In the last blog, I sorta, kinda set up the reader for the next book I knew I was to start, Night’s Bright Darkness, by Sally Read. Read, once a proud atheist, tells the story of her conversion to Catholicism under the most difficult of circumstances: born in England around 1974 (I had to guess that from other dates given), her parents were hard-core atheists; and as a published poet, she was part of the artistic intelligentsia and the general non-spiritual world of modern London that routinely mocks religious certainty in general and Catholicism in particular. She tells us of how she laughed at the notion of God, and as a woman, despised the patriarchal Church, and how, as a humanitarian (with some chops – she had worked as a psychiatric nurse, caring primarily for people with Alzheimer’s) was horrified by accounts of sexual and other abuses concealed by the Church. She tells of her marriage to an Italian, and of life in Italy, where Catholicism is more a cultural than a religious thing, and of her husband’s initial disgust when he found her pulled to genuine religiosity. Then, of course, she talks of what brought her to conversion.
Before reading, I had figured that she would give some clue as to how she found the Truth in faith – an answer to my question in the last blog – and I was not disappointed. But her book gave so much more. It is, for one, beautifully written, as only poets can write – with nearly every sentence packed with a punch like a two by four over the head. Her opening – of her first dressing of a corpse – is breathtaking, and her honesty about her messed-up life, of her struggle to find love with a man and of her sense of meaninglessness, of her living hell (as she put it) is searing in its poignancy. But of primary importance was her conversion, from militaristic opposition to complete believer. It was, as is often the case, a matter of utmost simplicity, yet so totally convincing that it could not be denied by her, an atheist.
Or as she put it, could especially not be denied by the atheist. As a literary figure, before her conversion she had gone to the great works of the mystics – St John of the Cross in particular – and to the modern writers - particularly Simon Weil, the great apologist for Christianity and Catholicism who never converted to the Church from her Jewish tradition even as she embraced it in all other ways. From St John, she learned of the abandonment of God in the final phase of faith, and from Weil the clear reason for this abandonment: that once God is allowed into the door to the soul, he then leaves again – so that you may take for yourself the same path back to God that He had taken to enlighten the soul. It is, then, about freedom and will; the spiritual path is ours alone to walk.
Further, like Read, Weil had been an atheist, which Read discovers can be a great plus, for this, too, explains St John’s “Dark Night of the Soul.” In the dark night, we are finally forced to abandon all notions of God, for none that we have are sufficient. Here is where religion drops us off, where we must take by ourselves alone that last leap to perfection and Truth. This, she believes, is what, in a more preliminary stage, had happened to her, and for this, for all her pain, her “hell” in the secular world, she is grateful.
But what of her moment of conversion, of the certainty that laid her atheism to rest? It took place in a Catholic church in Italy, where she had stopped to ease an ongoing restlessness, and it is there that she felt The Presence of God, who came to her as Jesus. Never, she said, had anyone ever been so close, had ever known her down to her cells, to beyond her own knowing, which she understood in the way of faith. That was her first way of knowing if “it” was true – how it spoke to her inner knowledge. But what, then, of the deluded, of the Jim Jones followers? She asked that question herself, and her reply was simple: the presence gave her “peace and joy.” She knew, and what she knew was good. It seems, then, that this is how we all can know – by feeling the mystical, knowing presence that imparts peace and joy.
Until a door is opened for God in the soul, as Weil wrote, we are forced to use scripture and faith alone, but once the door is opened, we know for sure – as sure, at the least, as any human can be of anything. FK
Before reading, I had figured that she would give some clue as to how she found the Truth in faith – an answer to my question in the last blog – and I was not disappointed. But her book gave so much more. It is, for one, beautifully written, as only poets can write – with nearly every sentence packed with a punch like a two by four over the head. Her opening – of her first dressing of a corpse – is breathtaking, and her honesty about her messed-up life, of her struggle to find love with a man and of her sense of meaninglessness, of her living hell (as she put it) is searing in its poignancy. But of primary importance was her conversion, from militaristic opposition to complete believer. It was, as is often the case, a matter of utmost simplicity, yet so totally convincing that it could not be denied by her, an atheist.
Or as she put it, could especially not be denied by the atheist. As a literary figure, before her conversion she had gone to the great works of the mystics – St John of the Cross in particular – and to the modern writers - particularly Simon Weil, the great apologist for Christianity and Catholicism who never converted to the Church from her Jewish tradition even as she embraced it in all other ways. From St John, she learned of the abandonment of God in the final phase of faith, and from Weil the clear reason for this abandonment: that once God is allowed into the door to the soul, he then leaves again – so that you may take for yourself the same path back to God that He had taken to enlighten the soul. It is, then, about freedom and will; the spiritual path is ours alone to walk.
Further, like Read, Weil had been an atheist, which Read discovers can be a great plus, for this, too, explains St John’s “Dark Night of the Soul.” In the dark night, we are finally forced to abandon all notions of God, for none that we have are sufficient. Here is where religion drops us off, where we must take by ourselves alone that last leap to perfection and Truth. This, she believes, is what, in a more preliminary stage, had happened to her, and for this, for all her pain, her “hell” in the secular world, she is grateful.
But what of her moment of conversion, of the certainty that laid her atheism to rest? It took place in a Catholic church in Italy, where she had stopped to ease an ongoing restlessness, and it is there that she felt The Presence of God, who came to her as Jesus. Never, she said, had anyone ever been so close, had ever known her down to her cells, to beyond her own knowing, which she understood in the way of faith. That was her first way of knowing if “it” was true – how it spoke to her inner knowledge. But what, then, of the deluded, of the Jim Jones followers? She asked that question herself, and her reply was simple: the presence gave her “peace and joy.” She knew, and what she knew was good. It seems, then, that this is how we all can know – by feeling the mystical, knowing presence that imparts peace and joy.
Until a door is opened for God in the soul, as Weil wrote, we are forced to use scripture and faith alone, but once the door is opened, we know for sure – as sure, at the least, as any human can be of anything. FK
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