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1933-1939
Divine things are not named by the intellect as they really are in themselves, for in that way the intellect knows them not, but they are named in a way that is borrowed from created things.
ST. THOMAS AQUINAS.
March 1, 1933.
To CONRAD NOEL.
Thank you so much for your letter. I am terribly sorry that I am entirely snowed under with work at present; and could not write anything for your Crusade, as you so kindly ask me to do. Also, to do this would rather conflict with my fixed policy of not identifying myself with any particular parties or movements within the Church: more especially those of a religious-political character. You see I do feel that my particular call, such as it is, concerns the interior problems of individuals of all sorts and all opinions: and therefore any deliberate labelling of myself, beyond the general label of the Church, reduces the area within which I can operate and my help is likely to be accepted: but telling you what I think is quite another matter!
So far as I can see, the sense of “absorption” with nature and with other beings is far more characteristic of the nature-mystics and the pantheists than of the real Christian mystics. The deep love and sympathy with mankind, and often with all life, which one finds in them seems to be the direct result of their sense of union with the Divine Charity. They aim at that first, and thence flow out, as Ruysbroeck said, in a “widespreading love to all in common.” The saints whom I have known in the flesh have often been quite unable to keep anything for themselves, and have agonized deeply for the world’s suffering; but I don’t think they felt any mystical absorption in life in general. They just loved all things with God’s love. That is why I always feel that the best way to teach the Second Commandment is to concentrate on the First!
March 21, 1933.
To U.N.
How lovely it will be to have you at Pleshey…. The new Chapel is most beautiful and simple and seems to have been born full of the spirit of prayer. Everyone loves it. We had a perfect day for the Dedication last Friday week (March 10).
If you ever see the Church Times you will find in last Saturday’s number an account of it all by me. NO! ours won’t be the first Retreat in it. They are beginning this week….
50 Campden Hill Square, W.8.
20 March [? 1933].
To F.H.
… As to that restless feeling that the Roman Church is drawing you (a) mere nature makes us all a bit restless in the spring, and is likely to rouse our dominant interest; (b) the Church of Rome must always have a sort of attraction for those who love prayer because it does understand and emphasize worship. But the whole question of course is, not “What attracts and would help Me?” but “Where can I serve God best?”—and usually the answer to that is, “Where He has put me.” Von Hugel used to say that only a definite and continuous feeling, that it would be a sin not to move, could justify anyone changing. It is obvious that people who can pray and help others to, are desperately needed in the C. of E. And to leave that job because the devotional atmosphere of Rome is attractive, is simply to abandon the trenches and go back to Barracks. If all the Tractarians had imitated Newman’s spiritual selfishness English religion to-day (unless God had raised up other reformers) would be as dead as mutton! There is a great deal still to be done and a great deal to put up with, and the diet is often none too good—but we are here to feed His sheep where we find them, not to look for comfy quarters! At least, that is my firm belief! And the life of prayer can be developed in the C. of E as well as anywhere else if we really mean it.
As from 50 Campden Hill Square, W.8.
20th April, 1933.
To A.B.
Those feelings of bitterness, resentment, etc., you speak of come bubbling up from the animal levels of our being and can so easily taint our whole lives. The only cure is the frank acknowledgment of them for what they are and an absolute trust in the power of God to help to transcend them. When we receive absolution it is God Who enters our soul and frees us from the crippling fetters of sin and gives us a fresh start. It is for us to co-operate and use the fresh start! Remember the boundless pity and gentleness in Christ’s attitude to those who must often have jarred on Him; and come back to that, quite quietly and humbly if or when you catch yourself falling into these faults again. Your beautiful Good Friday was a seal set on your absolution. When we get fresh lights of that kind it is a sign that our act has been pleasing to God. So I feel that with you all is very well. Go gently, however, don’t concentrate on “Catholic” practices, keep your Christianity wide as well as deep.
50 Campden Hill Square, W.8.
11 May, 1933.
To F.H.
… I’m so glad you’ve lost the unsettled feeling about the R.C.
Church. I know just what you mean about using their books and things and so on. But after all many of them are the spiritual treasure of the Church Universal which our forebears tossed aside at the Reformation and bit by bit the Spirit is giving back to English Christianity in our times. I feel a great call to help on that renewal of sane Catholicism in England and am sure it is a work of God. My Italian saint, Maria (R.C.), says, “The Venerable Roman Church does but preside at the Universal Agape”—not, alas, their usual view, but full, I am sure, of deep truth.
50 Campden Hill Square, W.8.
12 July, 1933.
To. E. I. WATKIN.
I have just received the Dublin with your terribly generous review of The Golden Sequence. I really can’t thank you properly for all you say; or—most particularly for the fact that you do seem to like the book personally! I am particularly interested in the points you pick out and am rather pleased you think I go too far on the anti-emotion, anti-audition-and-vision tack! It is because I am so dreadfully afraid of the opposite excess! The sterner view seems on the whole the safer, don’t you think? because we may be quite sure in practice that valid “auditions,” etc., will carry their own guarantees and no one who gets them will be frightened out of believing in their worth—the same with emotion: whatever its theoretical views may be, the soul touched by love will feel and express love! As to the “universal and personal,” I agree that “almost” is quite wrong and I don’t know why I put it. But I think the purely intellectual combination is beyond us—we manage it in intuition (or dim contemplation if you prefer that) and the intellect accepts the result, without having done the work.
50 Campden Hill Square, W.8.
July 20,1933.
To L.K.
… Here is The Cloud of Unknowing; Abandonment is out at the moment, so that must wait till the autumn, but I am sending de Caussade’s other one, on Prayer. You will find Part II the most interesting. I am also sending you, as a little present, my last book. If it does not agree with you, throw it away and don’t force yourself to read it. But I think you may like the last part.
As to your question: yes, surely all generous, self-giving love, with no claimfulness, is part of God’s love—“who dwelleth in love dwelleth in God”—any kind of real love! That is surely what St.
John is always trying to say. “God is greater than your heart.”
As to all the rest, be content with this. God is enlightening you and teaching you direct, bit by bit as you can bear it. It will feel uncomfortable, you often will feel lost, ashamed and contrite. But all that is a great grace for which you must be very grateful, because it comes from the contrast between the great God deigning to touch you, and your small soul. It is for Him to choose what He shall show you, for you just to accept His lights and gently purify your love. It is natural and right that the soul should desire Him in Himself and also to be used by Him. Both these phases are part of a full spiritual life. But our longing for Him must be the kind that longs first for His will to be done, even though it means darkness for ourselves—at least that is how it seems to me.
Don’t strain after more light than you’ve got yet: just wait quietly. God holds you when you cannot hold Him, and when the time comes to jump He will see to it that you do jump—and you will find you are not frightened then. But probably all that is a long way ahead still. So just be supple in His hands and let Him mould you (as He is doing) for His own purposes, responding with very simple acts of trust and love.
50 Campden Hill Square, W.8.
Oct. 27, 1933.
To THE SAME.
… I’m glad you feel you begin to like St. John of the Cross —because I think he will be a lifelong friend to you. He does help with the bare, painful, self-stripping side—which is only one side of course—butf must be there… .
St. James’s Day, 1933.
To M.C.
The Leiston Abbey Retreat was quite lovely from the Conductor’s point of view. A marvellous place, exquisitely beautiful and well inhabited! The 14th century Lady Chapel of the Abbey to give the Addresses in and a real cell in the cloister (but with H. and C. and fitted bath!) to live in. And the general feeling of the spirits of kind and devout white monks helping us along. It was all so peaceful, miles from everywhere, and the birds’ songs all mixed up with the hymns. A dear old crippled priest, a perfect saint, as Chaplain, almost going on all fours to give thanks after his Communion, ‘cos he couldn’t very neatly kneel down. A friend of yours there … also a Russian and a. blind girl and 2
missionaries and a rebel… . Also a spiritual healer who came into my cell late the last night, saying she had been guided to the Retreat and after a little talk, suddenly asked if she might lay her hands on me as she felt I was completely tired out (not that I felt so!). So she did and it was a most strange experience. She put one on my head and one between the shoulders and a stream of warm energy seemed to pour through from them. Then she made one startlingly apropos remark, made the Sign of the Cross on my forehead and walked away….
Lesjaskog.
16 August, 1933.
To G.F.
I knew you’d like Barth, but I hope the eager dog won’t get a displaced heart from too much following of the bicycle! To change the image, Barth is rather like a bottle of champagne … too intoxicating to be taken neat but excellent with a few dry biscuits!
He is not “the only real religion”: I can’t allow you to simplify like that. He is a neglected and splendid part of the whole rich complex of religion. Consider what Barthian religion alone would have to give to the poor, the miserable, the lonely, the childlike, and all in fact to whom Christianity is specially addressed. You must have the gentle and penetrating intimacy to balance the over-againstness surely, to get the total need and experience of the soul expressed? Von Hugel is far better, saner and more complete.
Barth and Eckhart are interesting, stimulating excessives—too exclusively transcendent and abstract, carrying the revolt from naturalism too far. But splendid if kept in their place.
Lesjaskog.
25 August, 1933.
To THE SAME.
After all even he [Barth] in his milder moments, acknowledges that what he is offering is a “theology of correction.” And it is worth while to reflect on what happens when the whole emphasis of religion is thrown on the transcendental and eschatological. The majority of people must have something to lay hold of, and if it isn’t given them by the Incarnational and Sacramental path, uniting supernature with homeliness, they just vulgarize supernature, and claim familiarity with it. The result is seen in the paradoxical fact that now Brunner is one of the pillars of Buchmanism and Barth’s “breaking in of God” becomes “guidance,” and once more the deep spiritual sanity of the Christian-Catholic scheme is vindicated.
As from 50 Campden Hill Square, W.8.
4 Sept., 1933.
To F.H.
… Mother X. has written to tell me you are going to them, and evidently hopes that it may turn out your vocation is to Community Life. As to that I would not dare to express an opinion—God will guide you and show you your path, so long as you are absolutely straightforward with Him and do not try to persuade yourself you feel an attraction where none truly exists! The fact that you have been pushed bit by bit into this situation, without definite choice on your own part, is doubtless important—but all the same do please be careful to avoid being biased by it. I should think from what you say there has been a secret pressure on your soul through your whole life, to give yourself to God—d it may be that this is the place where He wants you to be. Anyhow He can and will accept, transform and use your self-surrender—and with the C.H.F. you will see one form of the Religious Life (not the contemplative, however, except incidentally) at its best.
Mother X. is a most remarkable personality, both intellectually and religiously, but her Order exists at least as much for horizontal as for vertical activities, indeed for what the Baron calls “the interweaving of the two movements.” You may find at B– the opportunity for the steady practice of the upward look you are craving for now—but being a postulant, if it really comes to that, will involve a lot of drill, much of which you may find very irksome! Those stiff collars and cuffs are symbolic. But I hope and pray God has much for you in all this and whatever happens it will bring you fresh knowledge of His love. I don’t think any of it silly—not even Sister M.‘s kiss, though that, of course, should not seriously weigh in such a decision, as you know very well.
There will be young things at B– too—and I do feel the active side of your call, whatever it may be, should include a teaching office towards the young. But don’t hurry a decision, don’t be influenced by the real love and generosity and holiness you will meet unless a steady and insistent pressure urges you to this life.
9 September, 1933.
To G.F.
He [Karl Barth] does key it up too much for average use… . So glad you like the Dark Night. I love it, but not better than Mount Carmel I think. The Flame I have never got on with very well, but perhaps shall some day. It is really only during the last few years that St. John X. has become one of my most intimate friends! …
… At one stage and for a long time I found them [the Gospels]
just as baffling as you do. But since—though the meadow is God-they include all His best grass, one cannot of course here apply the Baron’s rule to the extent of leaving them out. And since …
something in you far deeper than your brain and critical sense insists on finding God very specially through Holy Communion and the Eucharist, it seems likely, doesn’t it, that a long and very docile patience and a faithful response to the bits of light you do see, will gradually resolve this difficulty for you and gradually disclose, as far as you can bear it, what “the Word made Flesh”
means in actual fact? It must mean something quite downright, factual, concrete; something that comes the whole way into our human world. And a career staged truly in our human world will look thoroughly matter-of-fact and concrete. It is quite an old difficulty—“is not this the carpenter’s son?” The Resurrection and the prompt formation of the Church out of a body of frightened and disillusioned men, and that revealing scrap at the end of St. Mark: “the Lord working with them” give the real clue. I think also the fact that St. Paul’s Epistles, with their view of the transcendental character of that concrete life, were in circulation before those matter-of-fact Gospels (except possibly St. Mark) were written at all. But one only gets the feel of it By working from the here-and-now living experience back to the historical embodiment. Of course, the “good and heroic man” is no good at all, and makes nonsense of the history of the Church. When criticism has done its worst, the words and acts of Our Lord which remain are not those of “a good and heroic man,” but of one deliberately claiming unique authority and insight, and conscious of a unique destiny.
As from 50 Campden Hill Square, W.8.
15 Sept., 1933.
To A.B.
… The most important of these suggestions to you I take to be, trying anyhow to refuse to consider and regret the past. It is done, it has happened—you only weaken yourself by dwelling on mistakes, frustration, etc. (which happen in some form in all lives!). Take the present situation as it is and try to deal with what it brings you, in a spirit of generosity and love. God is as much in the difficult home problems as in the times of quiet and prayer, isn’t He? Try specially to do His Will there, deliberately seek opportunities for kindness, sympathy and patience—don’t “open up”
your bitterness, etc., deliberately but bring your whole situation en bloc into your Godward life. Knock down the partition between living-room and oratory, even if it does mean tobacco smoke and incense get a bit mixed up. I think it a wholesome sign even, though painful, that you feel and see so acutely the disharmony between your attitude to home problems and your love of God. Quietly and humbly acknowledge you have not yet got this right and ask God’s grace that you may do it in His way. If you go to Confession now, don’t rake over details but make a general statement of repentance for lack of love, tolerance, etc., etc.
