The Kid Sister of Blessed Imelda

 It’s been a rough few days, so I’m sitting down with a Diet Coke and a Toblerone bar (the wine bottle was nearly empty) and continuing with Merton as he is always a source of comfort, even in hitting hard topics…

I don’t know if I ever got very close to needing a padded cell: but if I ever had gone crazy, I think psychoanalysis would have been the one thing chiefly responsible for it.

This had me belly laughing.  My mother tried to get therapy for me three times during my life before the age of 18 and every time the psychiatrist listened to me, sent me out, called my mother in, and told her that I was doing fine, knew exactly what was going on, how to deal with it, etc and that they didn’t need to see me.  The wondering what he was thinking was the worst part.

Discussing his impressions of the flavor or spiritual ‘feel’ of England…

…the whole of England was pretending, with an elaborate and intent and conscious, and perhaps in some cases a courageous effort, to act as if it were alive.  And it took a lot of acting.  It was a vast and complicated charade, with expensive and detailed costuming and scenery and a lot if inappropriate songs: and yet the whole thing was so intolerably dull, because most of the people were already morally dead…

Ouch again. If you just substitued the word America for the word England? Is it not a shockingly accurate description of our own country and culture? Chilling, but true.  What an experience it is to read that and to feel the spirit within me cry out to God in anguish for the people of my country, how bizarre to feel the urge to prostrate myself before Him in prayer and supplication for the sins that scream out against us from the streets… it isn’t the first time since becoming Catholic that I’ve had that experience, but it still surprises me how radically my perspective has changed, both in my attitude and my prayer life.  Talk about instilling a desire to go back and read the prophets and Psalms, see how the men of God interceded on the people’s behalf… that’ll do it.

The next quote is somewhat in the same vein, but different, and powerful as well…  There was a time when I could’ve read this and thought ‘uh uh, no way, sure, my sins are bad, but let’s not get carried away here’ and had plenty of justification and self righteous angst over it.  That was not what I felt.

Did I know that my own sins were enough to have destroyed the whole of England and Germany? There has never yet been a bomb invented that is half so powerful as one mortal sin - and yet there is no positive power ins in, only negation, only annihilation: and perhaps that is why it is so destructive, it is a nothingness, and where it is, there is nothing left - a blank, a moral vacuum.

Ouch simply doesn’t cover my response to this passage. A deep feeling of inner keening and mourning might. It made me think of the Ecthroi in Madeleine L’Engle’s Time series, forever x-ing and unnaming things. (Ok, that was simply an unforgivable dumbing down of the passage, wasn’t it? *sigh* ) Not only that, but the knowledge that I am guilty of so MUCH sin just almost overwhelmed me.  I can just hear some well meaning person pulling their hair out by the roots with the desire to remind me that Christ paid for that sin etc etc… and I know all that… but it isn’t that my sin isn’t covered, it is the understanding, even if only in a finite limited way, of just how bad my sin truly is.  It is the knowledge that despite my best efforts, I will not be able to keep from sinning again and knowing in a much more REAL way, the agony I inflict on my Beloved every. single. time.  I thought I knew true penitance… and I’m sure that God, knowing I felt as penitent as my spiritual understanding would allow, accepted it… but it was nothing compared to what I feel now. (I can just HEAR you guys thinking “And you want ME to READ this book?” )

It is only the infinite mercy and love of God that has prevented us from tearing ourselves to pieces and destroying His entire creation long ago.  People seem to think that it is in some way a proof that no merciful God exists, if we have so many wars.  On the contrary, consider how in spite of centuries of sin and greed and lust and cruelty and hatred and avarice and oppression and injustice, spawned and bred by the free wills of men, the human race can still recover, each time, and can still produce men and women who overcome evil with good, hatred with love, greed with charity, lust and cruelty with sanctity.  How could all this be possible without the merciful love of God, pouring out His grace upon us?  Can there be any doubt where wars come from and where peace comes from, when the children of this world, excluding God from their peace conferences, only manage to bring about greater and greater wars the more they talk about peace?

