Assault craft...

I think the contemplative mind is the most absolute assault on the secular worldview that you can have because it is a different mind from what we've been taught. The calculative mind or the egocentric mind reads everything in terms of personal advantage. As long as you read reality from that small self and read everything with a calculative mind, I don't think you're going to see things in any really new way.

All the great religions have talked about a different way of seeing that is actually a different perspective, a different vantage point, a different starting point. To quote Albert Einstein, "No problem can be solved with the same consciousness that caused it."

Richard Rohr, from Contemplative Prayer

I have always felt like a bit of an oddity, really. Partly it has had to do with being brought up the way I was, partly with being, according to the Myers Briggs personality types, an INFP. It may be, in God's economy that is so unlike our human one, these things have been a necessary preparation for a life of prayer. It may very well be that. But if, as Fr. Richard says, "the contemplative mind is the most absolute assault on the secular worldview that you can have," then that explains it. I have never, in my whole life, felt altogether comfortable with "the secular worldview!"

Over the years, I have tried various ways to find where I did fit, where I would feel comfortable. It's only in the last ten years or so that I have begun to realise that, from the world's point of view, I'm just never going to fit in, wherever I try to settle. These days I feel most nearly comfortable with my fellow Franciscans, but for the rest, I've come to cease worrying about it. If I have truly been called, as seems to be the case, to this odd life of prayer and contemplation, then it doesn't matter. Not fitting in is presumably part of the job description, if one is going to mount "absolute assault[s] on the secular worldview"!

The danger of course, in anything like this, is pride. It is so easy for the fallen heart to cast itself as the romantic outsider, the misunderstood hero of the spiritual revolution.

It seems God has decided to use this Lent to straighten me out a bit.

It's becoming abundantly clear that the only antidote to what could end up as a kind of creeping gnosticism, is fellowship: submitting to being a small part of something much greater than myself, and yet very ordinary. As I said the other day, being part of my own local church fellowship, being obedient to that as well as to my own Order, is absolutely vital, especially to one so vulnerable to self-deception as myself!