It is a startling thing to consider how a particular decision, quite insignificant in the hour it takes place, can secretly hide the truth of a spiritual destiny. Without that decision, a completely different life would have been lived. The choice, trivial and optional at the time it occurs, is part of a soul’s destiny. An entire life, in other words, can reside at an unsuspected, secret juncture when a seemingly unimportant impulse is obeyed. Once the decision is made, the hour releases the bolt on a great interlocking network of influences and events that would not take place but for that choice. Perhaps we do not pay sufficient attention to the importance of such junctures and crossroads…
Fr Donald Haggerty, The Contemplative Hunger
For some weeks now I have been living between worlds. Outwardly, I am much the same man I was before, but inwardly something has changed, and the sense of what it might be in only gradually dawning on me. Long ago, as I recalled recently, I stepped onto the contemplative path almost without realising it. But, as Eve Baker notes, “contemplatives… are useless people” and I was brought up always to be useful as an artist, a poet, a musician: always to consider what treasures I might be able to bring back from the land beyond the grey wind to illuminate the lives of others, and to ornament my own in their eyes.
Almost it would seem an instinct of nature, the manner in which contemplatives flee from attention to themselves. But perhaps it is not so much a flight or an escape as a profound inclination that they are following. What we see externally as their tendency to self-effacement and concealment reflects a desire to be released from the concern for self.
Haggerty, ibid.
Over the years, the inclination to solitude and concealment has popped up often enough, as I’ve noted before; but I have been too quick always to dismiss it, to leave its demands as being too extreme, too far beyond the practicalities of the moment, and life has gone on much as before, filled with pleasures and obligations, weariness and some wonder.
Too early in our lives, perhaps most of us are taught to distrust our truest insights and best impulses. We come under such pressure to conform to the imperatives of our culture – and, growing up in the 1950s, I encountered a culture with strong gender demarcations and role models – that even with the most enlightened parenting we grow up doubting the deepest parts of ourselves. Those of us with a calling to the saltmarshes of the spirit are perhaps doubly vulnerable: growing up into our teens and twenties, it is a brave young person who will dare to be more than a certain amount weird.
Gradually, though, I have found this call to give everything for what I am coming to understand is the simple presence of God growing stronger, not less. I cannot defend or justify this, nor advance any arguments for its advantages. It involves no obvious sacrifices, as far as I can see, nor outer heroics or spectacular renunciations. Like the impulse itself, it is an inward thing.
Eight years ago now, I wrote:
All this stuff about prayer boils down to this. What I am really doesn’t matter. There isn’t any holiness in me. Of myself, I really am not, truly, anything more than little, and ordinary; and anything praiseworthy about me only consists in the extent to which I am prepared to acknowledge that, and to live in the shadows, quietly, like the ivy I love so much. All my health and growth depends on accepting that…
It’s time to let go of a lot of things; and yet it isn’t a time for heroic gestures, grand austerities, but for little turnings to that hidden track that leads out between the trees, away from the lights and the music and the excited voices.
Progress in the life of the spirit doesn’t seem to be measurable in the way worldly progress can be measured. It is hard to write honestly of this. But truly to pray is to become a small incarnation, a tiny model of our Lord; this is why to pray is to take up the cross ourselves, since it is the refusal to turn away from the pain that runs inextricably through existence, like a red thread in the bright weave of what is. Easter is not a metaphor, and resurrection lies on the far side of the cross that is absolute surrender, helplessness entirely embraced. The cross means abandoning all that is my will, every last attempt at self-preservation; “For,” as Paul wrote in his letter to the Colossians (3.3), “you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.”
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner…