Oct. 16, 1933.
To M.C.
I’ve got a wonderful new edition of the Sayings of St. John of the Cross—his Spanish text, with crib opposite which shows how terse and deep and splendidly unpious his real voice was and how amazingly daring his spiritual declarations—a wonderful example of how to be a Quaker without being a Quaker, if you know what I mean.
Nov. 18, 1933.
TO L.K.
I’m writing this in the train on my way home from Lincoln, where I have been giving the Ordinands Retreat. There were 36, of all imaginable types, all longing to know more about prayer but with the queerest sort of notions about it….
Here is another St. John of the Cross. I think possibly it may clear up the situation for you a bit. Yes, I do understand about the fog that keeps lifting a bit but never clears and shows you what you want so dreadfully. But that is exactly the form, you see, that your probation is to take, completely cleansing you of all spiritual self-seeking and utterly subordinating you to the Will of God. It is the willingness to go on in the fog, not frightened, because God is both on the road and off the road too, “if thou could’st but see Him,” which is, after all, of the essence of faith, isn’t it?
It is the Cloud of Unknowing over again. And also, how humbling and therefore how good for us, when we are obliged to realize as you say, that we cant honestly say we want to serve God without limit and at whatever cost. Wait quietly a bit and pray without fuss, for such a steadying of your love and such a quieting of the dithers, that you are able to feel through and through, even though with pain that “His will is our peace.”
Don’t attempt to force a complete surrender while it raises a tornado. Just acknowledge very humbly that you cannot get past the tornado without His grace but that underneath it, all, you do desire to give yourself, or rather to be taken from yourself, into His love. In our natural selves we can’t help being afraid of the cost when we catch a glimpse of what it may mean—and this makes the gift, when the moment strikes for it, a real and total offering we’re ready to pay for—not merely something of which we haven’t reckoned the price and can’t go through with.
Dec., 1933.
TO J.K.
The letter you sent me is clever, absurd and pathetic all at once, isn’t it? The writer is obsessed by jargon and by her swollen sense of the importance of human individuals and the final character of “psychological” advice. But after all it is those who have a deep and real inner life who are best able to deal with the “irritating details of outer life.” I think at her present stage, Self (her own or others) is all-important to her. I would begin at that end with psychology!
As far as her letter goes there is no indication that she has at present any idea at all of what religion is. And indeed the more I see of the psychological point of view, the more I feel its distance from the Christian point of view! Still, God can do anything; and at any moment her soul may wake up. Keep on friendly terms; pray for her; avoid arguing with her; trust the “catching force” of your faith! She is quite right I think in saying that it is more important to know what we are, than why; but then the what is Children of the Eternal God and inheritors of heaven! Only when we have achieved recognition of that can we see any “psychological situation” in a true light.
I can well believe that the greater part of what you achieve will be unseen by you now and will bear fruit later. It needs much faith and love to accept that and carry on all the same in a spirit of loving confidence. But that is the way, I fancy, that God’s hardest jobs are done.
50 Campden Hill Square, W.8.
20 June.
To D.E.
I’m so glad you wrote, and hope you always will when you feel the need of a paw in the dark. Anyhow this time the paw gives you a very pleased squeeze, and says, “All’s well!” Every word you say in your letter goes to prove that. It is a tough noviciate but a real one; and all the dark and humiliation (but what a lot of light and love there is with it too) is the shadow and tension which must come with God’s direct dealing with the soul. He is showing you things very quickly now and opening new paths and opportunities of self-oblation. Don’t be discouraged if you get a bit breathless or even fall flat on your face now and then. Far better, more alive, more demanding, and more utterly purifying from self-love than that “blissful era of peace” you thought might come. You have so much to bring to the altar in the way of love, sympathy, compassion, all of which can be used by God through your intercessions. But while things are moving at this pace, please be careful not to overstrain.
If your rule of life merely irks youstick it out; but if it really strains (and perhaps it may) then modify it a bit. And above all, proper recreation, a day off if possible from taxing jobs, and ample sleep!
No—we can never become unselfed on our own—it is God’s work in us. We can only open the door and say, “Do what You like.” Stick to your Chapman—he is a safe guide—and if you want another book, Grou’s Spiritual Maxims will do well.
This and the next eleven letters are undated; they are grouped here as preceding that of New Year’s Day, 1934.
50 Campden Hill Square, W.8.
19 November.
TO THE SAME.
… I am sorry to hear of you in bed—though I expect it is far the best place for you to be for a few days; and am not awfully surprised that the strain has been too much for you. It’s all part of the game, I’m afraid, that one should feel as if one had failed God and taken it all badly. This adds to the unhappiness but also (and that’s the one point that really matters) to the humbling effect. If we felt how very nicely we were taking our troubles, so brave! so patient! so devoted! they wouldn’t have a particularly purifying effect. If you had by some miracle (not of grace) “accepted and wanted this bit of darkness as part of His will,” you might have felt quite a fine little fellow—and that couldn’t conceivably be part of His Will!! We have to feel utterly helpless, weak, unable to stand up to it, if we are ever to learn real trust and abandonment. After all, Our Lord Himself didn’t say, “I accept this darkness peacefully,” etc. He said, in the first instance, “Why hast thou forsaken me?”—pain, bewilderment, and all that you reckon in yourself as “failure”—but it isn’t, my lamb—it’s the “other side” of love.
Don’t struggle to “find proofs of God’s existence” when He seems to vanish. Throw your hand in and wait, as quietly as you are able. Do you remember von Hugel in his little book on Prayer compares this experience to meeting a sandstorm in the desert—and says the Arab, then, doesn’t struggle with the situation but accepts it, lies down in the sand, covers his head with his mantle, and just waits. That is what you are asked to do. God can’t be clear to us all the time —if He were, He would not be great enough to worship. But the more we care, the more we suffer in the cloudy bits. It must be so; and desperate as it seems at the time, it does great things for us. I, certainly, am not one scrap disappointed in you! … But I’m very sorry for you; for I know how impossible it is for you to realize that it is, as a matter of fact, All Right. Please stay in bed till you are really rested, and after that, don’t force yourself to any special religious practices except your Communions, and don’t be fierce in preparing for these but go, quite without scruple, however impossible you may be feeling. Otherwise be dormy on the pious side for a bit.
Alexandra Hotel, Lyme Regis.
December 1st.
To THE SAME.
… I always meant to answer your remarks about the Kingdom of God and forgot. I suppose “Kingdom” is really a misleading word, and Reign of God is nearer the sense of the Greek: in which case it means, not merely a neat, benevolent and hygienic social order (the Baron used to say “the Holy Spirit is not a Sanitary Inspector”) but that transfiguration of the world and of life into something consistent with God’s Will, which is the aim of redemption. And in that case, it is both now and hereafter, isn’t it? But can’t be managed by social workers as such, but by the selfabandonment in love of all souls. So that it is within and comes without observation, but will have noticeable results on all levels, and, ideally, is identical with the Church and based on the Cross.
As from 50 Campden Hill Square, W.8.
14 March.
To THE SAME.
I think there’s a great stir going on in the invisible world, bringing people to such thoughts as yours; and that presently perhaps if we keep our doors and windows open and our wills alert, we shall be shown what to do. The Church, I’m sure, holds the pattern on which the new world should be built, but no one will believe it till she becomes much more sacrificial than she is yet.
No, I should think it unlikely that the convent is your solution; if it is, God will make it quite plain to you so don’t worry. But at the moment, except for the special cases of intense vocation to prayer, I think the need is for keen and alert and practising Christians in the world, showing in action (public as well as private) what being a cell in the Corpus Christi can mean.
50 Campden Hill Square, W.8.
Lent 2.
To THE SAME.
. .. No, I don’t think Truth for us (after a rather elementary stage) can be a static, dogmatically defined “This Is It” sort of thing. It is a flash from the Absolute, never complete, always suggesting further depths and further splendour as, in and through the particular truth concerned, God more and more reveals Himself.
You’ll find, of course, lots of pious persons think this nonsense-never mind. It is the way you will be led and is all right. Von Hugel somewhere speaks of Truth as we know it, as a blazing light fading off into the darkness of the unknown—or something like that.
50 Campden Hill Square, W.8.
Monday, p.m.
To THE SAME.
I am so sorry things are being hard. … Just lie down as quietly as you can in the dust and wait for the Lord; don’t struggle—it is perfectly useless at such times, and merely exhausting. This “oppression of sins” is one of the Devil’s pet dodges. Point out to him and to yourself that we all have them—very little difference between us! There is nothing very interesting or unusual about it.
And in spite of it all, God loves us and holds on to us. Is there anything special which has caused this hurly-burly beyond the uncertainty about your future—which of course is very unsettling?
But I have a feeling perhaps there is something else which is troubling you, and against which you are struggling. If so, leave off fighting it; that only means strain, not “getting free.” Accept this fresh suffering as your bit of the Cross, and offer it—even though you have to offer it in darkness—for the world.
50 Campden Hill Square, W.8.
21 October.
To THE SAME.
… It is not waste of my time when you come! Please don’t ever think that, or that the “spiritually interesting” are particularly interesting. Those who think themselves so are usually pretty awful.
Yes—I realize these last three months have been tough—but the thing is, that you weathered them and I hope will soon feel able to relax a bit. For you won’t be happy or stable until you are able to have in your life people whom you can love without fear of disaster.
This keeping them at arm’s length must only be a temporary measure until you really have yourself in hand; and already the improvement is so great that it’s only a question of time. Meanwhile God is using you, and also supporting you with the power of His love, in and through struggle and pain.
50 Campden Hill Square, W.8.
25 October.
To THE SAME.
My poor lamb, I am so terribly sorry for you. I know it is horrible, but it is really all right; and was bound to happen sooner or later. After all, if you choose Christ you start on a route that goes over Calvary, and that means the apparent loss of God as a bit of it. There is no by-pass. But as long as you were getting the assurance of God, your offering wasn’t absolute, was it? This means total sacrifice. So face up to it, and thank Him (for He is there all the time—you must trust your fellow Christians for that) for the privilege of being allowed to taste a little bit of Christ’s suffering and offer it for all those you long to help. Apart from this attempt at acceptance, don’t do anything. It isn’t your fault —it is just part of the route—d God will again show Himself when you are through this bit. Don’t struggle with prayer you can’t do —just say “Into thy hands I commend my spirit.” Continue your Communions quite steadily but don’t pull yourself to bits over them.
Remember it is you who are temporarily blinded, not the world that has gone black. Early bed, novels, the flicks and so on are all good and help to minimize the nervous strain. Do not be too ferocious in your exercises in detachment at the moment, and try not to be discouraged, though I know this is hard. Your grief at God’s absence is the best of all proofs of your love. If you have Dom Chapman’s Letters by you, read them again. Lots are addressed to people in this state. It is a normal experience in spiritual growth.
50 Campden Hill Square, W.8.
29 October.
To THE SAME.
… I had a dreadful feeling that I was no real good to you this time, but still, if you only feel you can hang on to me, and say whatever you like—that, I know, is some use! I’m sure the great thing is to remember, so far as one can, God’s Ocean of Peace, and the way it abides and holds us safe, right through all our little storms, which can purify us even while they humble and hurt us. As von Hugel says, “it is so much more He who must hold us, than we who must hold Him.” And that being so, it is He who must ordain what we are to do for Him; and if He wants bad tools like us, we must not object, but just gratefully get on with it. He knows that the storms in your nature are much more temperamental sufferings than sins —and, being sufferings, you can accept them and add them to the Cross. The root principle I think is (a) since God is all that matters in religion there is never anything to be afraid of in spite of our illusions to the contrary; (b) a Christian can always do something with suffering. Stay as quiet as you can when it happens, and wait till it blows over—then get up and go on.
50 Campden Hill Square, W.8.
Michaelmas.
To THE SAME.
As to C–, I don’t feel clear that you should give this up.
It may be the bit of relief in your life you positively need; and if, as you say, the children are “pure joy and a real part of you,”
it may be that the extra space in your life and reduction of strain which would result from giving It up, would be too dearly bought.
I’m not therefre going to say you should give it up at the moment; and I could not possibly promise that doing so would bring you nearer God. But be reasonable. Remember you hold your body and nervous system in trust from God and must treat His property well.
So carry on for the present, as quietly as you can, obeying His pressures when you discern them. The great task for you, as you see, is cleansing love of possessiveness, and that you are doing, and I know it is a big job which asks for real heroism. It will get easier, as more and more God takes the central place and you gradually find yourself loving others in and for and with Him.
I think it would be better really if you felt able to take up a moderate and disciplined attitude to those you love—seeing them and writing to them less than you would like, but to a reasonable extent, and for their sakes rather than your own. Your plan of entire separation seems to me too drastic; and likely to react in overstrain, depression, etc. But this is a question you must solve for yourself. You know what is possible to you and what is not. But keep an eye on the fact that you are temperamentally inclined to go to extremes! and this will show itself in your spiritual plans as well as in your emotional life. I feel it is likely that God’s Will for you just now will be that you shall take things quietly, as they come, doing what turns up to and for Him and being content to offer just that. After all the oblation which becomes the matter of consecration is ordinary daily bread, isn’t it? “I look not for thy gifts but for thee.” You do not seem to me at all a useless person-on the contrary, I think you have a great deal to offer, and should be happy in spite of the Cloud.
