! Abbot John Of Forde At Prayer

All the wonders under heaven and earth would take more than a lifetime to enumerate – why then, to be surprised, that One can speak to such as me, not in my outer ear, but straight into my inner ear – nay, right into my soul his gnosis whispers as it were myself that spoke it… whispers such sweet things, that though they blessedly inform my later words - as these to you – yet they tremble in their truth, upon the very edge of words; whispers such new things to me, though such things, old to Him, old, but present; thus, they’re ever new… for this, I’d waited; waited in the stillness of my heart; now listened as it were to all my life explained to me; not, not in judgment, but in the sweetest grace of friendly intimacy; and then, when I can no longer hold Him to me, dare to ask for further news of my true self, He’s gone… At first, it was the sweetest pain, His going; and then one day, I learned as from myself the way to share with Him, his return journey – which for Him must be – as must have been – joy beyond all joy; returning to His Father… so I accompanied Him with gratitude and praise… and then I learned, when I accompanied Him to that place where all inner and all outer meet, a further, private, holy thing – His Father’s love for Him… which aforetimes had been but words that I believed to be beyond man’s mind… the whisper in my thought, now thunder in the world; silent thunder in the mind, flashing lightning in the soul; yet in the silent church, I by the altar there, sounded near as altar candle’s peaceful flame: I knew that what men call a mystery, is daylight truth as visible as mountains or as streams: that what men read as words, dance off the page in holy silence, to the heart: the Holy Trinity was, is now to me, as necessary and inevitable, as Man and God; as living, now, as God and Man; as living, now, as Grace. So John of Forde records for us, by grace of grace itself. [John of Forde, c.1145 – 1214, is a newly translated witness to the undivided Church in an age when spirituality, scholarship, and poetry of speech came together at their height.]