I would like to preface the following by tendering my sincerest apologies for any anxiety, vexation and (above all) disedification that the reports of what has recently happened to me may have caused. It behooves us to learn that we ought not to idealize anyone: the only human persons we can safely idealize and admire with immeasurable love are the Saints! All the more, no one ought to idealize a sinner such as myself, I who am the worst of them all.
I am honestly astonished that there have been some who have marveled at the report of my collapse. It is perhaps because of my background as a formally trained academician that it is connatural to me that I write in such a way so as to efficaciously hide my personality; or perhaps it is my desire to remain anonymous for various reasons.
What happened…
I have always suffered from chronic and seasonal depression, together with suicidal thoughts and temptations, ever since as a child I had the use of reason. There are various neurological, psychological and situational factors that could explain it, but I never really understood why even as a child I was assailed with an intense yearning for death, which actually constitutes one of my first memories. This is why I never had a true vocation to the Sacred Priesthood, since my mental disorders truly constitute so many examples of
defectus animi, according to the disciplinary norms of the Code of Canon Law (Can. 984, par. 3), promulgated by Pope Benedict XV in the Apostolic Constitution
Providentissima Mater (27 May 1917; A.A.S., vol. IX, pars II). I know this is a true irregularity because it has led in past instances to another more serious irregularity: the grave crime of attempted ѕυιcιdє, which is an irregularity by delict (Can. 985, par. 5,) even if there was no physical injury caused, according to the opinion of most commentators and Canonists. There is no way I can never be considered as a candidate for Holy Orders, and I am absolutely certain that I lack the mental stability that is requisite to establish a family and govern a household as only a healthy Catholic man can.
I sometimes feel like "I am caught between two worlds, one dead, one powerless to be born," as a poet once wrote, as I pass from a past full of regret to a future full of uncertainty, with the present moment bringing all sorts of things: from ecstasy to terror, from despair to tranquility, from self-abandonment to a crazed retreat inwards.
One who has never been depressed to the point of considering ѕυιcιdє can never fully understand what drives one to actually ponder upon committing such a crime and actually to attempt it. I myself can never adequately explain it, because when the collapse occurs everything fades to black, so to speak. I can only know I am still alive when the darkness dissipates, and I gradually realize again who and where I am.
It has nothing to do with the state of one’s soul, neither with emotions, nor is it necessarily a diabolical attack: it is something very profound and exceedingly puzzling that thwarts the natural impulse to live and survive. Sometimes, there is no sorrow or vexation or anxiety involved; the neuro-chemical processes we understand as emotions can react in inexplicable ways, or be thoroughly deranged or impeded. That is when it becomes really scary, because you suddenly feel entrapped in a catatonic state of spiritual and physical immobility: you see yourself reaching for that razor blade, for that bottle of pills, for that live spark plug, for that rope, for that handle of the door of the oven, but you don’t react at any level: you can’t react. All discursive reason fails; the spontaneous impulse for survival fails; spiritual recourse to prayer fails: it is an utter helplessness, an ocean of terror that cascades upon an individual and wholly engulfs him round about.
A completely different stream of consciousness floods the mind, and with absolute clarity one feels a certain intense horror and terror that cannot be adequately described: it is as a sort of a simultaneous concurrence of a very sensitive hyper-consciousness of everything in all its terrible reality and an anti-consciousness that confuses reality with delusion.
Sometimes it is something that may be interpreted as a demonic attack. There was this one time, long ago… I knew it was calling out to me, taunting me and heckling me: that abhorrent and disgusting thing that lulls the minds and hearts of men with a seductive charm and an almost maternal sweetness: it was Astoroth, the fallen seraph to whom Satan had given immeasurable power to war against the humble Maiden who had been predestined to the Divine Maternity, to give birth to the Word Incarnate, whose Hypostatic Union of created and uncreated natures Lucifer had the audacity to yearn and claim as his right; the demon who had been idolatrized as the Mother-Goddess by the ancient heathen, and who now has lulled womanhood into destroying femininity and family by the machinations of her human agents; the ape of the glorious Virgin whom Satan hates so much because he knows that this glorious Queen will vanquish him. I felt Astoroth surrounding me round about, her eerie embrace I desperately tried to shake off. I felt so scared, and I immediately cried out to God. I didn't want her to devour me. In the midst of terror, I cried out to Mary, and suddenly everything faded into white, and I found myself repeating the
Ave again and again, collapsed upon the floor. I was 17 years of age; ten years ago it was.
I am not offering excuses for such a thing; I am merely attempting to explain it in such a way that it can be understood by those who have never experienced it. My culpability in this recent instance has been confessed in the tribunal of sacred Penance, and due penance has been given me. It is pride and self-love that almost killed me so many times before by my own murderous hands. I feel like two different people in one person: Cain and Abel; the iniquitous union of apparent good and insidious evil, of two diametrically contrary and mutually exclusive elements, that constitutes the essence of the satanic construct.
I figure that I do not deserve to live, but God does deserve that I live so long as it is His will. God deserves that I be a better man. I don't deserve it. I deserve hell. But God deserves it, and by His grace I will become the sort of man He wishes me to be. This is a great mercy because He does not owe it to Himself to will me any good. But at the very least He wills me to live, to live in grace, and I owe it to him to do so.
