READING: A HELP IN THE SPIRITUAL LIFE TAKEN FROM SPIRITUAL CONFERENCES by Father Frederick Faber, D.D. TAN BOOKS Nihil Obstat and Imprimatur, 1957   A MAN has tried for some time to avoid sin and to keep close to God. He has taken pleasure in prayer, in religious services, and, above all, in the Blessed Sacrament. Peace is consciously stealing over a life which was perhaps fretful and agitated before. Now self-knowledge comes in upon him largely, yet not so as to confuse or overwhelm him. He sees heights in the practice of virtue which had been hidden in the clouds before, and he is not discouraged. He hopes to climb them; nay, he has a modest certainty that he shall one day stand upon those heights. He is realizing every day more and more that God loves him, and with the increase of that consciousness all other heavenly things increase within him. But now another trouble is becoming visible in his soul. It is no bigger than a point,--- less than the hand which the prophet saw from Carmel. It is stealing up, like morning over the sea, without a sound, with a level gray brightness over the waters, shyly as if it was not sure of a welcome, yet gradually as if it did not wish to take us by surprise. It has come to the man to feel that there is another sort of closeness to God from any he has thought of before. Another form of goodness is taking shape before his eyes. A tranquil dissatisfaction is mastering him. It will soon grow into a restlessness, but a restlessness which lies on a deeply-hidden peace. He looks up to Heaven to God, but, lo! a hand is put out from the depths of his own soul and is fain to draw him gently down there. A voice without words seems to say to him, Not up in the blue sky, or beyond it, but down here! The Holy Ghost has given him the craving for an inward life, a new vocation, a vocation to a closer union with God, and a union of another sort, a finding of God within. Happy the souls who are thus touched! Now, if they will but correspond! If they can but light on one who shall guide them well! Under this Divine pressure the man seeks his spiritual father. He is athirst for God, and he goes to the shepherd to show him the springs up among the hills. Woe to the shepherd if he cannot show them, from not knowing himself where they are! The inquirer naturally lays before his chosen guide all that has passed within him, and is passing within him still. He tells him of the faults of his past life, and, as far as he can judge of himself, the faulty tendencies of his natural character. He and his guide, however, are in very different states of mind. He is engrossed with the delight of his present feelings. He is yet thrilling under the Divine touch. But his guide sees onward, far onward, beyond that first range of beautiful mountains. He sees the portals of a wilderness, and through them the wastes of pale glistening sand. Dangers and delusions, faintings and uncertainties, strange trials and unwonted temptations, these are the images of the future which rise to the eye of the guide. Yet he is full of sympathy. He looks with tender respect on the man whose soul God has touched. The grandest of all the signs of predestination is shining majestically round him, in this vocation to the mystical apostolate of the inward life. He could almost kneel to one on whom God's finger has so lately pressed, nay, is perhaps pressing still; only that these touches are very swift and transitory, even when their consequences are permanent and lifelong. Nevertheless he is filled also with an affectionate anxiety, because of the numerous requirements he must make upon his disciple. He must require generosity: that is the first of indispensable things. He must exact humility, though just now he cares less for deficiencies there than in generosity. But, at all events, he must have such material humility as amounts to docility. The growing knowledge of God will bring the rest. These are great requirements; yet they are only two out of many. What can he dispense with, so as neither to frighten nor to burden the beginner? He need not be much afraid of frightening; for men are unconsciously brave, in whom a recent touch of God is still throbbing. But he may easily burden him over- much, and so may even suffocate grace in the soul. Generosity and humility are very great things, but so great that at least he must with them have one lesser thing, one little thing along with them, an engine small enough to be practicable, an implement capable of working on small scales, a tool not too big to be well grasped and held tight without distracting the whole man by the mere effort of handling it. He chooses one which his disciple hardly expected, nay, at present cannot bring himself to believe in, --- a taste for reading. With all the varied future as well as imminent difficulties of his dear disciple before him, the master seems exaggeratedly anxious that he should already have, or forthwith acquire, a taste for reading. To all, he will say, it is important, even inside the walls of a cloister; but to souls in the world, who have neither rule, cloister, nor superior, he will most dogmatically assert this taste for reading to be, as a general rule, indispensable to perfection, and that without it he cannot pretend to undertake the work now entrusted to him. Beginners must take many things on faith. Long before they are perfect, they will have learned that they must take all things on faith; such depths will have opened upon them as to show inscrutable difficulties everywhere. The habit of believing will have become stronger then than the habit of knowing. Men who have to learn --- as all spiritual men have --- that obscurity is the clearest and purest kind of light, have also other strange things to learn, and are too much engrossed to have time to be