Now, don’t get me wrong here. I am not anti-military. In fact, I am about as pro-military as they come. Few things get me as riled as reports that the government isn’t supporting our military properly. I absolutely think it was right to go to war to stop Hitler, for example. I believe there are just wars that God-fearing people must fight so that evil doesn’t win.  However, if we don’t get our military protective knickers in a knot, this passage has a great deal of truth in it.  What a different way of approaching a very old question.

I was not sure where I was going, and I could not see what I would do when I got to New York. But you saw further and clearer than I, and you opened the seas before my ship, whose track lead me across the waters to a place I had never dreamed of, and which you were even then preparing for me to be my rescue and my shelter and my home.  And when I thought there was no God and no love and no mrecy, you were leading me all the while into the midst of His love and His mercy, and taking me, without my knowing anything about it, to the house that would hide me in the secret of His Face.

I couldn’t even type that in without crying. I’m having a hard time typing how I FEEL about that quote without crying harder.  I resemble that quote.  One of my frequent sayings is that the caravan left for Egypt long before Joseph was thrown in the well.  It is a great comfort for me in times of difficulty.  Even when I was yet in darkness, God saw me, drew me, prepared my way…  Blessed be God forever.

In fact, I might need a slightly modified version of that somewhere permanent.

Ok, for all you Latin title/quote lovers out there… Here’s a gem.

Illos tuos misericordes oculos ad nos converte, et Jesum, benedictum fructum ventris tui, nobis ostende.

Show us your Christ, Lady, after this our exile, yes: but show Him to us also now, show Him to us here, while we are still wanderers.

That is also the desire of my heart… I want to see Him then, after my exile is over… but I want to see Him now too, here in this wilderness where I wander… just a glimpse… enough to sustain me.

It is true that the materialistic society, the so-called culture that has evolved under the tender mercies of capitalism, has produced what seems to be the ultimate limit of this worldliness. And nowhere, except perhaps in the analogous society of pagan Rome, has there ever been such a flowering of cheap and petty and disgusting lusts and vanities as in the world of capitalism, where there is no evil that is not fostered and encouraged for the sake of making money.  We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest.

Whew. Again, so true.  While all for the benefits of a capitalist society, I am not willing to ignore its faults… and Merton is dead on here. 

However, if you are wrong, does that make me right? If you are bad, does that prove that I am good?

A bit of an oddity found in the midst of comparison between Communism and Capitalism, yet I found it oddly appropo Labor Day weekend when I highlighted it, and more than capable of standing on its own.  It is good food for thought and caused me to stop and spend some time in meditation when I happened upon it.

…wide general curriculum of an American university, which, instead of trying to teach you any one thing completely, strives to give its students a superficial knowledge of everything…

UGH! Talk about one of my pet peeves!!!

For a man to be absolutely sincere with generation after generation of students requires either supernatural simplicity or, in the natural order, a kind of heroic humility.

That was said in reference to one of his teachers… what a testimony.  Oh to be that kind of a (wo)man.  Only possible with  God, wouldn’t you say?

Also regarding the same teacher…

Mark would come into the room and, without any fuss, would start talking about whatever was to be talked about.  Most of the time he asked questions.  His questions were very good, and if you tried to answer them intelligently, you found yourself saying excellent things that you did not know you knew, and that you had not, in fact, known before. He had “educed” them from you by his question. His classes were literally “education”- they brought things out of you, they made your mind produce its own explicit ideas.

I’ve had a few teachers like that.  I loved them. I’d like to be a teacher like that myself.

You pass through the doors of the library, and the smell of thousands of well-kept books makes your head swim with a clean and subtle pleasure.

Truly, a man after my own heart.  A passion and pleasure I am blessed to share not only with many friends, but also with my children as well.

On that pleasant note, I’ll leave the rest of the book for another day…

I DID say I wore a highlighter out on this book.  The only reason I didn’t in On Being Catholic by Thomas Howard is because IT was SHORTER!

ETA: Another reason is because I realized that THIS highlighter had  built in post it tabs in the back, the other didn’t. HA. I KNEW Howard won…