poverty and lust seek each other out and call to each other in the darkness like two famished beasts.

There's some of everything in it, as they say. The howling of a moujik under the rods, the screaming of a beaten wife, the hiccup of a drunkard, and the growlings of animal joy, that wild sigh from the loins--since, alas! poverty and lust seek each other out and call to each other in the darkness like two famished beasts. No doubt I should turn from all this in disgust. And yet I feel that such distress, distress that has forgotten even its name, that has ceased to reason or to hope, that lays its tortured head at random, will awaken one day on the shoulder of Jesus Christ.

Diary of a Country Priest, Georges Bernanos

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Hi Father,

I've acquired a few Carmel related books: Teresa of Avila's collected works I & II (not yet III), the OCDS starter book "Welcome to Carmel," and of course I've got John of the Cross with me and have been working through the commentary on the "Spiritual Canticle." I've also corresponded a bit with Leslie Schadt, the OCDS Formation Director in Moline, and I'm very excited about the propective journey and direction. I think the intensity of the prayer life scared me a little at first--you've seen the list of prayer obligations, right?--but I've been trying it on for size lately, going to daily Mass, attempting to pray the morning and evening Office, and muddling through silent prayer, and I'm feeling a lot less lost than I felt all of this last year under the Brothers' direction. The Brothers are wonderful and I'm very grateful for their teachings, but something very pressing has been missing for me. Structure maybe. A defined path towards spiritual growth. Maybe some of us just need a lot more structure and direction than others?

And why does spiritual frustration imitate despair? They are not the same creatures, but they look alike, are related somehow... Blake would say (I think) that the two actually meet each other where the infinite enters into the finite (in Christ). That meeting place is creative and transitional, a place of choice and of reckoning. I've been thinking about that apex a lot. It's the nailing of God to the cross, the worst of human artifice (an instrument of torture and death wrought from a tree He Himself made with that prolific, vegetable aspect of His Love). Or: it is God conforming His Will to ours. I have always asked: what kind of God would choose the bloody sacrifice of His Son (Himself) as the means for human salvation? But now I wonder if the bloodletting wasn't always already human logic--if it is meant to transform whatever human weakness is inclined to annihilate itself and its children? If God conformed Himself to a bloody death, to human will, as the ultimate expression of the gift of free will to humanity? We cannot be forced to His will, and so he succumbs to ours...?

I'm thinking about this in relation to lust and poverty, too, as it arises in Diary of a Country Priest. I'll send you that passage so you know what I'm talking about. I have more to say about it--the apex between them, the meeting place of Christ--but I'm rushing now to get to Mass--

Thanks for all your advice as of late. I'm very grateful for your help. You're in my prayers.

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