astonished. Beginners, therefore, must take for granted that their master knows what he is about when he lays such stress upon a taste for reading. Perhaps the monks of St. Hugh of Lincoln had to take it on faith when their saintly abbot made so much of it. His biographer tells us that it was one of his chief cares that all his religious should be provided with plenty of devout books; and books were scarce in those days. St. Hugh was always impressing upon them the duty of reading. He even went so far as to tell them that their spiritual books were "their arms in time of war, their occupation in time of peace, their support in time of trial, and their remedy in time of sickness." St. Ignatius went quite along with St. Hugh in this matter. However, it is not my object at present to accumulate authorities to prove the immense importance of reading in the spiritual life. I want rather to explain the stress laid upon it by ascetical masters, and to make it less strange to those who think it strange. Perhaps they will thus allow themselves to be persuaded to a more generous docility in the matter.   Other things being equal, a person beginning the spiritual life; with a taste for reading has a much greater chance both of advancing and of persevering than one who is destitute of such a taste. Experience shows that it is really almost equal to a grace. The hardest thing in the world is to think, that is, to think real thought. Goethe said that, if men wanted to think, they must avoid "thinking about thinking." This is a fatal process, a quagmire which has sucked up generations of unfortunate young men and is capable of absorbing as many generations more. The best test of a system of education is the power of thinking Which it engenders in its men. If we are at all observant, we must have been struck with this feature in the conversation of self- educated men, that, while it is very often clever, it is hardly ever characterized by real thought. The power of thinking is an immense help in the spiritual life. But it belongs to the few, and is mostly the result of an excellent education, which is, in this matter as in all others, the grand natural support of the life of the Church. Next to the power of thinking we may reckon the power of reading, or, to be less exacting, the taste for reading, which in spiritual matters is practically the same thing with the multitude of men, as the most important of all the personal non-supernatural qualifications for an inward life. As the power of thinking is the highest test of a system of education, so the second test by which it should be tried is its successful creation of a taste for reading. But by all persons a taste for reading is positively attainable, while the power of thinking is not so. Men who have been loosely and disjointedly educated, or educated without the cultivation of their imaginations, will have all the more difficulty in acquiring this taste for reading. Still, the difficulties are not very formidable. The process is little more than one of time. There are harder things to be done along the road to perfection, and success more than repays the effort. Anyhow, whether we have the taste for reading already, or whether we have to acquire it, we may be sure that he who begins a devout life without it may consider the ordinary difficulties of such a life multiplied in his case at least by ten. I will now make some observations with a view of showing you that this is not an exaggeration.  In the first place, the mere knowledge gained by reading spiritual books, even books which are very indirectly spiritual, is of incalculable importance. I am not speaking of erudition. I am aware that there is a consent among the great ascetics of the seventeenth century that learned persons are nearly the most difficult to lead to perfection, both because the absorption of learning engrosses their interest and interferes with habits of contemplation, and also because the process of study withers the freshness of the mind for prayer, and dries the affections as if an east wind had passed over them. But knowledge and learning are two different ideas. It is not easy to think out for ourselves even very obvious things. Reading suggests them to us. It increases the light round about us, and also the light within us. We gain time by appropriating through books the experience of others. We learn methods which shorten roads. We multiply our motives of action, and we infuse new vigor into old motives by understanding them better. It is instructive to observe that, when God is pleased to raise ignorant and illiterate persons to a high state of perfection, he infuses into them supernatural science, making them very frequently even accomplished theologians and profound expositors of Scripture, --- as if knowledge must lie in the spiritual soul either as a cause or an effect of holiness, or, more probably, as both. It is the common rule that an ill-instructed person can never attain any considerable heights in devotion. He must have, for the most part, a knowledge of spiritual things, and even some knowledge of theology. In the next place, we must take into account the direct assistance in our combat which we derive from reading books about God and the soul, and the virtues or the lives of the Saints. They stir up our affections to God as we read. They elicit by a gentle compulsion continued acts of love, or hope, or faith, or desire, or contrition. They are like inspirations to us. Silent divine voices leap into our souls from off the page. Spiritual reading is itself an essential exercise. It is a special and peculiar form of prayer, the management of which is one of the important features of our spiritual day. Historically speaking, the reading of the lives of the Saints alone has been a most energetic power of holiness in the Church for