hand.

I would have been safe had I not dared glance towards the face and was struck in the core of my being by a glance from those heart-reading eyes.

She smiled silently and landed a dried flesh extremity upon my hand and declared: “ I think we shall become the best of friends. “

This was too much.

The leper’s kiss.

I fled in a heat of outrage that my friend had dared subject me to this encounter with horror.

Indeed I was in such a rage that when, about a half-hour later, my friend emerged from the hospital and was walking towards me, leaning against his car in the parking lot across from the hospital, I screamed my rage. We almost came to blows.

When the next day we returned to the city in which we were living, and he dropped me off, I walked wordlessly away from the car.

It didn’t take long after that incident for the friendship to dissolve.

Years later I heard he died in some prison.

Some years after my first meeting with her, in the meantime she had started writing to me and I was, at first strangely, almost as one mesmerized, compelled to write back, I found myself living in the same city.

By then the power of her insights, the passion of her compassion had touched me deeply and we were, indeed, the best of friends.

During the years I lived in the city I would see her often.

Many of her friends became mine, for she little by little roped us all in as volunteers in the seemingly endless projects she organized for that phenomena we have come to accept as a whole class of putative persons: poor, handicapped, elderly, homeless, unborn.

Though I was an atheist at this juncture she unabashedly spoke of the Suffering Christ, of the Loving Christ or the marvel of a life lived in complete union with Him.

These conversations were not easy for it could take her ten minutes of immense struggle to weave together the few words needed to form a complete sentence.

This created silence between the words, a silence like the jewellers cup bearing molten gold and each moment of silence tipped that fire-fluid into the recesses of my heart.

From this, the first of several “THE” woman-women in my life, comes my own passion for the anawim.

She told me once of the only gift she begged from her Divine Lover, having been crippled and abandoned at the outset of her teenage years with a disease that promised death, but failed to deliver: “ My one is to walk once more before I die.”

The last time I saw her was a few days before leaving the country on a planned Christmas holiday.

I had just completed the last of her Christmas cards, which I would write and then she would somehow manage to sign with her name. We agreed I would visit her immediately on my return and tell her all about the trip.

On my return I was met at the airport by my best friend, whom I’d met through her, and he told me what had happened:

       He and a couple of her friends had brought her to the hospital chapel for Midnight Mass.

At Communion time she had suddenly stood up and out of her special wheelchair and walked up to the astounded priest to receive her Lover Christ in the mystery of Holy Communion.

That evening she had died in her sleep.

She was not the first woman to have crawled a great distance in faith and hope to touch Him [Mt.9:20ff]!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Autobiography

18 A TREE FOR THE HANGING

THERE is a personal grace in this writing, as well as, since it is written under obedience and in fidelity to the duty of the moment, a grace for you whose eyes fall upon these words in this moment.

 

 

The Spirit tells my heart to give a glimpse of the grace so others might come to trust Him.

The glimpse I am moved to give is simply this: it is part of the original satanic lie hissed to Adam and Eve that there will come a moment in our lives when God abandons us.

The truth is, it is we who deny Him a place within us, and we deny the truth He is with us.

We abandon Him.

Indeed in so doing we abandon our true self.

That is why, among many reasons, hopefully by now most of them self-evident, I keep mentioning that this writing is NOT so much the story of my particular life, as it is the proclamation, the account of the persistence, the tender, faithful, relentless, seeking, calling, inviting, all-loving, redemptive, activity in the soul, mine, yours, of the Blessed Trinity, through the mystery of Jesus, the reality of Jesus, He whose Incarnation, Passion, Death, Resurrection makes real the fact of our being, and of our being beloved children of the Father.

The true teacher here is NOT this neurotic, sinful priest commanded to write.

I have been given the grace to understand, a grace of insight, as never before in my life how so much evil came to pass within my life.

The gift of conversion and healing entails such struggle.

 Often too there is much resistance until finally grace overcomes what holds us in bondage, layer after deeper layer, after deeper layer, until it is finished — usually at the moment when we are laid deep, deep in the earth under layers of earth when we have come finally to surrender to Love!

One of the great spiritual tragedies of internecine warfare within the Church today is rooted in the refusal of many of Her children, especially bishops and priests, the teachers and shepherds, to accept the clear truth of the Holy Gospel.

This is particularly so when it comes to denying the reality of satan and his permitted assault on the followers of Christ, and the constitutive reality of sin and its aftermath.