In sooth, no creature has a
right to exist, and God does not owe it to Himself to create and preserve creatures, much less rational creatures who turn away from Him as their last end. God has absolute rights to chastise sinners and the world, and owes it to His infinite majesty and sanctity to do so, but His ineffable and inexhaustible mercy gives sinners many opportunities to do penance and convert. Even in calamities, He often gives actual graces that one may correctly perceive such happenings by the trans-luminous light of the supernatural mystery of the union of divine mercy and justice in all the designs of Providence.
God deserves better. It breaks my heart that I have disappointed Him so many times. For a while I have culpably retarded myself in the way of the interior life by reason of my dissipation and complacency. I forfeited the graces that would have enabled me to bear the Cross as I should have, and to be more a comfort and solace for the servants of Jesus and Mary. I am ultimately an utter failure.
But ultimately there is a total surrender: with an almost terrifying cognizance that as a creature, having been created from nothing by a spontaneous and free act of absolutely unmerited benevolence and therefore enjoying no right to existence or any good concomitant with such a gift, I must confess, "It is the Lord: let Him do what is good in His sight," (I Reg. ch. iii., 18).
Lessons learned, again…
There is so much I have learned, my dearest friends, in this trans-luminous darkness. In the midst of despair there is so much hope to be found if one has recourse to penance.
The secret of grace is that there are no limits of time and space when it comes to such an ineffable participation in the Divine nature, which exists in the one single immobile instant of eternity, transcending above and beyond the created and finite limits of time and space. This means we can turn the clock back! As Isaias proved with the sun dial, and King Ezechias was given more years of life (ch. xxxviii.), and before Josue bid the sun to stand still (ch. x.), as the Prophet Habacuc sings in his sublime Canticle (ch. iii.).
This what the alchemists and theurgists of ancient times tried to do: it was never about of turning lead into gold, but of transcending the finite constraints of human nature in order to attain to a supernature of a divine order. However, they failed, as St. Louis Marie points out in the unfortunately edited portions of his book
The Love of Divine Wisdom, because their search for this sort of power was not according to the will of God and the grace of Incarnate Wisdom. They were fooled by the devils into aping what grace alone could do.
Grace does turn back time, for did not Our Lord say to Nicodemus, "Amen, amen I say to thee, unless a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. Nicodemus saith to him: How can a man be born when he is old? can he enter a second time into his mother's womb, and be born again? Jesus answered: Amen, amen I say to thee, unless a man be born again of water and the Holy Ghost, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God" (St. John ch. iii., 3-5). And He said elsewhere, "Amen I say to you, unless you be converted, and become as little children, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven" (St. Matt. ch. xviii., 3).
This sacred movement of retrogression is the only way the human soul can move forward in the interior life: it is the divinely ordained paradox. It is so easy, but it entails the greatest of difficulties: self-abnegation.
I managed to turn back the clock. By the grace of God, the times have been redeemed (Eph. ch. v., 16; Col. ch. iv. 5), and I can say with King Ezechias in his beautiful Canticle formerly said on Tuesdays, "Behold in peace is my bitterness most bitter: but thou hast delivered my soul that it should not perish, thou hast cast all my sins behind thy back" (Is. ch. xxxviii., 17).
The demon Astaroth did seek my soul, that she may devour me and bring down even to the depths of the abyss, but the glorious Victress and Queen, Most Holy Mary, has rescued me: in her venerable person did I behold in the midst of prayer such worlds of prodigies and untold wonders of grace, that she alone would have sufficed for me to adore the Lord with all my heart. In regards to the human race, the heavenly Queen did relinquish the executive and coercive powers proper to her sovereignty, but she kept her punitive authority over the demons, so that the princes of the darkness would be cast back into the infernal depths by a mere movement of her sacred hands.
In the end, the ѕυιcιdє I desired was transfigured by grace into the ideal for which I now must yearn with all my heart: the complete immolation of self, as a well-pleasing h0Ɩ0cαųst of praise and thanksgiving before that Love Who is eternal, infinite and ineffable; a sacrifice of reparation and penance for the sins and iniquities wherewith I have coinquinated myself. And yet I have a far way to go!
Grace can indeed make the clock turn back; it can make a full-grown man into a meek child; it can make a whore of Belial into a spotless bride co-equal with the choirs of the Virgins and Angels, espoused unto Christ; it can make the pessimist into a moderate realist, with an optimist's heart and a clear intellect.
I am utterly unworthy of you all, dear friends, and of anything else that is pure and good, but God in His unfathomable wisdom and clemecy, has ordained that I be the one to write these things to you and bring you the treasures of the books written and published by our fathers in the faith: for if it was the harlot Rahab whom God chose as the instrumentality by which the children of Israel took possession of the Promised Land (Josue ch. ii-vi; Heb. ch. xi., 31; S. James ch. ii., 25) and so was found worthy to be mentioned in the sacred Genealogy of our Lord (St. Matt. ch. i., 5), so God can use this sometime whore of Astaroth for the greater good of His servants, despite his unworthiness and demerits.
Thank you very much again for your prayers! Please be assured of mine as I remain
Tibi addictissimum humiliter in Jesu per Mariam,
Hobbledehoy[/size]
Topic: Prayers for Hobbledehoy (Read 8610 times)