long ages. [1] It will almost surprise us if we make an effort to remember how much we ourselves owe, in our little efforts after spirituality, to the study of the lives of the Saints. So far we have considered spiritual reading as directly an intrinsic portion of a devout life, one of its actual and almost indispensable exercises; and we have considered this very briefly, inasmuch as it deserves to be handled separately, both because there is so much to be said upon it, and because what might be said is of such great importance. [2] What we have now to bring forward, although it primarily concerns spiritual reading, applies also to reading which need be only indirectly spiritual. Every one must have experienced the good effects of religious reading as connected with prayer. Prayer is the grand difficulty of most souls. Solve that difficulty, and other difficulties are solved with it. Now, reading feeds and furnishes prayer. It supplies matter. It plants the wilderness. It irrigates what it has planted. The old masters called it oil for the lamp of prayer. How often do men --- not beginners only, but men who are far from their beginnings now --- complain that they do not know what to think about at meditation, or what to say to God! It is not too much to affirm that regular and rightly-practiced spiritual reading obviates at least half the difficulties of meditation. It is a sad thing to have been twenty years serving God, and to be still fighting with our morning meditation; although it is a comfort to think that St. Teresa was engaged in those hostilities for seventeen years. Reading is also of no inconsiderable service simply as an occupation of time. The use of time is one of the chief difficulties of the spiritual life. If we may distinguish the one from the other, we should be less frightened of St. Teresa's vow, Always to do what was most perfect, than of St. Alphonso's, Never to waste a moment of time; and the most impressive thing in those wonderful eighty-eight years of St. Andrew Avellino is his never having let a moment glide by unperceived and unoccupied. It tries our faith to think of it. Now, we cannot always keep our minds fixed on God, --- I mean, we who are not Saints. We may doubt it of the saints, gravely doubt it; but, having no experience of sainthood, we cannot dogmatize about it. Yet, when the effort to do so would be too much for us, there are in most of our days gaps of time which would be filled up with inutilities. Inutilities would be the most innocent filling up of them, yet how spirit- wasting also! Then reading --- not our regular spiritual reading, which is a more serious and direct intercourse with God, but conscientiously-chosen reading, even of a secular sort --- comes in, and not only saves us from evil by being harmless, but does us a positive good in itself. Moreover, it takes possession of the mind, of which the evil one is always on the watch to take possession. It occupies it. It garrisons it. It peoples it with thoughts which are, directly or indirectly, of God. Now, in these days there are two contagious influences in the atmosphere around us, which are most deleterious to the spiritual life. They are the multiplicity of interests, and the rapidity of objects. It is sad to see the success with which these two things thrust God out of our minds, perpetually edging a little more forward, and a little more, and a little more, The mere occupation of our minds, therefore, with religious objects, has become of serious importance in devotion, especially to those who are living in the world, and so are forced to hear its roar, and to turn giddy at the sight of its portentously-swift whirling and revolving, as if it were a machine of God got loose from is control. I need not dwell on this; but it would not be easy to make too much of it. For what has taken possession of the current of our thoughts has taken possession of our whole selves. A taste for reading is therefore especially necessary for these times, because of their perils and their peculiarities. It is by this occupation of our thoughts that reading hinders castle-building, which is an inward disease wholly incompatible with devotion. Perhaps it is speaking too broadly to say that reading hinders it altogether; but at least it makes it much less likely and confines it within much narrower bounds. In temptations, also, it is a twofold help, both negative and positive. Negative, because all occupation involves the non-existence of a great many temptations; and positive, because it furnishes an actual distraction while we are under temptation, as well as gives us light in our warfare with them, and a heating of the heart which prevents our being chilled by their icy touch. It also delivers us from listlessness, which is a dangerous enemy of devotion, especially to those who live in the world and have not the help of an always pressing rule and the soft uninterrupted pulsations of community acts. Toward afternoon a person who has nothing to do drifts rapidly away from God. To sit down in a chair without an object is to jump into a thicket of temptations. A vacant hour is always the devil's hour. When time hangs heavy, the wings of the spirit flap painfully and slow. Then it is that a book is a strong tower, nay, a very church, with angels lurking among the leaves, as if they were so many niches. But from our privacy let us pass to society. Conversation! what a stormy sea is that for a spiritual man to navigate! Possibilities of sin everywhere, rapid flow of indeliberate words, galloping of images through the mind, indistinct in the dust they raise, impossibility of adequate vigilance because of impossibility of ubiquity, unsatisfactory helplessness in the effort to preserve general purity of intention, --- tongues whetting tongues, brain heating brain, faces