posted June 23, 2005 12:31 PM         

At fourteen I fell into one of those fits of bottomless despair that
come with adolescence, and I seriously thought of dying because of the
mediocrity of my natural faculties. The exceptional gifts of my
brother, who had a childhood and youth comparable to those of Pascal,
brought my own inferiority home to me. I did not mind having no
visible successes, but what did grieve me was the idea of being
excluded from that transcendent kingdom to which only the truly great
have access and wherein truth abides. I preferred to die rather than
live without that truth. After months of inward darkness, I suddenly
had the everlasting conviction that any human being, even though
practically devoid of natural faculties, can penetrate to the kingdom
of truth reserved for genius, if only he longs for truth and
perpetually concentrates all his attention upon its attainment. He
thus becomes a genius too, even though for lack of talent his genius
cannot be visible from outside. Later on, when the strain of headaches
caused the feeble faculties I possess to be invaded by a paralysis,
which I was quick to imagine as probably incurable, the same
conviction led me to persevere for ten years in an effort of
concentrated attention that was practically unsupported by any hope of
results.

Under the name of truth I also included beauty, virtue, and every kind
of goodness, so that for me it was a question of a conception of the
relationship between grace and desire. The conviction that had come to
me was that when one hungers for bread one does not receive stones.
But at that time I had not read the Gospel.

Just as I was certain that desire has in itself an efficacy in the
realm of spiritual goodness whatever its form, I thought it was also
possible that it might not be effective in any other realm.

As for the spirit of poverty, I do not remember any moment when it was
not in me, although only to that unhappily small extent compatible
with my imperfection. I fell in love with Saint Francis of Assisi as
soon as I came to know about him. I always believed and hoped that one
day Fate would force upon me the condition of a vagabond and a beggar
which he embraced freely. Actually I felt the same way about prison.

The idea of purity, with all that this word can imply for a Christian,
took possession of me at the age of sixteen, after a period of several
months during which I had been going through the emotional unrest
natural in adolescence. This idea came to me when I was contemplating
mountain landscape and little by little it was imposed upon me in an
irresistible manner.

Of course I knew quite well that my conception of life was Christian.
That is why it never occurred to me that I could enter the Christian
community. I had the idea that I was born inside. But to add dogma to
this conception of life, without being forced to do so by indisputable
evidence, would have seemed to me like a lack of honesty. I should
even have thought I was lacking in honesty had I considered the
question of the truth of dogma as a problem for myself or even had I
simply desired to reach a conclusion on this subject. I have an
extremely severe standard for intellectual honesty, so severe that I
never met anyone who did not seem to fall short of it in more than one
respect; and I am always afraid of failing in it myself.

Keeping away from dogma in this way, I was prevented by a sort of
shame from going into churches, though all the same I like being in
them. Nevertheless, I had three contacts with Catholicism that really
counted.

After my year in the factory, before going back to teaching, I had
been taken by my parents to Portugal, and while there I left them to
go alone to a little village. I was, as it were, in pieces, soul and
body. That contact with affliction [her work factory work which is
discussed in the following sentences] had killed my youth. Until then
I had not had any experience of affliction, unless we count my own,
which, as it was my own, seemed to me, to have little importance, and
which moreover was only a partial affliction, being biological and not
social. I knew quite well that there was a great deal of affliction in
the world, I was obsessed with the idea, but I had not had prolonged
and first-hand experience of it. As I worked in the factory,
indistinguishable to all eyes, including my own, from the anonymous
mass, the affliction of others entered into my flesh and my soul.
Nothing separated me from it, for I had really forgotten my past and I
looked forward to no future, finding it difficult to imagine the
possibility of surviving all the fatigue. What I went through there
marked me in so lasting a manner that still today when any human
being, whoever he may be and in whatever circumstances, speaks to me
without brutality, I cannot help having the impression that there must
be a mistake and that unfortunately the mistake will in all
probability disappear. There I received forever the mark of a slave,
like the branding of the red-hot iron the Romans put on the foreheads
of their most despised slaves. Since then I have always regarded
myself as a slave.

In this state of mind then, and in a wretched condition physically, I
entered the little Portuguese village, which, alas, was very wretched
too, on the very day of the festival of its patron saint I was alone.
It was the evening and there was a full moon over the sea. The wives
of the fishermen were, in procession, making a tour of all the ships,
carrying candles and singing what must certainly be very ancient hymns
of a heart-rending sadness. Nothing can give any idea of it. I have
never heard anything so poignant unless it were the song of the
boatmen on the Volga. There the conviction was suddenly borne in upon
me that Christianity is preeminently the religion of slaves, that
slaves cannot help belonging to it, and I among others.

