The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything: A Spirituality for Real Life

by James Martin

One evening, the English poet W. H. Auden gathered together with his fellow teachers at the Downs School, when something unexpected happened to him. He describes it in the introduction to a book edited by Anne Fremantle called The Protestant Mystics: One fine summer night in June 1933 I was sitting on a lawn after dinner with three colleagues, two women and one man. We liked each other well enough but we were certainly not intimate friends, nor had we any one of us a sexual interest in another. Incidentally, we had not drunk any alcohol. We were talking casually about everyday matters when, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, something happened. I felt myself invaded by a power which, though I consented to it, was irresistible and certainly not mine. For the first time in my life I knew exactly—because thanks to the power, I was doing it—what it means to love one’s neighbor as oneself. . . . My personal feelings toward them were unchanged—they were still colleagues, not intimate friends—but I felt their existence as themselves to be of infinite value and rejoiced in it. Auden seems almost to have met the desire of his heart, almost to have found exactly what he was looking for, but when he arrived at the place, he was just as quickly taken away from it. Such powerful experiences increase our appetite for a relationship with God in the future, even if we never again experience God’s presence in quite so clear a way.