kindling faces, rapidity at last becoming terrific, and with rapidity unguarded oblivion, --- while truth, and justice, and charity, and reverence, and modesty, and kindness are standing round, mute listeners, shy, jealous, suspicious, frightened, almost fanciful, wincing visibly now and then, --- and the great fact that we are talking in God, with his immensity for our room, gradually growing less and less distinguishable! Were it not so hard to be one of the silent saints, even commonly good people would gradually steal into Carthusian deserts. But reading helps to make conversation harmless, by making it less petty and less censorious. Our books are our neighbor's allies, by making it less necessary for us to discuss him. It is very hard for a person who does not like reading to talk without sinning. As a help to the government of the tongue, therefore, --- that government without which, as St. James tells us, a man's whole religion is vain, --- a taste for reading is invaluable. It also makes us and our piety more attractive to those around us. It enables us to adorn our Christian profession much more in the sight of others. Ignorance is repulsive, but I doubt if it is so repulsive as that half-ignorant narrowness of mind which characterizes persons who do not read. The world is full of objections to devotion; and its want of geniality, of sympathy with men and things, is one of the chief objections to it. We may be quite sure that men have on the whole preached the gospel in their conversation more when they spoke indirectly on religion than when they spoke directly on it. Common interests are a bond. We are better missionaries in daily society if we have a taste for reading; and this of course does not mean spiritual reading on the one hand, nor on the other that light reading which dissipates our spirit, sullies our faith, and makes our conversation puerile or frothy. Above all, a taste for reading is necessary for Christian parents. It is evil for those children who are more educated by tutors and governesses than by their own parents. A mother who is little with her children is but half a mother; and how dull, and foolish, and uninteresting, and uninfluential must children grow up, if, as their minds expand, they find the conversation of their parents (as the conversation of unreading persons must be) empty, shallow, gossiping, vapid, and more childish than the children's talk among themselves! It is this which explains what we so often observe, --- that a taste for reading, or the absence of it, is hereditary. Furthermore, still speaking of society, a taste for reading often hinders our taking the wrong side in practical questions, which are mooted in the world but tell upon the Church. It does this either by the information it has enabled us to obtain on the subject itself, or by making our instincts accurate and sensitive through our familiarity with right principles and with the subjects kindred to the one under discussion. Look how many little-minded, narrow-sighted good people get on a wrong tack about the Church, and the Pope, and public affairs, especially in a non-Catholic country, simply because, having no taste for reading, they are fractions of men rather than men. Now, to go back to ourselves again, and our own self-improvement. Do we not all perceive in ourselves a tendency to become vulgar, to be interested with petty interests, to be recreated by foolish recreations, to be allured by ignoble pursuits? It seems as if, when the gay liberty and sweet clever simplicity of childhood evaporated, they left some dregs of sheer unmitigated puerility behind them, which made a shallow in the soul upon which we were ever and anon stranding. Very high spirituality sets us far above all this. But which of us is dwelling in those regions? Meanwhile, a taste for reading obviously does the same work for us in another way, and naturally with inferior success, yet with a success complete in its kind and degree. It raises us. It calls out our manhood. It makes us grave. It infuses an element of greatness into every thing about us. The same taste also helps us with our temper. It aids us in the supernatural work of gaining inward peace. When we are fretted, and are too feeble to lay hold of higher things, we have always a self-tranquilizing process at hand in reading. But who is not fretted well nigh daily, and well nigh daily forfeiting graces by his fretfulness? When I said before that a taste for reading was especially necessary for these times, I said also that it was especially necessary for those leading devout lives in the world; for they are the souls who most want peace, and least find it. I am afraid of making you suspect me by the multiplicity of my reasons. Nevertheless you must bear patiently with some more, which will not occupy us long. The spiritual life is always more or less a work in the dark; but it is a darkness in which we see. Nevertheless when we can see what we are doing, and whither we are going, what our work is, and how God would have us to do it, we work more securely and advance more rapidly. Even when we see our end before us, we have often to arrest ourselves in life, and make a deliberate election of the means best calculated to bring us to our end; and still more often have we to decide upon the character of some apparent means, which may in reality be a temptation or a distraction, either to turn us aside from the right road, or at least to hinder us from concentrating our efforts upon our single ascertained end. In all these cases we derive the greatest assistance from reading. Indeed, it is astonishing how pertinent all our reading seems to become when we are in difficulties. It is as if the Holy Ghost, rather than our selves, had chosen what we should read; and it is he most assuredly who gives it