 

When a soul comes to the priest for instruction, seeking truth, and is told such things as satan, mortal sin, hell, etc. are medieval notions best left aside by we enlightened moderns, the soul is relentlessly pushed back by such fatherly betrayal into the very clutches of evil, evil which the soul had come to the priest to be delivered from.

The more priests refrain from truth-speaking, from exercising our ordained paternal authority to enlighten, encourage, absolve, deliver, the firmer the grip of the evil one upon the person of the child of God, upon their very soul, upon the entire world.

Factually the abomination of the desolation occurs within the soul, the living temple of the Holy Spirit, more horrifically than anything we can image in an external structure.

This occurs when souls are denied sacramental solace by priests who have surrendered truth of faith to the illusion of modern scepticism.

This loss of faith/refusal to believe, by priests, results from the failure of priests themselves to approach each other for spiritual direction, authentic confession of sins, humble supplication for healing of interior neurotic wounds, those bitter roots and inner vows which form the sins of our youth, and unhanded over to Christ, hobble our adulthood.

Scripture is filled with stark descriptions of the hobbled soul in bondage to disorder and sin: Dn.9:27; 11:31. Often these passages are narrowly understood as end time prophecies, but everything in Scripture has a personal aspect to it, a teaching for us or a warning: Mk.13:14; Mt.24:15.

I have long wondered what my own personal ‘original’ sin was, how I came to close myself off to the activity and voice of the Holy Spirit, to allow the one who should never stand within my being enter as abomination and render me desolate.

How could this happen, or rather how could I choose this at such a tender age?

Why, within a few hours of arriving back in the city of my youth did I seek out a particular place, as if going to a shrine?

I’D BEEN back in the city but a day or so when this compulsion overtook me, with relative ease as I recall, that I should seek out a particular place, a place of horrific death in the last century, a place which was no mere place but more a thing, a living thing consecrated to death, the hanging tree.

I am deeply aware of the danger in writing about evil spirits, satan, the devil, demons, all names for the same spirits of evil, cast from heaven (Rv.12) because of their free-will, irredeemable sin against the Holy Triune God.

The danger is not merely to myself, but to others if this writing triggers extremely dangerous curiosity.

Or an equally disordered scepticism.

So as I write these lines I am in constant prayer for the protection of Our Lady and St. Michael the Archangel, for inspiration from the Holy Fathers and Doctors of the Church, so that I write truth, truth which is cautionary for souls.

CHRIST is a witness. He came down from heaven to destroy the work of the devil, that is, sin (1Jn.3:8). This is why He is called ‘the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world (Jn.1:29). Who can explain or even imagine all that Christ suffered to destroy the work of the devil and to satisfy perfectly the justice of God? ‘Though He was by nature God, He emptied Himself, taking the nature of a slave ‘(Phil.2:6). ‘Being rich, He became poor for our sakes ‘(2Cor.8:9). He ‘had nowhere to lay His head ‘(Lk.9:58), although He made heaven and earth. ‘He came into His own, and His own received Him not ‘(Jn.1:11). ‘When He was reviled He did not revile, when He suffered, did not threaten, but yielded Himself up to him who judged Him unjustly; who Himself bore our sins in His body upon the tree ‘(1Pet.2:23, 24). ‘He humbled Himself and became obedient unto death, even death on the cross ‘(Phil.2:8). ‘By His stripes we were healed ‘(1Pet.2:24). At last mocked, spit upon, scourged, crowned with thorns, crucified in complete shame and excruciating pain, He poured out all His Blood and His Life. He bore all this to destroy the works of the devil and wipe out our sin. [an]

 

Places where there has been, things used for, in either the ancient or near past, violent death, occult activity, blasphemy, satanic ritual, unless these places, things, are reclaimed for Christ, in Christ, through Christ, by the power of His Redeeming Cross, Blood, Name, such places and things will remain cesspools, swamps, bogs, of devouring evil.

There is a defined limit to the movement and power of the evil one and his minions as is attested to by Sacred Scripture and Church teaching, which we should never forget because it is as seriously dangerous to over-estimate the power of evil as it is to under-estimate same.

Scripture shows us the limits the Lord Himself has placed upon the evil one [Jb. 1:6-12; 2:6], as well as the fear evil spirits have in the presence of Jesus [Mk. 1:23, 24], and the power Jesus has over them [Mk. 5: 9, 10 & 12].

