The Irish Catholic Hermit

  The Holy Turnabout of the Soul. T here’s a quare story told among the old desert lads, and there’s more truth in it than in a yard of newspapers. Abba John the Dwarf goes to Abba Poemen, all soft-eyed and settled, and says to him he’s after reachin’ such a grand peace of soul that there’s no temptations left knockin’ at his door. Not a whisper, not a tug, not a bother. And Poemen, the old fox, looks at him and says, near gentle but sharp as a scythe: “Pray to God, brother, that the battle comes back to you, the broken heart, the lowliness you had before. ’Tis only in the fight the soul puts on flesh.” A nd there you have it, the great riddle of the spiritual life, turned upside-down like a creel on the strand. What the world curses as misery and shame, the soul that’s half-awake knows as blessing. What the world runs from, the saints lean into, slow and steady, like a man walkin’ into a headwind he knows will make him strong. T he world has its own crooked wisdom, God help us. It...