50 Campden Hill Square, W.8.
23 October.
To THE SAME.
As to confession, I very much hope you will come to feel it is a good plan and will find the right person for it. If so, and I can help you with the technique, let me know. You are sure to have many ups and downs, and indeed real tumbles—but these don’t in the end matter, however agonizing the bruises, if one carries on! And it helps to that, to have the definite process of going and telling God’s delegate, on your knees, about it all, and receiving help and the sacrament of forgiveness. I am sure you should find this deeply tranquillizing and strengthening and it would help you to realize that the important thing is your whole Christian life and intention, not your very real difficulties and falls. No—it would not in the least mean that I gave you up and handed you over. There is plenty of room both for a father-in God, to whom you go to make your confession, and, so to speak, an aunt-in-God in the background!
I think all this readjustment of life must be a hard patch for you and make great demands on patience and long-suffering and self-oblivion. Also that you are really getting on with it whatever you may think to the contrary. The one point of real importance is to have enough trust and humbleness not to be discouraged even by really spectacular falls! In the sight of God a few somersaults aren’t nearly as bad as going into the garden to eat worms.
50 Campden Hill Square, W.8.
Advent 2.
To THE SAME.
… I’m glad you wrote, for I was just tuning-up to write to you!
One of my many defects as a physician is that I remember several items for the prescription after the patient has left.
(1) Realize quite definitely that your storms are to be classified as psychic illness and not as sin. It is true you are responsible for doing your best to cure them—as any other malady—but, when in spite of yourself, they occur, you are not to regard yourself as “guilty.” Your emotional life has got out of gear, and you have to bear the resultant suffering and humiliation, just as if your tummy had got out of gear, and let you down for a time. Accepting this as the reality of the situation will take out the worst of the sting, and also be a real help towards getting yourself in hand. When anything does happen to touch you off, say to your self at once if you can, “This situation is perfectly all right really; my horrible feelings are merely my possessiveness getting inflamed—a tummy-ache of the soul.” Slight attacks can sometimes be stopped this way—and each one defeated is a long step towards ultimate victory.
(2) I think you would be wise to use bodily as well as spiritual helps. I don’t advise a psychologist but I do advise a decent and sensible nerve-specialist to whom you could frankly describe the situation. For I am sure a suitably compounded sedative would help you a lot, quiet you, and so heighten your control. This is not a cowardly resource or a second-class ticket. Our bodies and nerves enter into all our mental states. In default, when you feel a real storm brewing, at once take two luminols, or similar harmless sedatives, and lie down. Yours is a case for circumventing the enemy—that excellent dream showed you the results of direct attack.
(3) Confession. Prepare somewhat like this. First, consider, quite generally, your life from childhood to (say) 18 or 20. If any known wrong act, habit, relationship, etc.—anything you are ashamed of —emerges, note it down. Then take your adult life in five-year chunks, and consider it in the same way, specially observing your chief faults and temptations and when you fell into them or failed to resist. Don’t do this with a tooth-comb but quite generally. The final few years you will take in greater detail, especially as regards your chief faults and difficulties, sins of omission and of thought as well as of act. The things that matter are all forms of misdirected or insufficient or self-regarding love, you will find; and 1 Cor. xiii forms a very good examination paper. The easiest plan is to write down one’s findings and take the paper with one to Confession. Say (if you have not made an appointment before), “This is my first Confession,” and then the Confession we have in Compline up to “by my own fault,” and then add “especially I confess” and give the contents of your notes. If you get stuck, the priest will probably help you out; and at the end will talk to you a little before giving absolution and a “penance,” usually a prayer to say as an act of penitence. Finally, he blesses you or says, “Go in peace, your sin is done away,” and you just get up and go away to another part of the church and say your “penance” and thanksgiving. …
But one confession won’t work a miracle; though I am sure it will release and help, and also [show], that you have made a start in the direction of victory.
50 Campden Hill Square, W.8.
New Year’s Day, 1934.
To THE SAME.
… This seems just the right forward-looking day to write to you: even though at the moment we are wrapped in a thick fog! I am sorry for all the apparent bad luck, and not getting to Confession when you had primed yourself for it. Never mind. The outward act is the least part, and the “awful list” of sins, etc., is got rid of, the moment you have offered it to God with gratitude for His patience and love. Wait a minute now, as next week I shall be seeing someone whom I can ask about the sort of priest I would like you to go to. Meanwhile resist the inclination to re-examine the collection! It is out of your charge now.
I’m glad the sedative stopped minor storms—each time that happens it means a trench won, and though I don’t deny there are a good many of them, still “Are we downhearted? NO.” As to the doctor—I just think that all this is a severe strain on nerves and body, and part of what you suffer is psycho-physical and should be dealt with from that end. You need all the help you can get on all levels, and some wise medical advice might be such help. But if you feel strongly against this leave it for a bit, treating yourself sensibly, not scolding yourself and when you do come a cropper saying, to God, “This is my weakness and knowledge of it can purify me and make me more dependent on You. Give me your strength, and help me to go on again as if nothing had happened.” When your desire and love are truly centred on God and His purposes, not in a fiery way but in a gentle selfabandoned way, the demon of possessiveness will get one of the worst snubs he ever had in his life. I am glad you have identified that tendency to collect material and brood over it, as the first stage in storm-production. The first minute you notice that, say, “No, you don’t! this is just the dog hunting in the dust-bin. Come away and attend to the things God wants done now.”
There is a saying of von Hugel’s you should keep for such moments—”
The best thing we can do for those we love is to help them to escape from us.” Very hard, but true—and moreover the best way to keep all the pure and noble and enduring part of love. I want you to accept all the events and deprivations of your life because God is in them; and all the pains and struggles connected with your great power of loving and longing to give yourself, because these are the very disciplines and purifications that power of loving needs if it is to be useful to Him. You are winning the war, even though some of the engagements go wrong.
Eve of the Epiphany, 1934.
To U.V.
The Christmas roses and violets arrived in absolute perfection. I have never seen such lovely ones. They are a perfect joy and have made a lovely vase to stand before my Donatello Madonna, and also a little bowl in my own room. Thank you so very very much.
This Donatello plaque presented by her husband is now E.U.‘s Memorial in the Chapel at Pleshey.
[? January, 1934.]
To G.F.
I look forward with childish pleasure to our holiday. I hope it will be like Origen’s description of the first hermits: “They dwelt in the desert where the air was more pure and the heaven more open and God more familiar.”
Jan. 10, 1934.
To L.K.
I’m glad you wrote and I think you have managed to express the situation on paper quite clearly. It is a perfectly usual situation and one that anyone being led by God along your path is bound to have to face, sooner or later. I know how horrible it is but it is a fine test of loyalty and courage. All you are required to do about it is to keep as calm as you can and go through with it, making your chief prayer to God deliberate acts of acceptance of the discipline He has sent you. That scrupulous fear that, after all, you did not love God for Himself alone but there was an element of self-seeking in it, is part of the experience and shows too what it is meant to do for you—namely, purify your love.
We all need that. He draws us first by our own needs and longing and then afterwards, when we can stand it, to a pure love which does not even secretly desire reward. The transition, when the jam-jar is removed from the nursery table and only the loaf is left—is very bitter to our babyish spirits but must happen if we are to grow up.
It is St. John of the Cross’s Night of the Senses you have come to.
Face the fact, and trust God and not your own miserable sensations.
You are being made to dissociate love from feeling and centre it on the will, the only place where it is safe! This does not mean feeling has gone for ever, or ardour, or joy. They are to come back, at God’s moment not yours, in a far better, deeper form. It is rather like one of the long stuffy tunnels in a mountain railway —they seem to go on and on, and then suddenly we come out, one stage higher up the mountain than we went in. …
I know the distaste for Holy Communion does seem the last straw. But again, it can remove the emphasis from what He gives, to the total, abandoned giving of yourself. Do not reduce your Communions, but do not try to beat yourself up into a “suitable” stage of mind and soul. Take them as an act of loving obedience.
Do not add to your prayer—even reduce mental prayer a little if it is a great strain—and replace by Offices or vocal prayer, offered, however dryly and coldly, as an act of service. Keep quiet inwardly and let God act. Don’t dash about trying to get out of the fog and do not be frightened. He is in it, and is working on your soul through it. You will find it a help to put as much of yourself as you can in the active side just now—practical work for others, etc., and offer that. Don’t be worried—all is well. It is God you want and God Who wants you.
50 Campden Hill Square, W.8.
Shrove Tuesday [? 1934].
To D.E.
… I don’t know when anything has made me so happy as your letter. I’ve always felt that if only you could be protected from discouragement and persuaded to carry on, God would show Himself to you—and then you would know it was, in spite of all the difficulties and sufferings, more than worth while. I’m not surprised you “get excited,” for it is so wonderful and overwhelming. But all the same, please keep as calm as you can! It all makes a considerable strain on the emotional apparatus, and yours has to be treated with care. The “tiresome desire to be alone”
is an inevitable part of it; and I’m very sorry that conditions at present make it so difficult for you. All you can do at the moment, I think, is (a) to take such opportunities as you reasonably can without neglecting either duties or health, and (3) humbly offer up to God this unsatisfied desire as your “reasonable sacrifice.” You have to reckon with the fact that the intensity of your nature is now turned into this channel; and it may be a very useful, indeed essential, bit of training for you, that your desire for communion with God is checked for the time being by circumstance. Do you remember the letter on packing in von Hugel’s Letters to a Niece?
That just fits your case! All the same, I hope a little time to yourself may soon be possible. You don’t say whether you have managed anything about confession … don’t scrape yourself raw in preparing the confession!
Feb. 16, 1934.
To L.K.
What a wonderfully unsuitable beginning to Lent; to have your lovely box of spring bits to unpack and play about with. There’s no present I enjoy so much as that. And to have real country violets and tall snowdrops to sniff at is a perfect joy.
Non-liturgically it came at a very good moment, as we had a mild motor smash on Monday (our first!) and I’m in bed with a face like a prize fighter and (supposed) slight concussion … nothing really but awfully inconvenient. …
1st Sunday in Lent, 1934.
To M.C.
… Except for the mess made of work, etc., concussion is a lovely disease, I think. You just lie in a “sleepy device” as the Cloud of Unknowing says, like a particularly contented baby in the arms of God, and don’t care a straw about anything. However, this blissful state is rapidly passing and I hope to get to Holy Trinity, Sloane Street, for my address on Thursday. So you might think of that.
50 Campden Hill Square, W.8.
1 June, 1934.
To E. I. WATKIN.
… The new St. John of the Cross [Allison Peers’ translation]
seems to me very good, as far as it has gone: but of course the Spiritual Canticle volume will be the real test. I have been spelling out the Spanish in Dom Chevallier’s edition—marvellous, isn’t it? No one could have guessed from any of the translations what an experience the encounter with the original is—the short version I mean, of course. I’m quite in agreement with those who think St. John did not write the other. It seems to me incredible that, considering what the short one is like, how deeply and passionately personal, he could have sat down and made a nice neat treatise on the mystic way out of it!
I am so pleased to hear your book is nearly ready—I wish I could hope to review it for Spectator but, alas, under the present (strong Nonconformist and Modernist) editor, I get practically nothing from them and the sort of books which interest me are seldom noticed at all. I have just begun, however, a very interesting new job—to write the volume on Christian Worship for the Library of Constructive Theology. It is to include individual as well as liturgic and corporate prayer, and I am given a fairly free hand—so am quite looking forward to it. …
Philip Neri and Antony Puss send respectful purrs to Tinker and tell him to Stick to It and Never say Die. They hope he saw the photos of England’s largest cat in the papers—weight 35 lbs. and waist 33
inches!
50 Campden Hill Square, W.8.
12 June, 1934.
To F.H.
… I loved all you said about your new insights, and the Divine light on the dishcloths and the dirty water. But I did not at all like that failure to carry out orders in the matter of eating eggs.
You know as well as I do that it is a direct obligation to God to keep your body as healthy as you can. I hope and trust you have confessed it all to Rev. Mother now and are having the food you need, even though it does make you different from others and is difficult and so forth. Tabloids may be a temporary help, but you must have your proper meals. So if it has not yet been done, please “pluck up your courage,” and tell Rev. Mother you have not been carrying out her instructions and why. I am perfectly sure the Community do not think you an “object of charitable hospitality.”
Mother X. called you “a blessing to them.” So there! But if you get run down and really ill, they will be terribly worried and distressed.
21 June, 1934.
To L.K.
I loved your letter and am quite glad you do feel a bit stirred up about the Christocentric, incarnational side of religion. I expect I rubbed it in rather, because I am temperamentally like you in that, and left to myself would just go off on God alone. And Baron von Hugel made me see that it simply won’t do and does lead to a sort of arrogance (as you discovered!) as well as missing some of the loveliest, deepest and most touching parts of Christianity. You will always, I think, be mainly theocentric. But just keep an eye on the other side, without fussing! …
It is hard not being able to be alone when you are longing for it.
Still, this apparently is what God asks of you at the moment and so is all right, and the renunciation of your own will can just be offered to Him as your adoring prayer, can’t it? After all, even were you in a contemplative order, you’d have to carry on and put up with it if you had to give out the groceries just when you felt inclined for prayer! Things usually are like that I find.
July 19, 1934.
TO THE SAME.
No, one can’t like St. Teresa as much as St. John of the Cross—at least some people do much better, but I do not think you and I ever will. Still, I am glad you feel friends with her. Suso perhaps was a mistake! Too personal and romantic. Still, he has some fine bits about God, and doubtless for him, his kind of prayer was right. It’s like Tribal Lays—there are Nine and Ninety Ways and Every Single One of them is Right.