The Church herself in her Catechism teaches:

The devil and the other demons were indeed created naturally good by God, but they    became evil by their own doing……{# 391 CCC*} Scripture speaks of a sin of these angels. This ‘ fall ‘ consists in the free choice of these created spirits, who radically and irrevocably rejected God and His reign…..The devil ‘ has sinned from the beginning ‘; he is ‘ a liar and the father of lies ‘. {# 392 CCC*}

 The power of satan is, nonetheless, not infinite…It is a great mystery that Providence should permit diabolical activity, but ‘ we know that in everything God works for good with those who love Him. {# 395 *Catechism of the Catholic Church}

 

The evil one then can only suggest, what is accurately called ‘tempt’ the soul, us, to sin, to choose against God’s love for us.

Satan CANNOT make a soul commit a sin.

We have free will and must, in order to sin, freely choose to follow the evil idea, in a word to cooperate with the evil one.

The imminent danger in minor cooperation with evil, known as venial sin, is the progressive weakening of our free will and the increased predisposition of our will towards greater evil, known as mortal sin, the deadly sinning which, persisted in, leads necessarily towards such a distortion of our freedom that in extreme cases we will hand our will over to satan, i.e. become actually in bondage to, if not possessed by, an evil spirit.

We, I, You, and no one else bear the responsibility for our choices and the repercussions of those choices.

True, the sins of others against us may, because of the severity of the impact of the sin against us, damage our notion of self, weakening our will, our emotional stability, render it more facile for us to choose evil and more of a struggle to choose good. Nonetheless, we remain with a free will and therefore responsible for the choices we make.

In this spiritual warfare we have the person, the victory, of Christ Himself as our encouragement. Through His Passion and Death, His Redemption of us, by the power of the Holy Spirit operative in the Sacraments, especially of Baptism, Confession, Holy Communion, we have the forgiveness of our sins, the grace to begin, with God, anew, moment by moment to choose the life of goodness over the death of evil.

Christ’s own struggle with the evil one is amply attested in the Holy Gospels, very dramatically at the outset of His public life in Matthew 4:1-11.

Another example from Matthew of the struggle with evil, which illustrates both that which occurred within my soul during my monastic years, and what happened to me when I returned to the city.

The passage is found in Matthew 12:43-45 and illustrates the true conversion is not just the action of Jesus setting us free but what happens if we fail to live in the reality of conversion. We cannot be passive!

When I returned home from the monastery I had within me a closed heart, a shutting down of my baptized self, soul, mind, heart, will, towards any and all activity of God within me.

Now partially this was due to the fact that while, through entrance into and life within the monastic vocation I had, in a true sense, been freed of the evil I had clung to prior to my monastic life, and thus to a real degree the house of my soul was indeed tidied and swept clean, I had not invited Christ to occupy the house of my being.

Because there had been no work done to deal with the ‘why’ of my previous life of sin, there had been no invitation to Christ to fully occupy my being.

This thus enabled those tendril roots to spread and grow, to become eventually the returned evil spirit with his legion of seven worse than him. They occupied the place within me which belongs to Christ but which was empty of Him because I had never invited Him to enter. Even when I sometimes desperately went through the motions I never trusted He actually would enter as the fullness of my being.

The means by which I sustained the new occupants within me was to deliberately silence the voice of my conscience, which in fact means I deliberately chose to ignore, to render myself deaf and oblivious to, the voice of the Holy Spirit.

…..the conscience is ‘the most secret core and sanctuary of a man, where he is alone with God, whose voice echoes in his depths ‘. It ‘can…speak to his heart more specifically: do this, shun that ‘. This capacity to command what is good and to forbid evil, placed in man by the Creator, is the main characteristic of the personal subject. But at the same time, ‘in the depths of his conscience, man detects a law which he does not impose upon himself, but which holds him to obedience ‘. The conscience therefore is not an independent and exclusive capacity to decide what is good and what is evil. Rather there is profoundly imprinted upon it a principle of obedience…..the conscience is the ‘secret sanctuary ‘ in which ‘ God’s voice echoes ‘. The conscience is ‘the voice of God ‘….[ao]

 

The result of remaining an empty house upon my return from the monastery, and the result of my free will choice to remain empty, was of my being seized by an urgent need to seek out that place of the hanging tree and, frankly, the tree itself, to touch it, feel its raw bark against my cheek, to hopefully find there the original lad, the one who though he had held me in bondage, had tortured me and beaten me when I wanted someone else, and from whose grasp I illusory supposedly had escaped, been free of while in the monastery. This need for him seized me urgently still with an intensity as if it had never left me…which it hadn’t in the bitter, deep rooted depths of my being.

