Lost and Found
This is an excerpt fromt Edwin Faust’s essay which appears in Love in the Ruins, the newest title from Angelus Press. A review of this book will appear in a future issue.
When [I was] asked...why I had come to Europe and I had answered “Because I’m lost,” I had spoken honestly. When I entered high school in 1963, life had a single purpose: salvation. And salvation was only to be found in the Catholic Church. By the time I graduated in 1967, all of that had changed. The Second Vatican Council had intervened. Whether the council merely exposed the fragility of the Catholic edifice or undermined its solid structure is arguable. It seems that the faith must have played a somewhat superficial role in our lives for its institutional expressions to have been swept away so quickly and easily and on such thin pretexts.
By the time I graduated college in 1971, the church had plunged precipitously into its post-Vatican II madness and society, as a consequence, had also lost its sanity. Madness reigned. And in this madness I was expected to find a place for myself; to chart a career, start a family, buy a home, build equity, diversify a portfolio, climb the ladder of success, plan for retirement–in short, to behave in the prescribed ways as though it all still made sense. But it made no sense. How could a sane man acclimate himself to a lunatic asylum? How could you set out to live life when life appeared to have no purpose? It was a game without rules; a play without a plot. It seemed to me and to many of my contemporaries that we were cut off from the past; that if we were to give meaning to our lives, we must do so with little help from the usual quarters: our elders and their traditions.
Going to a strange country was in its way an escape from my native land, which had also become a strange country. No matter where I turned, I felt alienated, but it is somehow more bearable to feel this way in a foreign place than in one’s own home. Travel also allowed me to postpone making any serious decisions about my future. I knew that my money would not last long, but for however long it did last, I would be given a reprieve from a responsibility I dreaded.
When I said I was lost, I meant that I had lost a unified vision of life, and it was this I wanted so desperately to recover. And so I looked for it in many places: in the writings of Nietzsche and in many other books. I tried on idea after idea, like so many changes of clothes, to see which one suited me best. And when I grew tired of thinking, I found respite in the riot of the senses. But after a while, patterns form, and license becomes habit. Even dissipation can fall into a routine. And then one longs to escape those very things that once were an escape. But where is there to go?
After a year of wandering about Europe, collecting experiences, I was still lost; so I came home, or to what remained of my home, and I tried various jobs, none of which lasted; and I lived in various places, never for very long. I was still postponing my life, waiting for some event or idea or person that would lend it meaning and direction. I lived on the East Coast and the West Coast and parts in between; in mountains, by the seashore, in the cities, in the country; I tried sensuality and asceticism; gravity and frivolity; society and solitude. But always I ended in the same state of confusion and near despair. And I was getting older. The world forgives the young their rootlessness and lack of serious purpose, but there comes a time when forgiveness ends and the no longer young wanderer is regarded simply as a bum. I had become a bum.
My thirtieth birthday found me residing in a small rented house in a barrio in Santa Fe, New Mexico, working as a window washer. When we are young, we seldom give thought to all that it means to grow old. We can no more imagine our aging that we can imagine our death. But at the age of thirty the thought was powerfully borne in on me: I would live to be old. I also knew that I did not wish to be an old window washer. I felt immensely tired of everything, most especially myself; yet, I couldn’t rouse enough energy or enthusiasm to change my situation. I had reached rock bottom. I was nobody going nowhere.
I celebrated my birthday by walking aimlessly around town, lashing myself with such thoughts. For no particular reason, I wandered into a book store and began listlessly surveying the rack that offered self-help through psychology, diet, exercise, astrology, crystals, aura-balancing and religion. One volume caught my attention. Its cover bore the face of a man, a Hindu, and I felt an intuitive connection with him. I lifted the book from the rack and began to peruse its pages. I had long ago run through all the New Age remedies to life’s ills and found them wanting, but for some reason, I bought the book and carried it home, and on my way I became aware of some faint resurgence of my flattened hope.
The book was a spiritual autobiography, a Hindu counterpart to Augustine’s Confessions. Much of the material was familiar to me, as I had studied Vedanta and various forms of yoga, but a mysterious thrill seized me whenever I opened its pages. The master, let’s call him Baba, claimed that one could not become free, moksha, without receiving the grace of an enlightened being, a genuine guru. The book, though punctuated by paeans of praise to his teacher, was chiefly concerned with presenting detailed descriptions of the author’s own experiences in meditation: experiences that he assured his readers were available to anyone fortunate enough to seek and receive the guru’s grace. Without such grace, he claimed, no amount of learning or ascetic practices could bring one onto the path that would lead to liberation from Maya, that is, from all the pain and delusion of this passing world.
