The Living Centrifuge

“As for spiritual life: what I object to about ‘the Spriitual Life’ is the fact that it is a part, a section, set off as if it were a whole. It is an aberration to set off our ‘prayer’ etc from the rest of our existence, as if we wre sometimes spiritual, sometimes not. As if we had to resign ourselves to feeling that the unspiritual moments were a dead loss. That is not right at all, and because it is an aberration, it causes an enormous amount of useless suffering.
Our ‘life in the Spirit’ is all-embracing, or should be. First it is the response of faith receiving the word of God, not only as a truth to be believed but as a gift of life to be lived in total submission and pure confidence. Then this implies fidelity and obedience, but a total fidelity and a total obedience. From the moment that I obey God in everything, where is my ‘spiritual life’? It is gone outthe window, there is no spiritual life, only God and His word and my total response.
The problem comes when factors beyond our control make it impossible to respond in all our totality: I mean by that when a large part of our subconscious or routine or ‘obligatory’ existence gets blocked off in such a way that it remains in opposition to, or not in union with, the will of God.
This is where you and I have to suffer much. In actual fact, if we could really let go of everything and follow the Spirit where He leads, who knows where we would be? But besides the interior exigencies of the Spirit there are also hard external facts, and they too are ‘God’s will,’ but nevertheless they may mean that one is bound to a certain mediocrity and futility: that there is waste, and ineffective use of grace (bad way to talk, but you understand). The comfortable and respectable existence that you and I lead is in fact to a great degree opposed to the real demands of the Spirit in our lives. Yet paradoxically we are restricted and limited to this. Our acceptance of these restrictions cannot purely and simply be regarded as the ultimate obedience that is demanded of us. We cannot say that our bourgeois existence is purely and simply the ‘will of God.’”

“…there is all the difference in th world between theology as experienced (which is basically identical in all who know and love Christ, at least in its root) and theology as formulated in which there can be great differences. In the former, it is the One Spirit who teaches and enlightens us. In the second it is the Church, and in this of course I believe that the Roman Church is the only one that can claim to say the last word.”

“I don’t believe in being professionally anti-intellectual, as though the mind as such were an obstacle to contemplation. I think this is a big mistake, and the effects of it are unfortunate.”

“To be a contemplative is to be in some ways maladjusted and even though by forcing oneself, one can put up with the superficialities and pretenses of social life, one constantly sees through them and is very aware of their absurdity and meaninglessness. To live in a state of more or less unrelieved absurdity is not pleasant….”

“As to your own desolation and loneliness: what can anyone say? It is the desolation of all of us in the presence of death and nothingness, but Christ in us bears it for us, without our being consoled.”

“Technology now has reasons entirely its own, which do not necessarily take into account the needs of man, and this huge inhuman mechanism, which the whole human race is now serving rather than commanding seems quite probabbly geared for the systematic destruction of the natural world, uite apart from the question of the ‘bomb’ which, in fact, is only one rather acute symptom of the whole disease.”

“If I may say so, I believe you are the type of person who is basically Christian, and realises it and wants to be fully what he already is.”

“…often there are things that get mixed up with it [Christianity], and seem even to be inseparable from it, or identified with it – and among these there are many errors, or wrong attitudes, or approaches to life that are not perfectly healthy…we cannot demand that our Christianity be absolutely pure…There is inevitably plenty of prjudice and cant wherever there is a religion. The point is that the wheat and the cockle are not the same thing, and that Christ Himself said, “Let both grow until the harvest.” The temptation to demand that the wheatfield be absolutely pure of cockle is then a real and serious temptation. It is really an evasion. We have to take on the difficult job of constantly making distinctions and telling the difference and adjusting ourselves to the reality, in order to make sure that we ourselves are wheat and not cockle. And of course the thing is that one never can tell. Because we are not the ones appointed to do the judging.”

“…if they set their minds to it, the lawyers can do anything. After all they live in a purely fictitious universe, so since it is of their own making, they ought to be able to do what they like with it, with a little dogged patience and humourlessness.”

“…when you come into the Church you go through all the painful hesitations one must have about conforming, and wanting to learn, and wanting to do things the right way. Of course this is to be expected and I would not want to dismiss it lightly: you should want to learn and be ‘right’ – the openness and ‘docility’ of this period (which will never be recaptured!!!) is as a matter of fact tied up with a ver special exposure to grace and the Love of God, and so the things you do are more than mere conforming. What goes on below the surface is so great that your care about genuflecting at the right times becomes something important and very sacred in the sight of God – but for deep and interior reasons which no one can see, least of all yourself. Just go ahead like that. But in the end, the right way about which you will naturally be concerned will often not eist at all – or be irrelevant. The Church has made such a fuss over her externals, or rather Catholics have, that one coming in from the outside tends to worry about what is and is not ‘done.’ But in fact almost anything is ‘done’ in many cases, and it doesn’t matter.”

“I heartily recommend as a form of prayer, the Russian and Greek business where you get off somewhere quiet, remember what you may have known about hatha-yoga, breathe uietly and rhythmically with the diaphragm, holding your breath for a bit each time and letting it out easily: and while holding it, saying ‘in your heart’ (aware of the place of your heart, as if the words were spoken in the very center of your being with all the sincerity you can muster): ‘Lord Jesus Christ Son of God have mercy on me a sinner.’”

“I like the rosary, too. Because, though I am not very articulate about her, I am pretty much wound up in Our Lady, and have some Russian ideas about her too: that she is the most perfect expression of the mystery of the Wisdom of God. That in some way she is the Wisdom of God. (See the eighth chapter of Proverbs, for instance, the part abut ‘playing before Him at all times, playing in the world.’)”

“Be patient….In due time it will all come through and I think perhaps the waiting is necessary in a way. Grace (we say glibly) works on nature, and can work suddenly if it pleases. But actually a deep interior revolution needs to go on and this takes time. A settling and a sort of aging of the strong new wine. We have no adequate idea of what takes place in our depths when we grow spiritually or change. Meanwhile you have had a chance to go trough a lot of quick and volatile surface reactions, which are bare indications of the adjustment taking place deeper down. Let peace have time to settle and gain a firm grasp of those depths. And do not be troubled if you do not always feel settled. Time takes care of such things. And the Church with her sacraments, while doing infinitely much in your life, will not take away all anguish. On the contrary, the anguish must always be there. But it must deepen and change and become vastly more fruitful. That is the best we can hope for nowadays: a fruitful anguish instead of one that is utterly sterile and consuming.”

“Have you ever heard of Cassian? He is easily available….and makes very good reading, though perhaps he might appall you. He is the Boswell of the Desert Fathers, and wrote down everything they could be cajoled into saying. None of them were very talkative. Then Cassian went back to Marseilles and started a monastery and became a monastic best-seller. May the Lord rest his soul. (In the Oriental Church he is venerated as St. Cassian the Roman. In our Church he is suspect of heresy, but no one has ever stopped reading him on that account. And the heresy is just one little sentence he quoted from an old Desert Father one hundred years old who could no longer walk upright but crawled around on all fours. No wonder the poor old man could not be perfectly accurate on the fine shades of the doctrine of grace!)”

“If I tell you once again to be patient you will probably throw the letter on the floor and stamp on it.”

“That is the way it is with all efforts at truth. We all get too mixed up with what is less true, and then we get in one another’s way.”

“In these things, quiet and unassuming, the Kindgom of God consists.”