I hope you will have time again for your “real” prayer soon: because I am sure you will get to feel very starved without it. But the summer is a difficult time.
I had 100 Clergy Wives at X. No one told me there was Mass at the Cathedral, and the bell rang while I was in my bath, but I arrived, damp, just after the Gospel and found NO one connected with the Quiet Day there… . Well then, I had them from 11 to 5 in a frowsty little church, and we had ham-sandwiches for lunch being Friday; and all felt it was a Wonderful and Devotional Day.
And I got back to London 10:30 p.m. feeling that was that. Still, they did like it, and I had talks with a few and they were nice creatures.
I forgot to say, it seems to me, though sending R. your precious book seemed a wash out, it has probably stirred her up. … So perhaps like Oman your heap of corn was used in another way than you thought! It generally is.
13 September, 1934.
To G.F.
… All suffering involves some imperfection, disharmony, wrong relation or decay—and all this is quite unthinkable in connection with the Being of God who is Perfection and Harmony and eternal Joy.
What’s more, I don’t understand how anyone who loves God can bear the idea that He suffers. And though in Christ God reveals Himself right down in human nature and in closest communion with human suffering—which indeed has to endure the utmost as the vehicle of such revelation—that does not mean that God qua God suffers.
Suffering belongs altogether to the temporal and successive, not to the eternal sphere. The “torments of the lost” are the torments of knowing they have failed to achieve eternal life = God.
Eve of St. Francis, 1934.
To M.C.
Thank you so much for reading “Sacrifice” so quick and kindly and all you say… . As to why man conceives that God requires the death of the victim, the most recent and reputable books on Sacrifice say the essential point is the total gift, not the death which is, I take it, man’s way of responding to the total demand.
“God’s word is ALL,” as R.S.W. says, and primitive man in order that the life He asks for may go to Him, slays the body and releases the life. Perhaps I ought to say a bit on that? but even in primitive sacrifice there are meal-offerings—the Evening Sacrifice of the Temple was “bloodless” and there is surely a reminiscence of this in the Eucharistic oblation? Yes—I think the death is the action from man’s side, and the response of God is always life. It all begins in the rough in the jungle, but points towards some mystery of the Divine action which lies beyond us still. Meanwhile, for Christians, surely it is a “holy and living sacrifice”? and unless the offered victim typifies the self-oblation of the offerer, it is displeasing to God. This, it seems to me, is what the Prophets meant to denounce. Yes! I agree about attendance at Mass—it is of course the snag of all institutional religion but perhaps specially of that kind—and yet, I would not say that the pure act of worship was not in one sense an end in itself. I can’t bear the “worship God because it makes us better” type of religion.
A chapter of her book Worship.
50 Campden Hill Square, W.8.
19 October, 1934.
To F.H.
This brings you my love and prayers and blessings for Wednesday’s Clothing—it is a day I always go to Mass so I will make my Communion specially for you. How I hope this act of oblation will bring great peace and growth to you and give to God something He can use for the furtherance of His Will. I had such a nice letter from the Rev. Mother, who seems very sure that it is all right.
As to Confession, you will of course have to conform to the custom of your Order and the directions of the Rev. Mother and this act of obedience in itself will be good and bring grace with it. The confession itself may and probably will, be just an unrewarding and uncongenial duty. There do really seem to be some souls who never find it anything but irksome. In such a case, having explained yourself to your Superior, act as you are told, but take it very simply. Mention plain faults, omissions, imperfect dispositions etc.
which come to the surface in a brief self-examination, make an act of contrition and leave it at that. I understand it very well as I’m much the same myself and Baron von Hugel when he directed me never allowed me to go at all!
Oct. 29, 1934.
To MRS. HOLDSWORTH.
I am just back from Pleshey, where I received your messages and the delightful gift of your Memoir of Mrs. Waterhouse. Thank you so very much for it. I have read it for the first time this evening and even in the state of mental and spiritual coma which follows conducting a large retreat, I have appreciated it greatly and so loved gaining a picture of the author of the Little Book of Life and Death—whom, to my great loss, I never had the opportunity of meeting.
How happy and interested she would have been to see the Franciscan revival within the English Church now, and the young men and women deliberately turning their backs on luxury and even comfort and taking the “3-a-week vow” as Tertiaries, or, as Friars, keeping within the 133. 4d. a week of the dole.
All Saints, 1934.
TO M. C.
How nice to write to you on one of the nicest days of the year.
… Oh, how I love All Saints and Wisdom III. 6.
“As gold in the furnace hath he tried them, and received them as a burnt offering.”
All Souls, 1934.
To G.F.
The flowers stand in a row under the rood in the study and make a festival of holy beauty all to themselves. I read the Baron’s lovely bit, “Look up! look up! what a glorious, touching company”—d’you remember? I always feel All SS. is his day. And to-day read through the Matins of the Dead. One of the most beautiful bits in the Breviary, I think, like a symphonic poem… . We got to the Zoo and the first thing I saw were Pelicans, who said quite clearly, “O
beata solitudine!”—which of course they were not enjoying at the Zoo.
50 Campden Hill Square, W.8.
6 November, 1934.
To L.K.
… I think, about suffering, we can offer it to God for “a particular intention” without any suggestion of bargaining—which would, of course, be horrible. We offer it as a kind of prayer —sometimes the only kind we can offer—“I offer you this suffering which I accept and bear—I offer it as my prayer for so-and-so.
Please take it and use it.” Specially we can offer it surely-because we are “members of Christ,” as an atonement for sin—this, I suppose, is what St. Catherine meant when she used to say to the naughty, “I will bear the burden of your sin.” Offering it for a definite object will, of course, like all intercession, be in subservience to the Will of God—which makes it all right.
As to that spiritual suffering you speak of, I think it is what some souls, not all, are asked to bear and to offer—their share in the Cross—it’s not the same at all as the kind that comes from feeling our disharmony with God. How much of it comes to each of us and for how long, is His affair, not ours—but we must accept it with gratitude and use it as well as we can. I agree that it is very likely that you will be given a good deal of it; and anyhow the radiant, consoled prayer of God’s vivid Presence is rather a beginner’s prayer really and sooner or later—when God sees you are strong enough—He is certain to use your power of prayer for His redemptive purposes and that is always painful. No one—not the greatest saint—goes on in that lovely light all the time. You will have just common grey weather and storm and fog and perhaps even intense darkness before you have done—that’s all part of the “Leave all and follow Me.” But it’s all right. I would not forecast anything or try to look ahead or wonder how much you can bear—just leave yourself in God’s Hand. “I am with thee, saith the Lord.” If you feel a definite pressure to leave contemplative prayer, and pray for others—then you must obey each time. But where it is left to you, give a little time anyhow to acts of simple love towards God.
It soothes and braces us to remember His Beauty and be glad of it even when we don’t see it at all. I think that’s all for the moment —except of course avoiding strain, getting enough fun and so forth.
50 Campden Hill Square, W.8.
13 December, 1934.
To A.M.J.
Thank you very much for your letter, and for writing as frankly as you have done. It is not easy to advise someone otherwise unknown on a sample letter, so if what I say does not meet the case, I hope you will write again. I have been during my life (I am now approaching 60) through many phases of religious belief and I now realize—have done in fact for some time—that human beings can make little real progress on a basis of vague spirituality. God and the soul, and prayer as the soul’s life, and the obligation of responding to God’s demand, are real facts—in fact the most real of all facts—and they are the facts with which orthodox religion deals. As to dogmas which you cannot accept—e.g. the Virgin Birth—it is useless to force yourself on these points. Leave them alone for the time being neither affirming nor rejecting them, and give your mind and will to living in harmony with those truths which you do see. This is the way—in fact the only way—to get further light.
For your own reading I think if you do not know them you would find Baron von Hugel’s Letters, Dr. Temple’s Christian Faith and Life, the Letters of St. Francis de Sales, and Grou’s Hidden Life of the Soul valuable. You probably know the Confessions of St. Augustine, but if not do study it. When you speak of reading more than you practise in your life, you put your finger on a real source of spiritual weakness. You would benefit by a simple rule of life: so much definite time each day given to prayer and spiritual reading; definite acts of, e.g. charity, selfdenial, patience, aimed at “mortifying” whatever your special faults of character may be. The “active” and “passive” sides of your nature are meant to collaborate, not compete! As to Holy Communion, consider that this is the way in which Christians have always drawn near to God, offered themselves to Him and received from Him spiritual food.
Leave the more doctrinal side alone for the present, and go humbly, taking no notice of how you “feel.” This really matters very little!
50 C.H.S.
Epiphany, 1935.
To L.K.
… I’ve found, myself, that the mark of the direction which is meant for one by God is, that it is never used up; one re-reads it at each stage and finds it applying in a new way one had not thought of before.
I think now, that one of the things you’ve got, quite gradually, to aim at, is some kind of harmony or balance between your outer and inner life, otherwise the strain will become too much. Plainly you are required at present to live both lives; and so in both you can aim at God, though in different ways. I think you have to learn not to pour yourself out too much in outward activities, relationships, etc., but maintain a certain reserve. This is an awfully important thing for one’s inner peace; but it takes a lot of doing, so you must expect it to be a slow job. It is really of course an aspect of detachment—you are to love much and give yourself much and yet maintain an independence of soul, fully given to nothing but God.
When you have got this inner stability you won’t be so much troubled by that painful shrinking from people and external action; nor will these things spoil your prayer (when they are part of your job) because you won’t lose yourself in them. But some degree of pain and loneliness you are sure to have. Try to arrange things so that you can have a reasonable bit of quiet every day and do not be scrupulous and think it selfish to make a decided struggle for this.
You are obeying God’s call and giving Him the opportunity to teach you what He wants you to know, and so make you more useful to Him and other souls.
Your letter sounds as if you had got a wee bit strained and fussy.
Remember that “the Holy Spirit works always in tranquillity” and even the most devout fuss is not any good to Him at all. There will inevitably be great tension between the natural and supernatural sides of your life, yet even this must be drowned in the peace of God. I’m afraid this sounds very muddling but you will pick out what you want… .
50 Campden Hill Square, W.8.
24 January, 1935.
To A.M.J.
I am so sorry to have been slow in answering your letter and acknowledging the very kind gift of your poems. There seems to have been a lot to do lately and correspondence is in arrears. I was so interested in (your book) and think it is beautiful. It seems to me that what you say there is true as far as it goes but not the whole story—because, as well as our “psychic drive,” which is of course the same drive whether we direct it to selfsatisfaction or to God, there is something else, namely a real transcendental spark in us which, once it is awakened, can only be satisfied by God. It must take everything else with it, but is definitely not just Libido. It belongs wholly to the Eternal.
This too is the reason why you failed to be satisfied by New Thought and all that sort of thing. It leaves out the “supernatural spark”
and the soul’s thirst for God alone, and is, really, a very refined form of self-cultivation and selfsatisfaction. I don’t a bit want to press “orthodoxy” on you. I have every reason to know how difficult it is and how often it ruins and makes repulsive the truths it exists to proclaim. But I do very much want you to see that “poetry and romance” are not enough for religion. It asks an immense self-giving and some real austerity to respond to the yet greater self-giving of God.
Have you read Kirk’s Vision of God? There is a good deal in it you would probably like. Also von Hugel’s tiny Life of Prayer and Maritain’s equally small Prayer and Intelligence repay very close attention. You want to get into your bones the realization that the first movement of religion is from God to us and not from us to God.
I expect you know Otto’s splendid Idea of the Holy; if not, do read it. If you have a difficulty about getting books I could lend you some of these. Do please write if you wish to, and don’t hesitate to ask questions if it helps.
As to prayer, follow (at present) your own attraction towards God Pure: do what is real and sincere to you, not what is not. But keep well in mind that this is only one path, and try to turn sometimes with thoughts and affections to Christ, remembering it is still the Absolute God Who draws near to you in Him.
50 Campden Hill Square, W.8.
Shrove Tuesday, 1935.
To F.H.
I am afraid, my poor child, you have had a very stormy time—but so thankful you did not carry out the wild impulse to run off, and did do the only right thing and took all your troubles to Rev.
Mother. There is still quite a lot of “private judgment” about you, and you won’t be happy, truly and peacefully happy, in Community Life till all notions of taking things into your own hands are put right away. This is not in the least bit meant as a scolding—as I am sure you know—but even now I don’t think you realize what “obedience” in the religious life implies. It means, for instance, that you cannot just ignore the order to study 3 hours—but if your timetable makes this impossible you must explain this to Sister B.
and leave her to decide on readjustments. I think you are very lucky in having so kind and really understanding a Mother and I do so hope now that this crisis is over that you will be happier. You want at the moment a thorough rest, to recover from the exhaustion of the mental uproar: and nothing leaves such utter limpness behind. Sister M.‘s death of course had a lot to do with it—that, and the monotonous nature of your work, without sufficient mental relaxation. So lie low and keep quiet so far as possible for the time being. I would so love to see you happy and tranquil in your work for God.
50 C.H.S.
Feb. 8, 1935.
To L.K.
… Thank you very much for the books… . This one I send now [Spiritual Canticle of St. John of the Cross] I think one of the loveliest in some ways ever written, so I hope you’ll like it too.
You’ll see it has two versions of the same book. No. 2 is really, I think, the clearest and the best to read… .
I am interested you have been hearing Zernov. I have just joined the Anglo-Russian confraternity—not much use really as I am hopeless at societies and guilds and always forget their rules and prayers. But they have a magazine with very good things in it, and also I am most interested in the Orthodox Church. Next time you are in London we might try to go to the Greek Cathedral or Russian Church… .
