Isn't the very fact that convents exist dazzling evidence enough of the presence of the Spirit, unsatisfactory and odd as their inmates often are?.What was it that old Afghan, Mahbud Ali, said to Kim: "When I was fifteen I had shot my man and begot my man!".as representative of God and Christ glorified, consecrated to him, he is absolved from these characteristics of fallen humanity, dispensed, raised above them - neither for ascetic reasons, nor on human grounds, but simply because these are the symbols of the Adamite order.
that sex and death must both be phenomena of fallen Creation.Another odd parallel the very men who haven't the courage to beget children, to accept fatherhood, are likely to be pacifists on principle, and opponents of the death penalty. That wild Irish novel ( Blackcock's Feather, Maurice Walsh), a wonderful Elizabethan cloak and dagger story, has started me spinning again, those same old threads the link between begetting and killing, i.e.At the same time there's something disturbingly un-Christian here - the utterly heathen, desperate keening of the dirges, the grisly dances of death, danses macabres, in which death is nothing but the end, finality - destruction, not transition. One passionate, desolate lament - immeasurable and inconsolable - for the waning, wasting and passing of beauty. I've just finished reading Shakespeare's Sonnets, that is, I've read and understood them for the first time." For, isolated, Eros is in every sense the most treacherous counterfeit of love, sending a continual flow of self-deception and delusion throughout the world, etc. The close affinity between sexual Eros and deceit is very startling - as in infatuation, infidelity and jealousy: " Quoniam lumbi mei repleti sunt illusionibus.Utter nakedness, utter rejection, utter renunciation - how tempting is this stream of spirituality, with the tremendous nimbus of its glorious and venerable past! Once again the tide of Carmelite spitrituality is drawing me, like a current, and, yet again, I sense its dangerous challenge to my own appointed way.The Ancients knew this - they called chastity, honestly, simply and humbly, a gift, a charisma, to be implored from God with tears and in humiliating experience - not just a simple athletic feat of will-power and self-control. genuine continence and virginity are rare and costly achievements - admirable and really extraordinary the real thing, nota bene, not simply a shrivelling of Eros-power by means of life-long taboo injections.Something which does not belong to original human nature, but which owes its actual existence to The Fall in the same sense unnatural as death is unnatural and yet taken for granted, an inevitable, undeniable factor - in this fallen world. that there's definitely something wrong with sex in its present form, that is, during this terrestrial aeon - something that is not sex in itself, as a whole, but some trait or quality.
And yet in these quite obviously heretical speculations there's a barb which, even at first encounter, penetrated to the depths of my mind as the startling confirmation of something always known, and this ferment keeps on working - all the time.the idea which one finds in so many apocryphal trends of thought, i.e.