When I was in my early forties, I had a spiritual experience that made me suddenly doubt everything about the way I’d been living my life.
Dante’s description of this sort of unwelcome crisis sums it up best: “In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself in a dark wood where the straight way was lost.” In my case, the “straight way” was not so much the path of virtue but instead the “familiar way,” the one I’d grown used to, the one that had led to a certain measure of success in the world. Yet if I took this spiritual experience seriously, it was clear I’d have to change course, and that thought frightened me.
So I set out instead to explain it all away. I’d been pushing myself too hard; I was exhausted and stressed out. The experience must have originated in something I read or heard or watched. Or—this had to be it!—I was having a full-blown mid-life crisis and probably needed hormone therapy. I remained in this resistance mode for quite awhile, though whenever I let myself revisit that astonishing moment, my heart ached the way it does when a good friend says goodbye.
Then I found a group of monks steeped in a thousand-year-old contemplative tradition who recognized the forces at work in me. They assured me I was not having a mental breakdown. But I was going through a significant spiritual transition, one that countless generations before me would have seen as perfectly real and legitimate, and—even more importantly, considering how confused I was—there were tried and true next steps to be made on the path that had just opened up before me.
Richard Rolle of Hampole, one of the four great English mystics of the fourteenth century, knew all about this path. Born into a culture steeped in the Christian worldview, he grew up surrounded by powerful symbols of the faith: soaring cathedrals and great tolling bells and jewel-like stained glass; swirling incense and angelic liturgical polyphony; high stone crosses carved with scenes from the Gospels. Though his family background was modest—a small farm near Pickering—his intellectual ability was recognized early on, and with the help of the Archdeacon of Durham, he was sent to study at Oxford.
By the time he was eighteen, however, he realized he was being called to a deeper vocation, one that a purely theological or philosophical education could never fulfill. He felt his soul “being lifted from low things,” while at the same time his mind burned with longing for the simple and austere life of a hermit.
Rolle abruptly left Oxford and traveled home, where he asked his sister to give him two of her gowns—one white and one gray—and his father’s old rain hood. Then he slipped away into the woods, where he cut up the dresses, fashioning a crude hermit tunic from them and resolving to “flee from the world.”
But one evening as he sat praying in the nearby church, he was spotted by old friends from Oxford, sons of Sir John Dalton, who introduced him to their father. Sir John was impressed with the determination of the fiery young would-be hermit and decided to supply him with a cell and provide for his daily needs to free him up for a life of intense prayer and contemplation. In his lonely hermitage, “from worldly business in mind and body departed,” he sank into blessed solitude.
Yet Rolle understood from the beginning that the contemplative path would eventually lead him back to the world— that “love cannot be lazy.” For it is “love [that] makes men whole: it is only those who love wholly who are allowed to scale the heights of the contemplative life.” If this was true, then he must change.
Solitude might free him from unnecessary distractions, but it could not liberate him from the constant clamoring of his desires. This would require an intense period of purgation. The goal during this phase was simplification of the self, and the process involved ancient ascetical practices like fasting, wakefulness, the embrace of poverty and chastity, and constant prayer.
For Rolle, this first stage lasted nearly three years and ended abruptly with an overwhelming revelation of spiritual reality. “Suddenly,” he wrote, “in me I felt a merry heat and unknown.” All on its own, his heart had begun to warm. “I had to keep feeling my breast,” he said, “to make sure there was no physical reason for it!”
This burning sensation in his chest during prayer soon became a regular event, and ultimately the title of his most famous work, The Fire of Love. The term goes back to the fourth-century desert father, Macarius, and is rooted in both Old and New Testament passages that describe what God’s love is like: “Behold, the Lord will come with fire!” (Isaiah 66:15) “His word was in my heart as a burning fire.” (Jeremiah 20:9) “He is like a refiner’s fire.” (Malachi 3:2) “They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them” (Acts 2:3)
But the fire of love was not the only way God communicated with him. Soon, Rolle began to experience a great sweetness within as he relinquished the idealistic passion that had characterized his fervent youth and he was instead infused with a profound sense of peace. This new way of being released torrents of prayer, poured forth in “wild yet measured loveliness,” which sounded to him like the very song of angels.
Though Elizabeth Ann Seton was born nearly five hundred years after Richard Rolle, and his high-medieval era had long since given way to early modernity by the time she came along, the culture in which she was raised looked far more like the 1300s than it did ours. The Christian worldview, though challenged by breakthroughs in science and called into question by philosophers of the day, still reigned supreme. Elizabeth grew up in a society filled with churches and steeped in Christian morality. It was still assumed that true education was anchored in the great biblical truths.
Like Rolle, Elizabeth felt the first stirrings of a contemplative call, including the call to solitude, when she was a small child. She loved to look at birds’ eggs, but given her sensitive nature, saw how fragile they were and “[c]ried because the girls would destroy them.” The realization that she noticed and cared deeply about what others didn’t even see led her, more often than not, to “play and walk alone.” Rolle also cherished birds, seeing “the glad and eager life” they lived as a school of Christian virtue. He was particularly enamored of the nightingale, which “to song and melody all night is given.”
At fourteen, Elizabeth walked through a meadow toward a chestnut tree and felt a sudden rush of love for God: “Here then was a sweet bed, the air still a clear blue vault above, the numberless sounds of Spring melody and joy—the sweet clovers and wild flowers I had got by the way.” At eighteen, Rolle was having similar experiences: “Great liking I had in wilderness to sit, that I far from noise sweetlier might sing. . . “
Though Elizabeth did not embrace the rigorous ascetical practices of Rolle’s era, she most certainly went through a grueling phase of purgation and self-simplification at the hands of life itself. From taking on responsibility for her husband’s many young half-siblings when her mother-in-law died to nursing her beloved husband and two daughters through their agonizing deaths from tuberculosis and consumption, Elizabeth faced over and over again the necessity of complete self-surrender.
In time, she became her own sort of mystic—one I believe Richard Rolle would have embraced as a kindred spirit. As she wrote in her journal for her spiritual friend and advisor, Fr. Simon Brute, her prayer had by now become wordless while her heart “flow[ed] and overflow[ed}.” A year later she confided, “Peace—our God never my soul in the quiet as now. . . .Our God—Our God, two hours could only say that.”
As her life of prayer became all-encompassing, Elizabeth willingly shared what she had learned: “We must literally pray without ceasing—pray without ceasing—in every occurrence and enjoyment of our life.”
Though we no longer live in a culture steeped in religious architecture and symbolism, as Richard Rolle did, nor a time still firmly rooted in the Christian vision, as Elizabeth Seton did, thanks to my friends the monks I’ve come to believe that the contemplative path remains open to all.
As my younger self once discovered to her dismay, the mystical roadmap is not so easy to find nowadays. But it still exists. And the more we allow ourselves to pray as Blessed Richard Rolle and St. Elizabeth Ann Seton did—that is, to pray without ceasing—the more glimpses we will catch of it.
PAULA HUSTON is a National Endowment of the Arts Fellow and the author of two novels and eight books of spiritual nonfiction. Her essays and short stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories and in the annual Best Spiritual Writing anthology. Like Elizabeth Ann Seton, Huston is a convert to Catholicism. In 1999, she became a Camaldolese Benedictine Oblate and is a lay member of New Camaldoli Hermitage’s community of monks in Big Sur, Calif. She’s also a former president of theChrysostom Society, a national organization of literary Catholic writers.
To view all the Seton Reflections, click here.
Image: Public Domain