I am sorry things have been difficult… . But do not add to all this by “always feeling” it must be your fault. I am sure this is not true and though humility and acknowledgment of one’s real failings is good, the gratuitous eating of worms not put before us by God does not nourish our souls a bit—merely in fact upsets the spiritual tummy.
I am sure that you do genuinely try to deal with the situation He has given you, but I doubt if the most superhuman care and sacrifice could entirely prevent these attacks. Take things a bit more “as they come”—do all you can in a spirit of love and quite peacefully say to God, “I’m very sorry I do not make a better job of it.” After all, if you did make a miraculously good job of it that might not fall exactly within His plan for you, and might even bring with it a subtle temptation against humility. As to that tension between the inward and the outward life—yes I think to some extent it is inevitable for a long time yet anyhow! So I would not worry about that but accept it as part of your material. No doubt as you do grow more supple you will, as you say, go in and out between prayer and work quite simply and without strain, being moved by God.
But that is a good way ahead and at present simplicity and selfabandonment will consist in accepting quite quietly this fact of tension between the two sides of your life and offering that, like everything else, to God. When you catch the idea about “not pouring yourself out” over each thing—this will help to reduce the tension. But do not strain after an understanding of it. God knows the proper time for giving you new lights.
50 Campden Hill Square, W.8.
Feb. 15, 1935.
To Y.N.
I think this tiny book (valuable out of all proportion to its size) will solve some of your problems. It is by the late Abbot of Downside, who knew more really about prayer than anyone I ever met.
Contemplative Prayer: now printed in Dom Chapman’s Spiritual Letters.
As to your feeling (which everyone has at first!) that it is somehow wrong to leave intercession, etc., for this silent absorption in God (1) it is His call to your soul, otherwise you couldn’t do it—and this takes priority of everything else. (2) As you go on you will find you can take the people you desire to pray for with you into the great stream of this prayer—and this is the very best thing you can do for them! For in this prayer it is the deepest part of the soul that operates—it is, as The Cloud says, a “work,” a spiritual “action” and selfoffering, and you can do it for others as well as for yourself. Don’t overdo it—there is a certain amount of strain involved, even when it seems all peace and joy!
Do write at any time if I can be of any use to you. Meanwhile, there is really nothing to worry about! You will find a good bit rather differently put about the Cloud type of prayer in Grou—especially the section on prayer in L’Ecole de Jesus.
50 C.H.S.
April 8, 1935
To L. K.
… Thank you for sending back St. John of the Cross. I thought you’d like him! I hope you will like this too—or at least a great deal of it [Spiritual Letters of Dom John Chapman]. Its writer knew more about prayer really than anyone else I’ve ever met; and I think most of these letters are quite splendid. He was such a darling too —so utterly natural and free from all pious jargon and nonsense.
…
I am so glad you begin to see the point about a certain reserve in your soul kept only for God. Don’t worry about it or “try” too much.
Now the seed has been planted it will grow, as quickly as He wills, without your fussing about it! …
Yes, it is “of faith” that God dwells in our souls “by essence of grace.” Of course all spatial language is really unmeaning as applied to Him because He is pure Spirit and is present everywhere in His fullness. The mystics always say He indwells the “ground of the soul” below the level of everyday consciousness, utterly distinct from and yet more present to us than we are to ourselves.
Some find it easiest to withdraw and find Him in their souls and others to turn to Him as if He were the sun: both true and neither adequate.
Dockray, Westmorland.
Holy Week, 1935.
To THE SAME.
… We are 1,000 feet up on the fells, a lovely wild place with a darling old grey church, very small, growing out of the ground and so much prayed in by its dear and very humble priest and one or two others that it gives you a marvellous welcome…. The weather is perishing cold and dreams of eiderdowns and woolly jackets haunt my prayers, but we are quite well!
18 May, 1935.
To G.F.
I’m getting along with “Personal Worship” [a chapter of the book Worship]… but am afraid it’s rather recondite and impracticable and know I ought to dilate on the rather emotional Christocentric devotion which seems to colour most people’s private prayers, but don’t find it easy to tackle. L. tells me that their best conductor advised the staff “just to whisper the word Jesus on first waking up, and there was no limit to what it might effect.” … It’s in the best Christian tradition, yet I’m sure its origins are emotional and imaginative; not, in the pure sense, religiousness.
25 May, 1935.
To THE SAME.
I am both glad and sorry you feel like that. Sorry because it is very painful and takes a lot of handling, and glad because, as the Abbot says, it is a “very good state” to be in! Anyhow, you cannot help it. Of course it’s not imagination, though one’s state of nerves, mind and body all have their effect. I am prepared to find in a year or two you are more fundamentally at peace than now. I feel in my bones one should be. Like the blessed in the heaven of the moon—perfectly content to see God only by reflection, and not as those in the heaven of the sun, because it is His will for them and the fact that He is, is enough. But some people … don’t feel like that and presumably they are those who have to go further and (en route) fare worse… . When the interior stripping and readjustment is complete you should come back to ordinary life to find it more full of interest than ever before. It is the transition that is tough. How nice if we knew about our insides, instead of feeling our way about by rule of thumb as we have to do.
Ascension Day, 1935.
To Y.N.
I was so very pleased to hear from you again—and it is nothing but a joy and privilege for me, if I can be of any use in supporting and reassuring you.
All I can say—and I say it with as much certainty as a poor human can have in these matters—is that your prayer is all right. It is God’s gift, not your work, and all you have to do is to forget all the jargon about union and aspiration and so on and respond to Him with humble love. You have only three points to bother about:
1. All strain must be carefully avoided and if there were physical effects of any kind, you must ease off. But I don’t expect this.
2. Some vocal prayer, psalm or office each day and some reading and thought.
3. Take it with a light hand—quite ready to let it go, and accept aridity or anything else, if it is God’s will.
I’m thankful you read Dom Chapman. I very nearly wrote and told you to. He knew more about real prayer than anyone I ever met. And much of what he says applies directly to your case. Do you remember among other things that he says this type of prayer need not necessarily mean a very high spiritual state—he has known souls attain greater sanctity by the “ordinary ways.” This I think is very reassuring for those who are worried by finding their own prayer called by very highsounding names! He makes fun of all these distinctions; and just insists that this simple contemplation leading on to the sort of prayer you describe, is the right thing for those called to it.
As a matter of fact, you have no choice! as you say you can do nothing but accept. What is worrying you isn’t your prayer but the rubbish people talk about it! So carry on and be thankful!
30 June, 1935.
To G.F.
This morning was so queer. A very grimy and sordid Presbyterian mission hall in a mews over a garage, where the Russians are allowed once a fortnight to have the Liturgy. A very stage property Ikonostasis and a few modern Ikons. A dirty floor to kneel on and a form along the wall… . And in this two superb old priests and a deacon, clouds of incense and, at the Anaphora, an overwhelming supernatural impression.
14 September, 1935.
To THE SAME.
As to the devoirs of the troisieme sort, to such as me they only turn up as it were now and then, but then probably carry their own sanction with them. Like the “interior words which do what they say.” As for instance certain jobs, as to which you know you are to take them, and certain kinds of prayer which you are pressed to do.
These cases settle themselves. Those more on the border you would keep in your mind and ask for more light on until they cleared up.
If they didn’t clear up, the presumption would be that you were to use your common sense about them. Of course the more entirely surrendered and loving you were, the more sensitive you would become to these pulls and pushes. But in ordinary cases the “inspiration”
must be checked by the general rules of religion, “the mind of the Church,” and, I think, by reason and a sound mind too. Otherwise there is no defence against all the follies of “guidance.”
28 October, 1935.
To THE SAME.
You must read Gore’s Life. When he was dying the Archbishop visited him. He was very weak and kept sinking into half-consciousness and murmuring to himself, “Transcendent glory! transcendent glory!”
Don’t you love that? It reminds me so of when my friend E.R.B. was dying and kept saying, “Such music! Such light!”
Christmas Day, 1935.
To L.M.
I’ve had a lovely Lalique glass Madonna given me by one of my youngest—a most naughty and extravagant gift but what is one to do?
It is such a strange thing, very modern and yet somehow very spiritual—like the Platonic idea of the Nativity, different in every light… .
50 Campden Hill Square, W.8.
Eve of Jubilee (May 5), 1935.
To D.E.
… You should take Fr. X.‘s directions about sleeping, and a more ordered life, very seriously indeed. Of course, he expects you to carry out what he said!! And, though I fully understand it is quite against your whole temperament, if you would make a simple rule and stick to it regardless, you would find it bracing and quieting, and would get all that really needs doing done! If as I expect you don’t have breakfast till 8:30 or 9, threequarters of an hour for prayer and reading could surely come before that if you go to bed in reasonable time? You once mentioned letter-writing as one of the things which kept you up late—it is also one of the things that should be disciplined, both as to length and frequency! No letter-writing after 10:15, as an act of obedience to God, would probably bring a quite new sense of leisure, and no one would be a penny the worse. It looks impossible till you do it, and then you find it is possible.
8 January, 1936.
To G.F.
… My Indian turned out such a pet and so touching. He was quite a pale and very gentle one, a Moslem professor Of philosophy, and after various technical questions about mysticism, he suddenly said, “You see, madam, for me there is really a personal question, I have not the happiness of this experience of God, and I cannot live without Him any more,” and tears came into his eyes. It was illuminating to observe that the fact he wasn’t a Christian simply didn’t make any difference at all.
Just read such a nice little bit about Luther. When he’d finished his Commentary on the verse in Romans about “all creation travailing together, etc.,” he turned to his little dog and said exultantly, “Thou too shalt have a little golden tail!”
50 Campden Hill Square, W.8.
Quinquagesima, 1936.
To A.B.
As to your Lent—no physical hardships beyond what normal life Provides—but take each of these as serenely and gratefully as you can and make of them your humble offering to God. Don’t reduce sleep. Don’t get up in the cold. Practise more diligently the art of turning to God with some glance or phrase of love and trust at all spare moments of the day. Read a devotional book in bed in the morning, and strive in every way to make the ordinary discipline of life of spiritual worth. Be specially kind and patient with those who irritate you! And make of this effort an offering to God.
Instead of wasting energy in being disgusted with yourself, accept your own failures, and just say to God, “Well, in spite of all I may say or fancy, this is what I am really like—so please help my weakness.” This, not self-disgust, is the real and fruitful humility… .
Please be very kind to yourself (Christians must always be kind to animals, including their own animal part!) and get quite well.
Lent III, 1936.
To L.K.
What you say in your letter seems to me all right: it means God has shown you a little more of Himself. Thank Him for it very humbly and let it gently soak in. That pure unmoved Godhead, the “wholly Other”
in which we have no part is something which many of the mystics have realized and tried to describe. What we know or experience of course is only the tiniest fragment and always will be—how could it be otherwise? But when you say, at that centre, “God does not want us or our worship”—then I think you go beyond what we can possibly know. I think one must not speculate about it either way but just love and offer oneself, and carefully guard against the danger, always present with this kind of religious experience, of becoming too exclusively abstract and impersonal—moving from God to Godhead.
Our immediate concern must always, mustn’t it, be with God as He moves towards us, touches us, reveals Himself to us, in Christ and the Sacraments and in our experiences in prayer.
50 Campden Hill Square, W.8.
14 May, 1936.
To D.E.
… Have you read Aldous Huxley’s Peace pamphlet, What are you going to do about it? The end part I think fine, and just what all of us ought to do for a start. Do get it: it consoles one a bit for all the Ethiopian horrors and Musso’s “intuitively willed war” and the Church’s tactful silence. It is all a horrible mystery; but more mysterious that, immersed in such a seething pot, we can know and desire the Love of God. It all seems to me, on a vaster scale, very like the contrasts of the 14th century: all the outbursts of violence and despotism and sin as the setting for the lives of some of those who have known most about God.
Christmas Day, 1936
To G.F.
I do hope your Christmas has had a little touch of Eternity in among the rush and pitter patter and all. It always seems such a mixing of this world and the next—but that after all is the idea!
… We had a hymn this a.m. I’d never sung before—“the seraphs veiled their faces, but Joseph was not scared”—nice don’t you think?
50 Campden Hill Square, W.8.
Epiphany, 1937.
To F.H.
No—I am not at all upset that you have refused to be put up for election as Companion Sister. The awful thing would be to contemplate profession when not sure of your vocation, either from fear of displeasing Rev. Mother or any other cause. I am so glad you told her at once, when you saw you could not go through with it. You are, I think, one of the people who do best on a yearly vow which you need not renew, because you must feel free! I am afraid it has all been very painful for you but I am sure Rev. Mother and Sister K. understand the situation—probably better than you do. Now just wait quietly for a bit, and see where God is wishing to lead you. If later He grants you a firm desire to give Him your life in this Community, then accept the gift with gratitude whatever the cost to yourself. If not, then accept whatever else He puts before you. But whatever you do, don’t fuss.
15 January, 1937.
To G.F.
Most of these things don’t belong to your type of prayer, e.g.
remembering about individuals when you are trying to worship the Lord. When you’ve got to attend to individuals it will be forced on you. I know it’s awfully awkward and one feels a sweep when people mention how hard they have been praying for one and so forth, and one does not do the equivalent. But there it is.
