Monthly Archives: September 2023

Sep222023

The Past

A poem by Ralph Waldo Emmerson

The debt is paid,
The verdict said,
The Furies laid,
The plague is stayed,
All fortunes made;
Turn the key and bolt the door,
Sweet is death forevermore.
Nor haughty hope, nor swart chagrin,
Nor murdering hate, can enter in.
All is now secure and fast;
Not the gods can shake the Past;
Flies-to the adamantine door
Bolted down forevermore.
None can re-enter there,—
No thief so politic,
No Satan with a royal trick
Steal in by window, chink, or hole,
To bind or unbind, add what lacked,
Insert a leaf, or forge a name,
New-face or finish what is packed,
Alter or mend eternal Fact.

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Sep222023

Until the end

At the end of the afternoon, we went to the large abbey cemetery. At the bend of an avenue in this solemn enclosure, Dom Olivier turned to me and said: “The hardest death is the little daily death, when we are perfectly healthy. In life, we go from one death to another; they prepare us for the ultimate end. Little deaths of the ego are the big deaths, and they allow for a good death. Why do some monks experience more difficult deaths than others? I cannot explain to you the reasons why God distributes our final trials so unequally. Perhaps monks carry for others humanity’s fears and anxieties. One day, my father told me that he was not afraid of death. I told my father that this was not a sign of holiness. Peaceful deaths are not necessarily the most holy. Good monks can experience anxieties when they embark for heaven. How did our brother Cistercians in Tibhirine die? We are almost certain they were beheaded. Who can know if they were afraid? Their spiritual battles must have been terrible. Satan is present until the final moments. He does not ease his infernal grasp. Why does God allow the devil to act as he pleases? Lucifer loves to sow trouble and despair. He is monster of pride. But God has the last word. 

–”A Time to Die: Monks on the Threshold of Eternal Life” written by Nicolas Diat

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Sep212023

Infinitely

A poem by Emile Verhaeren. The poet discovered in a book purchased at the South Chicago Benedictine monastery Holy Cross. “A Time to Die: Monks on the Threshold of Eternal Life”

The hounds of despair, the hounds of the autumnal wind,
Gnaw with their howling the black echoes of evenings.
The darkness, immensely, gropes in the emptiness
For the moon, seen by the light of water.

From point to point, over there, the distant lights,
And in the sky, above, dreadful voices
Coming and going from the infinity of the marshes and planes
To the infinity of the valleys and the woods.

And roadways that stretch out like sails
And pass each other, coming unfolded in the distance, soundlessly,
While lengthening beneath the stars,
Through the shadows and the terror of the night.

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Sep102023

Sunday evening

I have returned to college, finishing my bachelor’s degree. I am taking three classes plus continuing to work full-time. Posting for the blog is proving difficult at this time. My spiritual life is my life. I have no choice.

The highest and most fruitful form of human freedom is found in accepting, even more than in dominating. We show the greatness of our freedom when we transform reality, but still more when we accept it trustingly as it is given to us day after day.

It is natural and easy to go along with pleasant situations that arise without our choosing them. It becomes a problem, obviously, when things are unpleasant, go against us, or make us suffer. But it is precisely then that, in order to become truly free, we are often called to choose to accept what we did not want, and even what we would not have wanted at any price. There is a paradoxical law of human life here: one cannot become truly free unless one accepts not always being free!

To achieve true interior freedom we must train ourselves to accept, peacefully and willingly, plenty of things that seem to contradict our freedom. This means consenting to our personal limitations, our weaknesses, our powerlessness, this or that situation that life imposes on us, and so on. We find it difficult to do this, because we feel a natural revulsion for situations we cannot control. But the fact is that the situations that really make us grow are precisely those we do not control.”

Jacques Philippe “Interior Freedom“

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