I LIVE NOW, NOT I

Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

Tell me if this sounds familiar:

You’re steeped in the sacraments. You pray more or less unceasingly. You devote yourself body, mind, spirit and soul to your vocation.

And right then, you begin to see the ways you are not good, your seeming inability to be useful in anyway you want to be, your seemingly utter failure to abandon yourself.

Or as St. Paul said, “The thing I want to do, I don’t do, and the thing I don’t want to do, I do.”

A book I’ve turned to again and again at such times is called I Live Now, Not I. The author is Fr. Patrick McNulty (1931-2015) who after serving for decades as a parish priest, hit a wall, endured a long dark night of the soul, and lived out the rest of his years at Madonna House in Combermere, Ontario, the lay community formed by Russian emigré and mystic Catherine de Hueck Doherty. (I got to meet Fr. McNulty once and he was delightful).

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.