“Just as you say, Lord” is a perfect intention, can’t be beaten; is the same as St. Francois’ “Yes, Father, yes and always yes.” And anyhow I think there is always the implicit intention of “take me and make me what you want.” This with, in active life, doing things for people “in the Lord” gives a perfectly sufficient objective and material for your soul. Every word you say makes me feel dead sure of this. All your discomfort really comes from the loving but drastic action of God on your soul. It may get worse still, but never mind. It’s more than worth it and you ought to give thanks.
… I know it all feels vague and waste of time … but all these doings and not doings are veils to the deeper action of the soul, which is what matters really, and, still more, humbling conditions in which the Lord can act.
19 January, 1937.
To THE SAME.
… In the end the tension should be resolved for Christians by really and actually finding the Lord so present in the visible that it is transfigured and the gap between it and the Invisible is closed; in fact by the complete eucharisticizing of life.
22 January, 1937.
To THE SAME.
Seems to me, as the Lord requires us to live (as much as we can) eternal life in succession, that, when we are fully abandoned, the painful tension between the two will cease because we shall be adjusted to His will. It is an element in our growth, incidental to the fact that we are getting the idea but have not yet arrived.
Don’t you think so?
Am reading Maisie Spens. She is difficult, but full of stuff. A quite new angle on Our Lord’s personality and action. Basic idea, that His sayings arise from and point back to his inner experiences and life of prayer. We shall like discussing it.
23 January, 1937.
To MAISIE SPENS.
… Of course now that it is walking about in its street clothes, so to speak, I am mainly conscious of the strands of thought I did not develop in it, though they are there in germ for anyone who will take the trouble to make them sprout! … If there is one thing I seem to have learned in the course of my spiritual wanderings, it is the oblique nature of all religious formulations without exception and the deep underlying unity of all supernatural experience. This does not prevent some ways being better than others of course and some doors opening more easily and directly on the Eternal. All this (for me) applies to prayer before the Reserved Sacrament… I still attach very great value to it. But I no longer feel able to put it in a class apart as a means of communion with God. Perhaps my dear Russians, with their extraordinary sense of the Presence in the Liturgy, and entire refusal to venerate the “Reserved Gifts,” have had something to do with this. You must go to St. Philip’s some Sunday morning when you are in London; though I think perhaps it is even more overwhelming when the whole majestic action is carried through by a handful of exiles in some shabby little room with the poorest of “church furniture.”
Worship.
… the open-air element [in Our Lord’s prayer-life], which always seems to me so central to the Gospels and so sadly ignored by the over-Churchy.
50 Campden Hill Square, W.8.
Quinquagesima, 1937.
To F.H.
Rev. Mother came to see me on Friday, and told me that it was now quite decided that you should not continue your life with them. I am sure that both you and she are right in coming to a final decision about it and not postponing things further—but all the same, I know you must be feeling very unhappy and am so sorry for you. Never mind. You have given the life a good trial under exceptionally favourable circumstances and have, I am sure, learned a great deal both about your own capacity for responding to discipline and the absolute demands of a consecrated life; and that is in itself a great gain.
Had God honoured you by calling you to surrender your liberty and take the vows of religion it would, of course, have been a glorious thing; but humbly and frankly to acknowledge that this is not for you, and to put your future into His hand, is also very pleasing to Him, so you must not be discouraged.
[Feb. 22, 1937.]
To L.M.
Your letter on arriving at Jerusalem came to-day. … I gather therefrom that the journey was far from Perfect Joy … and hope you took a long rest in that upper room with the lovely view and the balcony which does sound all right… .
I was thrilled by your description of the Jewish dedication service.
It sounds exactly like the Kiddush, the probable ancestor of the Eucharist… . Lovely the cook doing it! Of course he had to wear his tweed cap as all Jews must cover the head when they pray. Do try to go to a good Synagogue service while you are in Palestine—such an opportunity to explore these exciting Judeo-Christian connections… .
Nedoncelle’s book on the Baron (the one M. translated) is published to-day by Longmans. It reads very well, is nicely produced and has a lovely photo I had not seen before as frontispiece. The publishers in their blurb quote Archbishop Goodier as saying that the Baron “is better understood through his interpreters than through actual study of his writings”!!! In other words, mince is easier to swallow than a cut off the joint. Well! Well!
50 Campden Hill Square, W.8.
13 May, 1937.
To D.E.
. .. Of course you can have Baker! Disregard his views on illness and some of his more lurid acts of resignation. I think his notion of the powers of the director excessive myself—the whole object should be so to organize the life of the directed that he (she) can walk alone. But this commonly takes a bit of time!
I’ve been thinking about hot water bottles and the Basques. It reminds me a bit of an occasion years ago when Copec was being launched, and L., its rather ardent secretary, observed at a meeting that if each of us sacrificed something we really cared about Copec would bring the Christian revolution in. Bishop Gore, who was in the Chair, said grumpily, “If I gave up my pipe, what good would that do to the world?” At the time I was all for L. and displeased with the Bishop. But as a matter of fact he was living all the time a life of complete selfrenunciation, doing his own room, very ascetic in Lent, observing poverty and so on and taking it for granted without fuss: while L.‘s idea was a gesture, out of which she got quite a bit of kick! And Gore remains an enduring influence because of that hidden dedication, not done for this or that but just as his life towards God. And I think it is the quiet steady stuff that tells in the long run, not the startling sacrifices and acts of “reparation.” No doubt there are souls called to express their love of God through these but they ought to be very careful about it!
Whit-Sunday, 1937.
To MAISIE SPENS.
Nicholas Zernov’s idea [in an article in Theology, March, 1937]
seems to me, as to you, beautiful but very limited in scope—few have the chance of going, e.g. to an Orthodox Liturgy, and if they do, need special knowledge if they are to make much of it. Alas, there and at the Roman Mass they can’t be communicants, which at once creates a barrier to real unity, doesn’t it? I am sure it is good sometimes to join in the worship of other Churches, but this alone won’t lead us very far. The basis of reunion must be interior, secret, out of the reach of all ecclesiastical controversies. I think you have had a wonderful inspiration in basing it on Our Lord’s own prayer, which as you say includes and over-passes the sacramental, and indeed all else. But I have no light as to how the revelation you have received (for I am sure it is that) should be used—whether something should be published about it, or whether it should be allowed to spread like leaven. It is of course the idea of the Corpus Christi made real, concrete, not a mere notion, as to most people it is: a praying Church as the actual Body of the Lord.
I think you will have to wait and brood over it all a little longer and see if light comes. Things are moving in the supernatural world —don’t you feel this in spite of all that seems so hostile to religion? And at any time we may be given the clue to all the separate messages and lights and they will fall into place as parts of one whole.
16 June, 1937.
To THE SAME.
[For the development of Unity in and through the Praying Christ:]
I do agree that … a widespread group of praying souls, Orders and individuals, is essential. Still more that these should belong to all Christian Communions. I think verbal contacts much the best but you will not be able to make enough of these for your purpose, so you will be obliged to do some by letter. This leavening process seems to me of the greatest importance; and time and effort spent on it well worth while. Note that an unusual number of Christians of all types caring for reunion will be in England this summer, at Oxford for the “Church and State” and at Edinburgh for the “World Conference.” The Religious Orders should be most important for you.
… Of course use my name if you feel it is any use in making contacts.
50 C.H.S.
Lammas Day [1937].
To L.R.
I am sure the disciplined life based on the Sermon on the Mount is not easy! After all, it was never intended to be, was it? If you can get an hour a day (as much as possible consecutive and in the morning) you ought I think to be able to handle the situation even though just now the “sacrament of the present moment” may take rather a knobbly sort of form. Still God is in it—and it is there that you have to find a way of responding to Him and receiving Him and are actually being fed by Him. Christianity does mean getting down to actual ordinary life as the medium of the Incarnation, doesn’t it, and our lessons in that get sterner, not more elegant as time goes on?
As to deliberate mortifications—I take it you do feel satisfied that you accept fully those God sends. That being so, you might perhaps do one or two little things, as acts of love, and also as discipline? I suggest by preference the mortification of the Tongue —as being very tiresome and quite harmless to the health. Careful guard on all amusing criticisms of others, on all complaints however casual and trivial; deliberately refraining sometimes (not always!) from saying the entertaining thing. This does not mean you are to be dull or correct! but to ration this side of your life. I doubt whether things like sitting on the least comfortable chair, etc., affect you enough to be worth bothering about! But I’m sure custody of the Tongue (on the lines suggested) could give you quite a bit of trouble and be a salutary bit of discipline, a sort of verbal hair-shirt. I think God does provide quite a reasonable amount of material for selfdenial, etc., in your life. This extra bit is for love.
Rothbury.
September, 1937.
To G.F.
… The Deaconess is an old Pet, and pretty hot stuff too. Said she always reckoned to have three hours in church every morning, of which the first hour is spent getting rid of distractions and “getting down to the stillness.” She is going to pray for both you and me every day. I thought we might as well have the benefit of it.
She must be very old as she casually referred to some work she did in 1882. Has double cataract and broken wrist, but makes light of it. … I felt very abashed on being told that everything she knew about prayer she learnt from me, as obviously she knew infinitely more than I do. … I told her I was rather having to leave off active work, and she said, “O well, God has something else for you.
After all, it doesn’t matter in the least what one does, so long as it is what He wants.”
Wooler.
8 September, 1937.
To THE SAME.
… Wasn’t Philippians (ii. 1-11) nice this a.m.? Especially the marginal reading about “being made originally on the pattern of God,” wouldn’t clutch at it but let it go. In Philippians I think a deeply mature Paul is writing to very immature pupils—which is perhaps why such deeps of meaning come gradually out of it that one never suspected at first: things as it were he couldn’t help putting in because he had arrived at them, and they were just there for him.
Wooler.
September, 1937.
To THE SAME.
. .. How glad I am you went to darling Southwell. And did you see the listening Angel and the contemplative Hermit (whom I like even better) on the screen, and did they tell you how all the plants on those naturalistic capitals on the way to the Chapter House still grow round there? So nice to think of them all trooping into the Sanctuary to praise the Lord, and then remaining permanently.
As to your ascetical programme, I can only say with the American lady, “My, Signora, if that isn’t just how I feel myself!” Still, the usual advice is to take one virtue at a time, and not cut off a bigger chunk of perfection than one can chew.
As from 50 Campden Hill Square, W.8.
22 September, 1937.
To A.B.
… I feel the regular, steady, docile practice of corporate worship is of the utmost importance for the building-up of your spiritual life: more important, really, than the reading of advanced books like De Caussade, though I am delighted that he attracts and helps you and feeds your soul. But no amount of solitary reading makes up for humble immersion in the life and worship of the Church.
In fact the books are only addressed to those who are taking part in that life. The corporate and personal together make up the Christian ideal. You will find the “new attitude” you speak of—the simplicity, trust and dependence—can be kept up, and that your Communions will play a very important part here, giving support of a kind you can hardly get in any other way, reminding you too of the great life of the Church, engulfing your little life, and checking any tendency to individualism.
Sept. 27, 1937.
To M.C.
Now for the moment I have only got odd jobs. Greatly daring I’ve undertaken to give the Mercier Memorial Lecture at Whitelands College on Oct. 8, Education and the Spirit of Worship, and only hope I’ll have voice enough when the time comes. Do think of it! I wonder whether you feel as I do that the most difficult thing about rocky health is not the bits when one is really ill and has something as it were to get one’s teeth into, but the ceaseless uncertainty about whether one will be able to carry out one’s undertakings and the general shortening of the working day! this isn’t worth calling a Cross and I fear has no intercessory value at all! but it is a bit of a discipline! and perhaps has value in preparing for further and more useful suffering and stripping… .
October, 1937.
To G.F.
Did G. tell you a jewel we got from the new list of tulips: “The Bishop. A bloom of great substance. Blue base with white halo, borne on a stiff and upright stem!”
Moreton.
1 November, 1937.
To THE SAME.
… A darling old saint of a thing—Fr. X.—came and said Mass.
Before he began, after putting his things on the altar, he turned back, and said: “It’s All Saints’ Day! We are encompassed by a great cloud of witnesses. They are not witnessing how we are getting on with it—they are witnessing to what God meant and means to them! So we are to think of them in their myriads, surrounding the Throne of God, all standing on tiptoe and crying at the tops of their voices, Alleluia!” After which he went on to say Mass. Don’t you think it was rather nice? And aren’t you glad, although he is such a dreadful loss to pacifism, that Dick Sheppard arrived so quietly and comfortably in such good time for the Feast? Nice too that before going he won that victory for peace at Glasgow… .
Did you do 1st Vespers of All Saints with the proper psalms and antiphons? Very nice I thought.
Alexandra Hotel, Lyme Regis, Dorset.
4 December, 1937.
To E.M.
… I have read the letter, and the paper you enclosed carefully; and I think the upshot of it all is, that you are still far too much inclined to make feeling the test of religion. All that matters in religion is giving ourselves without reserve to God, and keeping our wills tending towards Him. This we can always do; but to feel devout, fervent, aware of His presence, etc., is beyond our control.
Everyone goes through “dry” times such as you are experiencing. They are of great value as tests of our perseverance, and of the quality of our love; and certainly don’t mean that anything is wrong. All lies in how we take them—with patience, or with restlessness. As to the experience you describe, thank God for it; but don’t worry if you never again have it. Such things do happen to many people from time to time, and especially at the beginning of a new phase in the spiritual life, but in this life such “awareness” is never continuous and its absence certainly does not necessarily mean that we are stopping it by our own fault. Just be simple and natural with God, ask Him to do with you what He wills, avoid strain and fuss of all kinds, and be careful to keep in charity with all men, and you will have done what is in your power. You say in your letter “below everything, I believe I’m in a way very quiet and happy”—well, that, not the fluctuating surface moods, represents your true spiritual state, and is the work of God. Give Him thanks for it and trust it and don’t bother about the variable weather.