There was a young English Catholic there from whom I gained my first
idea of the supernatural power of the sacraments because of the truly
angelic radiance with which he seemed to be clothed after going to
communion. Chance -- for I always prefer saying chance rather than
Providence -- made of him a messenger to me. For he told me of the
existence of those English poets of the seventeenth century who are
named metaphysical. In reading them later on, I discovered the poem of
which I read you what is unfortunately a very inadequate translation.
It is called "Love". I learned it by heart. Often, at the culminating
point of a violent headache, I make myself say it over, concentrating
all my attention upon it and clinging with all my soul to the
tenderness it enshrines. I used to think I was merely reciting it as a
beautiful poem, but without my knowing it the recitation had the
virtue of a prayer. It was during one of these recitations that, as I
told you, Christ himself came down and took possession of me.

In my arguments about the insolubility of the problem of God I had
never foreseen the possibility of that, of a real contact, person to
person, here below, between a human being and God I had vaguely heard
tell of things of this kind, but I had never believed in them. In the
Fioretti the accounts of apparitions rather put me off if anything,
like the miracles in the Gospel. Moreover, in this sudden possession
of me by Christ, neither my senses nor my imagination had any part; I
only felt in the midst of my suffering the presence of a love, like
that which one can read in the smile on a beloved face.

I had never read any mystical works because I had never felt any call
to read them. In reading as in other things I have always striven to
practice obedience. There is nothing more favorable to intellectual
progress, for as far as possible I only read what I am hungry for at
the moment when I have an appetite for it, and then I do not read, I
eat. God in his mercy had prevented me from reading the mystics, so
that it should be evident to me that I had not invented this
absolutely unexpected contact.

Yet I still half refused, not my love but my intelligence. For it
seemed to me certain, and I still think so today, that one can never
wrestle enough with God if one does so out of pure regard for the
truth. Christ likes us to prefer truth to him because, before being
Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go toward the
truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms.

After this I came to feel that Plato was a mystic, that all the Iliad
is bathed in Christian light, and that Dionysus and Osiris are in a
certain sense Christ himself; and my love was thereby redoubled.

I never wondered whether Jesus was or was not the Incarnation of God;
but in fact I was incapable of thinking of him without thinking of him
as God.

In the spring of 1940 I read the Bhagavad-Gita. Strange to say it was
in reading those marvelous words, words with such a Christian sound,
put into the mouth of an incarnation of God, that I came to feel
strongly that we owe an allegiance to religious truth which is quite
different from the admiration we accord to a beautiful poem; it is
something far more categorical.

During all this time of spiritual progress I had never prayed. I was
afraid of the power of suggestion that is in prayer -- the very power
for which Pascal recommends it. Pascal's method seems to me one of the
worst for attaining faith.

Contact with you was not able to persuade me to pray. On the contrary
I thought the danger was all the greater, since I also had to beware
of the power of suggestion in my friendship with you. At the same time
I found it very difficult not to pray and not to tell you so. Moreover
I knew I could not tell you without completely misleading you about
myself. At that time I should not have been able to make you
understand.

Until last September I had never once prayed in all my life, at least
not in the literal sense of the word. I had never said any words to
God, either out loud or mentally. I had never pronounced a liturgical
prayer. I had occasionally recited the Salve Regina, but only as a
beautiful poem.

Last summer, doing Greek with T-, I went through the Our Father word
for word in Greek. We promised each other to learn it by heart. I do
not think he ever did so, but some weeks later, as I was turning over
the pages of the Gospel, I said to myself that since I had promised to
do this thing and it was good, I ought to do it. I did it. The
infinite sweetness of this Greek text so took hold of me that for
several days I could not stop myself from saying it over all the time.
A week afterward I began the vine harvest I recited the Our Father in
Greek every day before work, and I repeated it very often in the
vineyard.

Since that time I have made a practice of saying it through once each
morning with absolute attention. If during the recitation my attention
wanders or goes to sleep, in the minutest degree, I begin again until
I have once succeeded in going through it with absolutely pure
attention. Sometimes it comes about that I say it again out of sheer
pleasure, but I only do it if I really feel the impulse.

The effect of this practice is extraordinary and surprises me every
time, for, although I experience it each day, it exceeds my
expectation at each repetition.

At times the very first words tear my thoughts from my body and
transport it to a place outside space where there is neither
perspective nor point of view. The infinity of the ordinary expanses
of perception is replaced by an infinity to the second or sometimes
the third degree. At the same time, filling every part of this
infinity of infinity, there is silence, a silence which is not an
absence of sound but which is the object of a positive sensation, more
positive than that of sound. Noises, if there are any, only reach me
after crossing this silence.

Sometimes, also, during this recitation or at other moments, Christ is
present with me in person, but his presence is infinitely more real,
more moving, more clear than on that first occasion when he took
possession of me.