It was that lad who had first introduced me to this place, this thing of dark, cruel, death. It was within its shadow that I consciously committed my first mortal sin in the clutch of that same lad.

Though I myself was but a lad at the time, I was old enough to choose.

 I chose death, darkness, evil.

I choose immediate gratification over trust and waiting upon the Lord.

Now I was returning to that thing, to distrust.

I have no patience with those who advance dubious evidence to suggest, actually to propose, as excuse and justification for activities, the origins of, sexual deviance, homosexual or otherwise, as being irrevocably bound up in the genetic roots of persons.

Even if that were so, as language skill is bound up within those same genetic roots, someone has to loosen the skill, teach the child to talk by first speaking to, and with, the child.

Patterns of behaviour are learned, from those who are already practitioners.

The informing and forming practitioner need not necessarily be an adult, they may be a peer, but, if only the truth would be told, when it comes to sexual deviance, sooner or later within the scope of promiscuity of all kinds will be found elements, if not overt practices of, black oracles, occult activity, satanic games, pornography, mind/mood altering drugs, abuse of power, use of violence and, of course, recourse to being habitués of places like the hanging tree.

This was the world, the world of the dark, the lost, deaf, blind, addicted, the habitués of the underbelly of cities, the corridors of political, social, philosophical, ethical, eventually even theological manipulation to achieve an evil agenda, the agenda of the licentious, that I was seeking to enter as surely, if not at the time as clearly aware as I am able to be in retrospect, as I sought out the place of the hanging tree.

Found there the place from which to suspend the last vestiges of dignity and conscience.

I DON’T WANT TO. I know I should, but I don’t want to. I’ll pretend I’m deaf; I’ll curl up and show my bristles. Let him touch me who dares! The arrow of the Call, sharply aimed, ricochets off. My skin is thick and weather-proofed. The Demand slides from it like water from a duck’s feathers. I stand on my rights, bestowed on me from the highest source in virtue of the nature which I have received, which I am, in virtue of the instincts and habits which are implanted in me and which strive for life and development. Let no one contest these rights, not even the highest authority! And even if someone should dare, let him know that I don’t want to do it.

  Soft it approaches, almost inaudible and yet quite unavoidable: a ray of light, an offer of power, a command that is more and less than a command — a wish, a request, an invitation, an enticement: brief as an instant, simple to grasp as the glance of two eyes. It contains a promise: love, delight and a vision extending over an immense and vertiginous distance. Liberation from the unbearable dungeon of ego. The adventure that I always longed for. The perfect feat of daring in which I am sure to win only by losing all. The source of life opening up inexhaustibly to me, who am dying of thirst! The gaze is perfectly tranquil, having nothing of magical power or of hypnotic compulsion: a questioning gaze which allows me my freedom. At the bottom of it the shadows of affliction and of hope alternate.

I lower my eyes; I look to the side. I don’t want to say ‘no’ in the face of those eyes. I give them time to turn away, time to withdraw into their cave of eternity, time to grow dark, to be blurred. I am not at home: ‘The master says he cannot see you at the moment’. I give those eyes time to disappear again behind their heavy lid, the curtain of eternity. For a second, precisely at the moment when I know it is too late, a nameless sorrow makes me tremble: happiness has been forfeited, love mocked, and no one can bring them back to me! The prison door thuds into its lock: again I am prisoner in what is to me so dead and so hated – myself [ap]

 

It is late in the evening of the first day of writing again and I am tired and need pray, need celebrate Holy Mass… need, but not in the negative sense…I need the way you feel when you do not turn away from the eyes of the Divine Lover and you need linger within those infinite streams of love which flow from the Risen One.

It is time to be bathed in light.

This is our hope, is it not, that no matter how often we turn away from those eyes, He is always seeking a moment within which to gaze upon us again, to offer us again the opportunity to look at Him straight in the eye and say: YES!

Ah Jesus, I yearn that You should pass by this way again this evening, gaze that I might linger within the Light of Your Eyes!

How come we remember the Holy Gospels so narrowly that we recall the walking away sad, but not Love’s Gaze? {Mark 10:21}

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Autobiography

17 THOUGHTS ON A TRAIN OF THOUGHT

SO HERE I am trusting the grace of obedience. The grace of the duty of the moment as I begin once more to write!