As from 50 Campden Hill Square, W.8.
5 Dec., 1937.
To MRS. ERNEST MILTON.
I have read Miss Bendix with the greatest interest and only wish you had carried her theological adventures a bit further. I do see, however, why Macmillan’s reader criticized the end as lacking in strength; and think also that the reason for this is fairly obvious.
Where one is transcribing, or building upon, an experience of one’s own, and has this experience very vividly present in one’s mind, it seems to me most difficult to discover how far one has succeeded in presenting it objectively, so that it can be realized in its full strength by one’s readers. “Apperception” comes into play here so strongly that hardly anyone escapes it. In the present case, I’m afraid you have not given the reader the full blast, as it were, of Miss B.‘s vision of God as you yourself see and feel it. You will have to strengthen it somehow; but not, I think, by expansion.
p. 134. I think you ought somehow to make clear that the underlined sentence is Miss B.‘s own composition; it reads rather as if she and you thought she was quoting the Athanasian Creed! I like very much the section with alternative passages from Flammarion and the Psalms. Where the strengthening seems to me to be needed is in the earlier sections of Part II.
If Miss Bendix is intended to be an ordinary devout Anglican, rather “High” but not “Extreme,” then the way she spends Holy Week needs a little revision.
p. 65, She wouldn’t probably take a tea tray with egg upstairs for breakfast, as she would be certain to attend the early communion service on Maundy Thursday; and a “fasting breakfast” taken after she had been to church would consist only of bread and butter and tea.
Good Friday—the fast ends at 3 p.m. and tea with a boiled egg on returning from the 3 hours’ service is the normal thing. Why does she get ready so early for a service that doesn’t begin till noon?
Also most people, I think, have a cup of tea in the morning, and bread (dry) unless their practice is of exceptional severity.
p. 70. There are proper Psalms for each day in Holy Week: she would read, not 119, but 56 and 64 on Thursday morning, 23 and 109 in the evening, and 22 on Good Friday morning (Lady Day, if it occurs in Holy Week, is “transferred” till after Easter).
p. 157. The quotation looks like St. Augustine: but it was not Augustine who said (according to the best opinion) Credo quia absurdum. I think it was Tertullian, but am away from home at present and can’t look it up.
On the last page of all, the mixed scraps from the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds which come to her mind rather look as if they were quotations from a single source.
But these of course are mere details, which are easily enough adjusted if you agree. The communication of Miss B.‘s total experience to the reader, in its fullness, is a very different matter! On the whole, my inclination would be towards slightly tightening-up and condensing the sunset part, and developing and elucidating the last page a bit. I’ve told you my impressions with brutal frankness as I am sure that is what you want and it is much too serious and beautiful a work to be insincere about.
Lyme Regis.
1 February, 1938
To G.F.
I go into chapel for Evensong every day. It makes a nice fixed point, and now I’m getting into the rhythm of it and feeling the curious effect of a daily Office, which I had not experienced for a long time now, not having stayed at convents. You do not feel it if you only go now and then. But done every day it becomes a complete act in itself, within which you feel the action of the Church.
Rather nice, though slightly spoilt by the curate’s passion for adding some second-rate collects at the end; especially a very horrid one about putting the whole weight of our burdens on the bosom of God for the night. I wonder what Otto would have thought of that.
Ash Wednesday, March, 1938.
To THE SAME.
I feel Lent awfully difficult, being unable to lay my hands on anything specific to do or renounce that is not (a) obvious to the world or (b) hostile to health! I’m sure spiritual “mortifications”
are the real ones, though without going so far as to say the others do not count. After all, Our Lord’s Lent consisted of forty days of exclusive attention to God under austere conditions and resisting the “devil’s” offers of things that compete with God—and that must be the ideal; quite impossible, of course, in its completeness for us. I’d never have dared to be as sweeping as Z. is about “not lessening your time of communion with God for any human being.”
After all, everything done in charity is communion with God; and therefore it is all right if charity really calls us to leave or reduce prayer for the sake of someone else. Don’t you think so?
… It’s all fearfully difficult and I see more and more the reason for the Religious Life and Enclosure. I don’t see how anyone really is going to teach and remain at the deeper levels whilst living in the world. Even this month here, not very well used, is enough to show the immense difference solitude makes. But that, of course, may only be at a certain stage. And the Baron would say if and when it was really required, we could trust God to provide it, and if He didn’t, we must carry on tranquilly without.
April 6, 1938.
To V.T.
As to School Prayers; of course they are immensely important and quite plainly part of your job and you must put as much into them as you can and really pray in them. But the fact remains, doesn’t it, that this is a bit of work? You are doing your best to help along and join in the corporate worship of the school—but it is not the normal channel taken by your personal communion with God and I still don’t feel we can reckon it in, when considering how much time you are able to give to that. I should think you want more, not less, of this personal communion in order to “put your back” into school prayers and help to make them what they ought to be. You are more likely to make them your own, if they are well supported by secret prayer.
May 10 [1938].
To LAURA ROSE.
… I was so much interested in your letter about K. [a young girl]. I agree with you she has the genuine spiritual nature and will need to be very carefully guided. It isn’t surprising, indeed at her age quite wholesome, that during this last year she should have concentrated most on active life and seemed to lose her prayer to some extent, and that the intense feeling about Our Lord also is less vivid. I think if I were you I would start at once to make her realize and make central the truth that these vivid impressions will vary much and may even depart altogether without there being anything (necessarily) wrong with her spiritual life. In fact if she wants it to be deep and mature, she must never make this the important thing. I think she has great self-knowledge for her age; and I would tell her at once, He comes to the soul when He wills and that soul needs it, but never continuously in this life. We are always in His presence but He not always in ours, isn’t it so? Tell her it is all right to love people all she can, so long as she loves with and in God and does not clutch at them. But in times of prayer she must subordinate thoughts of others to thoughts of God Himself —otherwise they do become hindrances.
I would love to have her in a Retreat if it were ever possible. I don’t think she would find it too difficult; anyhow there would be lots she could understand. Tell her to make a little meditation each day on something in the Gospels, picturing the scene and herself there, looking at and listening to Our Lord.
50 Campden Hill Square, W.8.
St. Barnabas (11 June), 1938.
To THE REV. GEORGE D. REINDORP.
I meant to write you a line yesterday with my good wishes for this morning, when I thought of you so much: and above all to thank you for your letter from Fulham. How splendid that everything cleared up for you like that and you were able to make your Confession too. I felt in my bones you ought to do it, but hesitated to press too much and disturb you to no purpose and am so glad now I just left it in God’s hands. It has been a crucial week for you, hasn’t it? When you had to make the choice which will now colour all your life—whether you will be (a) a real priest, offered to God, standing before His Altar as a sacrifice to Him, to be used for His people’s needs—with all the effort and difficulty this must involve, or (b) a thoroughly nice young Clergyman. How splendid that He pressed you to choose (a). Having done so, you can feel quite sure that although there will be very hard and dreary bits to get through, in all real necessities He will provide the support and light you need… . .
I thought it was so very specially kind of you to come round on Sunday afternoon and did wish I could have seen you. Will you please remember you are always welcome here, and have only to say when you want to talk, or just sit for a bit and get your breath! It is sometimes useful to have an auxiliary home.
50 Campden Hill Square, W.8.
27 June, 1938.
To D.E.
I couldn’t answer your letter before, being at the Anglo-Russian Conference where one was kept very much on the run. It was thrilling and the Orthodox services quite unimaginably lovely.
Yes—I hope and feel sure H.‘s great day will be beautiful for all of us. I feel it is a great privilege to be so near her when she makes her great act of self-oblation; and there should be no room for small prejudices or regrets over what her personal friends may feel for the time being they have lost. She has grown up so wonderfully, hasn’t she, since she turned entirely to God? One can only just admire and be thankful.
A profession at Wantage.
I am glad you have had some happy hours, and God has shown you something of His beauty and harmony. These are sometimes I think His way of encouraging and reassuring us and helping us along. No, I do not think it was imagination—though your senses and imagination were used as a vehicle for His message. I think it is important to realize that—it protects us from mere hallucinations. You receive the impress of the Heavenly Beauty, which is a true part of God’s Nature, by means of the faculties you have—and your music is a translation into human terms of something which is truly there. It’s an experience that does happen to people—Richard Rolle called it “angels’ song or heavenly melody dwelling in the mind,” and said quite a lot about it. Thank God for it—and don’t dwell on it too much.
50 Campden Hill Square, W.8.
6 July, 1938.
To LAURA ROSE.
… We went to Wantage that afternoon and Sister H.‘s profession was Tuesday morning. A long service—8 to 10:30—but most beautiful and impressive, especially the moment when the black veil is given and as she kneels before the altar the Novice Mistress takes off the white veil and the Rev. Mother puts the black one in its place.
Those who are to be professed are brought in in procession, with lighted candles in their hands by their fellow-novices and just before the ceremony begins (after the Creed at High Mass) are each given a sheaf of lilies to hold. They receive the veil, the cross, the girdle with three knots and the ring from the Bishop, and finally each is crowned with a wreath of little white flowers. X.
told me that she went in in tears, but when she came out she was simply radiant with joy—it was lovely to see her. (They are, I think, very satisfied with her and told me she has a very deep prayer-life.) Her cross was a special one and had belonged to a very old and saintly Sister who died last year, and had been specially saved for her. She made her vows in such a firm clear voice—one could hear every word! Afterwards we all went up on to the downs with her and had a delightful picnic, with larks singing, and a Birthday Cake with one blue candle!
50 Campden Hill Square, W.8.
26 October, 1938.
To C. S. LEWIS.
May I thank you for the very great pleasure which your remarkable book, Out of the Silent Planet, has given me? It is so very seldom that one comes across a writer of sufficient imaginative power to give one a new slant on reality: and this is just what you seem to me to have achieved. And what is more, you have not done it in a solemn and oppressive way but with a delightful combination of beauty, humour and deep seriousness. I enjoyed every bit of it, in spite of starting with a decided prejudice against “voyages to Mars.”
I wish you had felt able to report the conversation in which Ransom explained the Christian Mysteries to the eldil, but I suppose that would be too much to ask. We should be content with the fact that you have turned “empty space” into heaven!
50 Campden Hill Square, W.8.
3 November, 1938.
To THE SAME.
Thank you so much for your letter. But I don’t think even you can rehabilitate “Condescension,” especially where Admiration (in its full significance) was meant. It sounds as though you suspected me of being a terrestrial sorn, instead of just an elderly mouse.
I should not worry about the scientific view of the Cosmic Rays.
Perhaps the rays Ransom felt came more directly from the heart of God and so had a vivifying effect on those fit to receive them.
Anyhow, as you say, Heaven would no doubt be death to most of us —hence the necessity of Purgatory. Did you ever read St. Catherine of Genoa about that? If ever you are in London and feel able to come and see me, it would be a great pleasure to make your acquaintance.
50 Campden Hill Square, W.8.
Advent IV [1938].
To D.E.
… The Cats’ Creche … is too enchanting, and will be lit up at tea time on Christmas Eve, and be the success of the day! Thank you so much. My Irish Margaret gazed at it, and then said, “See the little cats making their offering to Our Lord, and sure it’s Himself is fond of animals!” After a pause—“I should think the lady who made this is a good-living person.”
Letter of thanks from the Campden Hill Square Cats, enclosed in Above:
HONOURED Miss,
We both thank you most purrily for our beautiful Crib expressing as it does in drama our Deepest Feelings, otherwise so often unperceived. We note that, like the story of Daniel in the Lions’
Den, the lesson for us is one of Self-control. It is as you say the abnegation of will involved in walking up with a live mouse that really counts (in fact, the offering of a dead mouse often involving a certain temptation to Pride). Gazing upon this scene, and making it the material of our meditation, we hope in time to learn the real nature of the sacrifice of a troubled spirit, and perhaps the other bit will happen later. It may interest you to know, dear Miss, that as a matter of fact, owing to weight and well-fedness, Victims are not often come by. The local mice and birds continue their careers unhindered. Fish, we agree, is different. But then, they have that Upstairs.
Now, dear Miss, with rubs and purrs, and hoping your Christmas mat will be provided with all your pet foods, We are,
Your affectionate cats,
TONY Puss. PHILIP ARGENT.
50 Campden Hill Square, W.8.
April 12, 1939.
To S.P.
I shall be only too delighted if I can be of any help about your prayers. But I am rather frightened of giving detailed advice to anyone I do not know personally: as every one differs in temperament, capacity, etc., their prayer must differ too. So please take anything I say with a grain of salt.
I think an hour in the morning is enough at present and should not be added to; so the question is, how to use it best. Without being too rigid or watching the clock, try dividing it roughly into 3
periods of about 20 minutes each:
(a) Will be given to a short N.T. reading and a meditation based on it, leading to:
(b) Prayer, including adoration, intercession and a review in God’s presence of the duties, etc., of the coming day, especially the contacts which may be difficult, or uncongenial jobs.
(c) Spiritual reading.
The point about this plan is that the meditation leads on naturally to prayer; and as soon as you perceive it has done this, you can drop it (because it has then done its work) and continue with that intercourse with God which it will have set going.
And, on the other hand, if it is a “bad day,” the meditation gives you something definite to do and a subject to attend to and think about which will help to control wandering thoughts.
As to subject, there are lots of books which provide set subjects, points, etc. But I think myself the best and simplest way is just to take some point from one’s daily N.T. reading, either the appointed Church lesson or whatever it may be, and, asking God for His light, to brood on it in His presence till it leads you into acts of penitence, love, worship, as the case may be.