now such a special unction and special message to our souls in their present straits. As a taste for reading assists us by illuminating our own work, so does it enlarge our charity in judging of the work of others. The more we know, the less narrow are our minds. Our sphere of vision is increased. Our horizon is wider. We appreciate the manifold varieties of grace and of vocations. We see how God's glory finds its account in almost infinite diversity, and how holiness can be at home in opposites, nay, how what is wrong in this man is acceptable, perhaps heroic, in that other man. Hence we free ourselves from little jealousies, from uncharitable doubts, from unworthy suspicions, from unsympathetic cautions, from ungenerous delays, from narrow criticisms, from conceited pedantries, from shallow pomposities, about others and their good works, things which are the especial diseases of little great men and little good men, and which may be said to frustrate one-third, if not more, of all the good works which are attempted in the Church. Goodness which is not greatness also is a sad misfortune. While it saves its own soul, it will not let others save theirs. Especially does it contrive, in proportion to its influence, to put a spoke in the wheel of all progress, and has almost a talent for interfering with efforts for the salvation of souls. Now, if reading did no more than abate the virulence of anyone of these eight diseases of narrow goodness mentioned above, would it not be a huge work? For we are all of us little at times, even when we are not habitually little. Self-love makes us jealous, and jealousy makes us little. But how much more, as experience teaches us, does a taste for reading do, than merely abate the virulence of these things! How many a narrow mind has it not made broad! How many close, stifling, unwindowed hearts has it not filled with mountain air and sunshine, and widened them to noble, spacious halls, so making room for God where he had no room before! It also heightens our whole spiritual standing, by making us more free from human respect. When we have a taste for reading, and reading approved religious books, we acquire the sense of standing under the eye and at the judgment-seat of great and holy minds. Their judgments give the law to ours. They introduce us into another world, where right measures and true standards prevail, and where injustice and falsehood are righted in the mind as they will be righted in fact at the general doom. Hence the judgments of that little inefficient circle immediately round ourselves, which we surname the world, are less important, less all-in-all in our eyes, than they used to be. We have got accustomed to higher things, to wider prospects, to greater worlds. He who does not suffer from the tyranny of human respect will hardly appreciate the force of this reason: but in what fortunate clime, or even in what anchoret's cell, is that blissful man to be found? Last of all, we must not forget St. Hugh's reason for making much of good books, --- that they make illness and sorrow more endurable. Doubtless what has surprised us in all our illnesses is that they have sanctified us so little. Pain has done so much less for us than by all accounts it should have done. Our experience of the matter has not been the same as the experience of the Saints. It is not so much that we have been less patient, as that we have been more animal. We have been occupied with the physical part of our sufferings. All our energies have been absorbed in the effort of endurance. Even sorrow we make too physical. Moreover, though others should not ask too much of us, neither should we unwisely overtax ourselves, yet there is no doubt we allow both sorrow and sickness to make us more idle than they need do. We waste time in suffering, when moments, always precious, are more precious than at any other time of life. Now, in the matter of patience, in the matter of inwardly sanctifying our sufferings, and in the matter of needless indolence, we shall find a taste for reading of great service to us both in sickness and sorrow. "But all these are very low and merely natural reasons!" True; but are we fit for higher things yet? Have we any dispensation from the earlier stages of this grand journey? Surely, if we rightly estimate ourselves, we may feel that we are too low for the lowest thing that is good; but we cannot feel that we are too high for any thing. Here, then, are about twenty reasons why a spiritual guide is so anxious to know whether one who is just putting himself under direction has a taste for reading. He knows by experience that this taste will practically do the work of higher graces, before we have yet reached, in the common course of things, the region where those higher graces dwell. 1. For illustrations of the effects of reading the lives of the Saints, and also for the right method of reading them, see the Author's Essay on Canonization, pp. 9, et seqq., and his Essay on the Characteristics of the Saints, pp. 17, et seqq.   2. Although I am not treating here of the right method of managing our spiritual reading. I cannot resist quoting for the reader's benefit a passage from Dacrianus, which deserves to be written in letters of gold: --- "Noli eos imitari, qui nullum legendi ordinem servant; sed quod forte occurrerit, quodque casu repererint, legere gaudent: qui bus nihil sapit, nisi quod novum est, et inauditum. Consueta enim, et vetera omnia, quantumlibet utilia, fastidiunt. Tanta instabilitas procul a te sit: ipsa enim non promovet, sed dispergit spiritum; et periculose laborat, qui hoc morbo vitiatus est." Yet how many are there whose spiritual reading is a luxury, rather than a spiritual exercise! Dacrianus ap Nigronium, p. 199, in tractatu quinto. 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