The old binders of notes from years ago are on this desk, vigils are lit before my icon wall, prayer prayed while writing becomes prayer.

Outside this little room in this little house, built like all the others in this area during the last great war of the world, to house the workers who made the weapons, trucks, bombs and other utensils of fraternal destruction, the mid November winds blow from across the great inner seas of this continent, harbingers of the snows which even now determinedly ascend from the arctic wilds, and the western altitudes of the Rockies!

How my being rejoices each year as winter approaches with its vastness of liturgical riches from Advent to Easter, its frozen stillness, the cities ablaze with lights from Thanksgiving to Christmas. Even the children of commercial darkness cannot easily resist the allure of light even if they refuse to adore Light from Light.

IT HAD all happened so quickly.

One moment I was a monk, struggling with the survival of my vocation.

One moment more and I was dressed in outdated secular clothing, sitting on a torn upholstery seat in a train wrenching me across the broken expectancy of the adolescence dreams which had been mine seven years earlier.

Now I was a work hardened, somewhat handsome, raw young adult returning to a world no longer the one he had left.

 I was an immigrant heading into new country.

What had happened to me?

How had my seemingly unchangeable until the grave monastic life ended so abruptly?

What had I missed?

What was wrong with me?

Why was God hurting me again in my life?

Why didn’t He like me anymore?

What would I do?

What would become of me?

What had become of me?

Where would I live?

Why would I live?

Who would I know?

Who would want to know me?

Well, if I was out of the monastery without explanation other than, as the Abbot intimated, there had been a consensus among the monks I didn’t any longer have a vocation, and, if God was allowing me to be tossed from the safety of that idyll into the jaws of terror and confusion, then I might as well be out of the church, out of faith, out of God.

Indeed it seemed to me it would be folly to remain close to a deity so easily fickle as to change His mind when such change meant so much pain.

Yes.

Distance from such a God would be wise indeed.

I remembered the grainy photo I had seen in a major news-magazine showing the shadowed nude body of a young man in the new style of ads.

Perhaps I could find him and he would be for me what God clearly could, or would not be: the affirmation of my being.

I recall reading somewhere John Henry Cardinal Newman, in a sermon; spoke of how doubts arise from disobedience, which itself is rooted in a life corrupted by bad company or evil books. This all, ultimately, ends in disbelief, which is the deliberate chosen refusal to believe, to reject the gift of faith, and is one of those genres of sin which is terrible above all: sin against the Holy Spirit.

PRISONS OF FINITUDE! Like every other being, man is born in many prisons. Soul, body, thought, intuition, endeavour; everything about him has a limit, is itself tangible limitation; everything is a This and a That, different from other things and shunned by them. From the grilled windows of the senses each person looks out to alien things which he will never be. Even if his spirit could fly through the spaces of the world like a bird, he himself will never be this space, and the furrow which he traces in the air vanishes immediately and leaves no lasting impression. How far it is from one being to its closest neighbour! And even if they love each other and wave to one another from island to island, even if they attempt to exchange solitudes and pretend they have unity, how much more painfully does disappointment then fall upon them when they touch the invisible bars — the cold glass pane against which they hurl themselves like captive birds. No one can tear down his own dungeon; no one knows who inhabits the next cell. [am]

 

SOMETHING exploded as I wrote out the above paragraph from those original notes which never came to my heart before about Von Balthaser’s cryptic, yet profoundly insightful, notion of the human condition: not only, which is why I use the quote, does it reflect how I was when, literally, my face was against the ‘ cold glass pane ‘ of the train compartment, but there is also here, as everywhere if we dare open wide the doors of our being, the tender presence of Christ seeking to penetrate through the pane, of our pain: He gazes, He speaks, He touches….{Song of Songs ch.2:9, 10 & ch.5:4}

In a few hours I would be back in the city, which was no longer my city.

A city which, as the train entered its outskirts was a foreign country.

I was returning to a place in which the remnants of my family lived, but which was a building I had never inhabited, peopled by persons I’d never really met.

I was terrified.

Undoubtedly, looking back these forty years, I was having a nervous breakdown.

I could not afford to be that vulnerable.

I needed to survive and I would.

The tree of addiction, that towering mass of sin and neurosis which overshadowed my being may have been cut down, its parts burned in my monastic life of penance, but the roots had lain dormant, for none had known, least of all my own self, of the need to uproot them.

Now, even as the train rumbled into the unfamiliar yet recognizable city, those roots became tendrils which would become a new great thorn tree and engulf my being.