No fixed rules can safely be laid down, because some people are more imaginative and others more logical in their ways of meditating and each should follow their attrait and not try to force themselves into a particular method. Prayer should never be regarded as a science or reduced to a system—that ruins it, because it is essentially a living and personal relationship, which tends to become more personal and also more simple, as one goes on.
Have you read How to Pray by J. N. Grou? I think that is one of the best short expositions of the essence of prayer which has ever been written; and of course there is much in his Hidden Life of the Soul too, which would be very useful to you.
On a much lower level, but still extremely good within its own limitations, is a small book called How to Meditate, published by S.P.C.K. in Little Books on Religion (1d.!); its directions are extremely clear, without being too rigid.
Beware of the elaborate arrangements of Preludes, Points, and so on which are set out in some devotional books; they only lead to unreality. And do not try to go on too long—ten minutes for the actual meditation will probably be enough at first.
If there is anything else you want to know, please do not hesitate to write again, or else come in one day for a talk when you return to London.
50 Campden Hill Square, W.8.
27 April, 1939.
To C.D.
Thinking over our talk yesterday afternoon, I felt that perhaps it might be a help if I jotted down one or two points for you to consider at your leisure, without the worry of trying to remember just what was said! But if on the other hand you don’t feel the need of this—then please ignore this letter.
A convert to Christianity who, at the beginning of the correspondence, had not been baptized: and eventually joined the Roman Church.
(1) I am sure you ought to go very slowly and quietly—not only for the sake of your mind and body but still more for that of your soul.
God in revealing Himself to you, put you at the beginning of a long road, and you must go at His pace, not your own (or mine!). “Tarry thou the Lord’s leisure: be strong and He shall comfort thy heart: and put thou thy trust in the Lord.” That is a grand verse for you.
(2) Make up your mind from the first to ignore the ups and downs of the “spiritual climate.” There will be for you as for everyone sunny and cloudy days, long periods of dullness and fog, and sometimes complete darkness to bear. Accept this with courage as part of the Christian life. Your conversion means giving yourself to God, not having nice religious feelings. Many of the Saints never had “nice religious feelings”; but they did have a sturdy self-oblivious devotion to God alone. Remember old Samuel Rutherford: “There be some that say, Down crosses and up umbrellas … but I am persuaded that we must take heaven with the wind and rain in our face.”
(3) Beware of fastidiousness! You are highly sensitive to beauty, and whatever branch of the Church you join there will be plenty of things that offend your taste, although they are religious meat and drink to less educated souls, who are also the children of God!
Those dreadful Protestant hymns for instance! (The Roman ones if anything are worse—but I don’t suppose you have ever heard such popular favourites as “Daily, daily sing to Mary” or “Sweet Sacrament I thee adore”!). You interpreted the heavenly music as rather like the best plain-chant. But if God had given the same experience to the charwoman, and He is no respecter of persons, she would probably have been reminded of “Onward, Christian Soldiers” or “Abide with me.” The Church must provide for all her children at every level of culture and this is a discipline which it is often hard for the educated to accept! It provides splendid training in charity and humility.
(4) I think you ought to have a very simple and unexacting rule for your devotional life; so as to get some order into it, but without worry and strain. Waking early as you do, I think you could at least spend 10-15 minutes with God either waiting silently on Him, praying or adoring, reviewing in His presence the duties, etc., of the coming day, or reading and brooding upon a psalm or a passage in Thomas a Kempis. Also in the last quarter-or half-hour of your afternoon rest, you could do this or read a devotional book. I think you would gain by getting familiar with the psalms, making a list of those that help your prayer and using one at least each day. Psalms 25, 27, 42, 63, 51, 103, 116, 130, 139, 145, 148 for instance; 134
is a nice bed-time psalm!
Read a little of the New Testament every day.
(5) On the England or Rome question, The Anglican Armoury by H.
Beevor gives that side, and The Spirit of Catholicism by Karl Adam, the best view of the Roman position—but the author is considered very liberal! And more appreciated by Anglicans than R.C.s. In a book of mine called Worship I have a chapter on the Anglican position in which I have tried to state what seems to me the truth of the matter: and also some chapters on the Eucharist.
50 Campden Hill Square, W.8.
3 May, 1939.
To THE SAME.
I quite understand your feeling that a quite definite rule, even though a light one (as it must be) would be a help to you at present. Without it, especially in the earlier stages, one does waste a lot of time and energy wondering what one shall do and what book one should read!
I suggest something like this:
(1) Morning. A psalm, taken slowly and “broodingly” as material for prayer, preceded by the proper liturgical introduction:
O Lord! open Thou my lips, etc.
O God make speed to save us
O Lord make haste to help us
Glory be to the Father—etc.
Make a list of psalms you feel you can use in this way, and allot them to the days of the week, and stick to them! After this you will probably be led into prayer or worship of God, and go on to review the coming day in His sight, especially any difficulties, etc., and offer it to Him. Then a New Testament reading. For the present, I would take a Gospel, and read through it steadily. This will probably be enough for the morning.
(2) During the latter part of your afternoon rest half an hour’s reading: decide on a book, and go on till it is finished! Dr.
Temple’s St. John is suitable, or Grou. This is to be devotional reading of a kind that nourishes your spiritual life; not reading for information “about religion” but leading you more deeply into the world of prayer. You can read about theology, etc., at other times.
(3) At night, a glance back at the day, with an act of penitence for any fault you notice without exploring, a short prayer and a few paragraphs of Thomas a Kempis.
Even this may be too much at present; if it strains or tires you, reduce it at once. The only other thing I would suggest is, try to form the habit of remembering God, with a few words of love or worship, at odd moments during the day. You will find that this is very steadying and refreshing.
I should think it would be a good thing to have an interview with an R.C. priest if opportunity arises, before seeing Father X., but he (the R.C.) won’t share your view that the question of which Church you join is unimportant! Because for him Rome is the only Church. I quite agree with you that “belonging to God and Christ” is what really matters—but it is, really, as members of God’s family, the Church, that we must fully belong to Him. But von Hugel will have taught you that!
If you do decide on the Church of England make up your mind to accept it as a whole, for what it is, a “Bridge Church” which can include both those whose emphasis is Catholic and those whose emphasis is Evangelical, so long as they accept the only true basis of Catholicity—the Scriptures, the Creeds and the two Sacraments.
Don’t be sectional and anti-Protestant! Just quietly leave what doesn’t suit you and feed your soul on the things that nourish it.
July 11, 1939.
To T.S.
I read your letter with great interest and sympathy. It seems to me that the fact that your work has had this very sharp and distressing set-back is no argument at all against its being God’s will. Most of the spiritual rebirths within the Church have begun in a very small way, and gone on for a long time in a small way, and have had very great difficulties and unpopularity to contend with; but looking back on them now, we do see in them the action of the Spirit, do we not? which must have been very hard for those who worked in them to realize at the time.
A woman engaged in Retreat work.
Consider the Tractarian Revival. The Church of England before it happened was at the lowest possible ebb sacramentally and liturgically, and it must have seemed incredible that a handful of ardent souls could make any real difference. And then, when it had begun to get going, there was the crushing blow of the secession of Newman and his friends to Rome. That seemed like complete failure, and indeed many people did despair, yet in spite of it the movement struggled on and recovered itself and now there is hardly an English parish untouched by its influence; and the present real revival of the religious life is entirely due to it.
So don’t despair, or give up the struggle to hold real retreats and training in the spiritual life, even for a handful of people: our Lord began with a “little flock” and it is still the true method of renewal. From your point of view it may all be very patchy and unsatisfactory and you may never see “solid results” and yet it is the Spirit’s work. As for the hostility and disapproval, that will go on too and must be borne.
As regards your further question whether the spiritual life can be lived apart from the Sacraments, God will care for His own, and will make up in other ways to the really desirous what they can’t at present receive through the sacramental channels of the Church.
Remember too that the frequency of communion in the Roman and Anglican Churches is quite a recent development. In the Middle Ages such a thing was unknown—as of course it is in the greater part of the Orthodox Church now. Three times a year was the usual thing for laity, though Mass was always the principal Sunday service.
Therefore it can’t be essential to the supernatural life. In teaching prayer and adoration you are bringing souls into touch with the supernatural, and teaching something all can and should do, in their own homes or perhaps meet for in small groups: whatever the custom of the official Church. As you say, individuals must make their own life of prayer and so leaven the rest. This too has always been a Christian method and happened throughout the history of the Church in a greater or less degree. We can’t tell how much retreats mean to those who come—on the evidence, a great deal to some, less to others; but we must be content to work in faith. So taking it all round, if you possibly can, remain … and stick it out! That is of course, unless you become aware of a steady and continuous pressure from God to move elsewhere. This work has come into existence for His purposes and the fact that you are now faced with a very discouraging situation, doesn’t matter a bit… .
Part Four.
1939-1941
Unlike nevertheless, much unlike, is the savour of the creator and of the creature, of everlastingness and of Time, of light uncreate and light illuminate.—Imitation, III, 39.
Highden, Washington, Sussex.
18 Sept., 1939.
To L.M.
I knew you would be feeling the horror of the whole thing intensely; it is all so awful, one dare not dwell on it. One of the things I mind most is the thousands of humble little families …
being ruined straight off by the exodus of people from the towns, shops, schools and so on… .
21 Sept., 1939.
To THE SAME.
You sound very busy and useful… far more than we are here! So far I have not found anything to do. The village being 11 miles away and petrol so short, seems to make it difficult. Hubert works hard all day in the kitchen garden, which is understaffed and of course very valuable now as a source of food.
I went to London last Friday for a night to get warm clothes, books and so on; had rather a disastrous trip as on the way up, just after leaving Richmond Park, an oncoming car on the opposite side of the road, suddenly swerved right across and crashed violently into us.
My car was half wrecked, all one side stove in, petrol-tank and back axle smashed. By a miracle E. (our refugee), who was driving, was unhurt. I got a black eye, bruises, a bad shaking and a wrench to my back—not serious but very tiresome… . The bother is we shan’t have the car for some weeks … which cripples us dreadfully here, 6 miles from shops and train.
We have all decided to make this our headquarters for the winter. I don’t feel quite sure it’s wise… . Of course it is healthy and quiet and there is nothing to take us to London as the war has brought all Hubert’s work to an end… meanwhile we shall have to economize as severely as we can… .
Highden.
Oct. 3, 1939.
To M.C.
I hope your Newcastle boys are being good and responding to (your country) atmosphere and you are not getting overdone. We go on here —I feel a bit troubled about it as we are just safe and comfy in heavenly country, but not being any use! there seems no job for us —the village hums with helpers and we are nearly two miles from it.
…
I am just finishing off my little book on the Lord’s Prayer. It is queer finishing a book now, that was written mostly in the summer.
One’s whole outlook seems so changed in proportion, and the terrible sense of universal suffering and ruin seems to get into everything.
I feel by turns (a) that one should fight against this oppression and (b) that it is to be accepted as one’s share in the pain and horror of war—ere’s almost a feeling of guilt attached to enjoying things. I wonder so much what you feel about it?
We’ve got a kitten! black and white fluffy, of farm origin but full of friendliness.
Highden, Washington, Sussex.
15 October, 1939.
To A.B.
I think from what you say, you are doing very well with your prayer. Everyone finds it difficult now, with all the distractions and anxieties that crowd on us. Nevertheless these are the circumstances in which we are now called to serve God; and the very best thing we can do to help the world’s suffering is to lift it up to Him. Our own suffering and anxiety too can be dedicated and united to the Cross. “Christ did not come to save us from trouble but to show us how to bear trouble.”
Do you know this bit from Gerlac Petersen’s Fiery Soliloquy with God:
“Let every circumstance and event find thee standing firm like a square stone. … So much the more precious and glorious is virtue before Our Lord as agitated by contrary and diverse storms, occupations, tumults and conflicts, it shall be found more constant; nor has it ever truly taken root in us, in time of rest and tranquillity, if it shall fail in time of tribulation… . For to him who bravely conquereth and not to him who avoideth the fight or dissembleth will be given the hidden manna and a new name.”
Highden House, Washington, Sussex.
25 Oct., 1939.
TO D.E.
I’m not a bit surprised you do get fits of furious revolt against this whole horrible and senseless business. Things like the Royal Oak, if one dares to stop and think what it means, are enough to upset anyone! But I am sure the only safe and sane way just now, is to keep the imagination sternly in check, turn to God in blind faith, hold on to Him in the dark as well as you can—or better, let Him hold you. You won’t, however, be able to get away from feeling the suffering and the darkness. So best accept them, join them to the Cross and offer them to God. It is a very hard time for realists, who can’t be content to “pay themselves with words.” The world is subject to the law of consequence and must pay for its deliberate departures from God. Yet in and through all that, His Hand is over individuals, bringing them out at last by strange paths into His Light.
I have tumbled into quite a lot of work here: a weekly intercession service in the Parish Church beginning next Wednesday at 3. Also a weekly religious lesson in the School, 11/14-year-olds, 33 of them, taking the place of the Vicar, who is too ill at present. This terrifies me as I have never taught children. I begin Monday week and if you can give me any tips as to how you would tackle the job I would be most grateful. The Vicar wants me to teach them about Prayer—do you think they will ever listen or take any interest? The schoolmaster wants “The History of our Prayer Book”—more concrete but not easy to make very thrilling. If it isn’t an abject failure I’m to have a class of evacuee girls, 12/14, later, but as they come from a Council school all doctrine is strictly forbidden.
Highden House, Washington, Sussex.
11 November, 1939.
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