THE LONG HARD SLOG

It happens. You decided to take your faith more seriously. You pray more – much more. You read, you write, and you try to live closer to God. From all you have read, you suppose that this will strip away a lot of inessentials, leaving your soul leaner and in better training for wherever you are going.

Yet in fact you realise that no such thing seems to be happening. You feel if anything clumsier, heavier, more chaotic, more earthbound, Your prayers begin to sound repetitive to your own ears – so how, you wonder, must they sound to God’s? It’s all exceedingly frustrating.

Opening, more or less at random, my copy of the Carthusian text The Wound of Love, I saw that the anonymous monk writing this knew what I meant. “The life of most Charterhouses is a dull sort of grey,” he wrote. There may be treasures of interior life behind these disappointing exteriors, but they are often buried in unattractive dress. And then he goes on to say, “How could it be otherwise, face to face with the Absolute? Is this not the price of such dangerous proximity to fire? For it highlights all our faults, all our roughness of character and all the petty misery which in other circumstances would be swallowed up in the surrounding sea of trivialities. To wish to come face to face with God is deliberately to consent to expose all our faults and pettiness to the hard light of day. These first become apparent to others, and then, as we become enlightened, to ourselves.“

I found this both enlightening and cheering. We in the world are not committed to as absolute a life, and an opening, as Carthusians; but perhaps the movement he describes is equally true, on another scale, for us. Perhaps it is precisely the turning more seriously to our faith and its Centre, the moving closer to the Light, that shows up our shadows and general muckiness more clearly – in our case, perhaps first to ourselves and only later (one fears) to others? It is bad logic and bad theology to invert a proposition, yet there is the cheering possibility that the frustration is, at bottom, a good sign. In one sense, only a sign that the long hard slog is settling in; but in another, an encouraging wink from Don Camillo’s Friend on the Cross.