His message was certainly not unique, but his effect on me undoubtedly was. Why? Perhaps it was a measure of my desperation that I felt so attracted to him; perhaps it was something more, something preternatural, as I later came to believe. I formed a desire to see this man and, as though on cue, I learned that a local group of his devotees ran a weekly meditation session in a home not many blocks from where I lived. I went there and discovered that he would soon leave India for another tour of North America. He had already established his U.S. headquarters at a sprawling complex in the Catskill Mountains. I was tempted to make the pilgrimage, but hung back, remembering so many of my failed adventures and fearing that this might prove to be just one more.
One of the devotees had given me a picture of Baba, which I hung in my bedroom and which came to have an increasingly hypnotic effect on me. I would find myself staring at his face for long periods, unaware until later of how much time had elapsed; and during these trances my thoughts would fall away, the clamor in my brain grow fainter, more distant, until it was replaced by a quiet and gentle euphoria. When my thoughts did return, they appeared to be less important, less my own, too, as though I were faintly conscious of some senseless jabbering by an intruder. Then, one night, I had a dream unlike any other I could recall. I dreamt I was sitting in the house where I had grown up, watching the staircase, waiting for something; then, I saw descending the staircase a figure in a long orange robe, such as that worn by Hindu monks. I did not see his face, for as he approached I fell to the ground, prostrated myself, reached my fingers toward his feet, then felt his hand on my back, making some sort of adjustment to my spine. At that instant, I awoke and sensed heat rising in my spine from its base toward my neck. I had the unshakable feeling that something significant had happened to me.
At the next meeting of the meditation group, I told a few of the devotees about my dream. They nodded knowingly. “You’ve been given shaktipat,” one said. This is the Sanskrit word for the guru’s grace. “It’s a powerful form of initiation, to receive it in a dream,” the leader of the group said. “You’d better go see Baba.”
And so I did.
I had little money, so I hitchhiked from Santa Fe to New York and spent my last few hundred dollars to pay for my stay at the ashram and to attend a program called “The Intensive.” The Intensive consists of mantra chanting, talks by devotees, talks by Baba, translated from Hindi by an interpreter, and the chief thing, a meditation session during which the lights are lowered and Baba passes through the sitting crowd, touching people’s heads with his wand of peacock feathers or pressing his thumb against their foreheads. The heavy smell of musk perfume marks his approach and a variety of noises follows in his wake: crying, laughter, strange words, animal sounds; feelings of intense joy, overpowering sorrow, visions of lights. Some people simply pass out, their heads lowered to the floor, where they remain until the end of the session. These reactions are called kriyas and are supposed to have a purgative effect on consciousness, freeing the subject from all that binds him to this world: karma from lives past and present. The purpose of the guru is to initiate these kriyas. When the devotee is completely cleansed of karma, he, too, becomes realized, enlightened, a free soul, one with God. Such is the belief. But this liberation may require a lifetime of meditation; perhaps, several lifetimes. Above all, it requires shaktipat, the guru’s grace.
My stay at the ashram brought me many vivid experiences in meditation. I was told by veteran devotees that I had been especially blessed. After a few weeks, I left, convinced that, at long last, I had found the real thing. Nothing seemed to matter now. If the world regarded me as a bum or a fool, so much the worse for the world. I had found truth. I was blessed. All that I need do is allow the shakti to work. All else was insignificant. I returned home, broke, and spent the winter chopping and selling wood. The next few years found me working a variety of jobs, getting away on occasion for short stays at the ashram in the Catskills until, one summer, I was invited to join the staff as a night security guard. I accepted....
....I was now and again assailed by doubts: could it be that the truth was known only by a few thousand devotees of a Hindu holy man? Did it not seem improbable? Yet, there were precedents, as with the apostles. And why had God created a world of illusion in the first place? The answer was that the world was the Divine Lila, or play. It was a form of amusement for the deity. The answer seemed superficial and unsatisfying. And what about evil? Well, that was just karma. But what was karma? How did it originate? The reasoning appeared to be circular. We were told, of course, that the mind was the enemy; that were we to give it free rein, it would lead us into endless torments and delusions. Trust the guru. Trust the shakti.
....I had not frequented the library, for I had a large collection of my own books, but I thought I might take a volume with me to help pass the hours until dawn. My eyes fastened on a title: Ascent of Mount Carmel, by St. John of the Cross. I had tried to read it many years before and had found it exceedingly strange and almost unintelligible. But I took it with me and perused it as I sat at my security desk by the front entrance, waiting for my relief.
As I read, I felt the sort of thrill that had seized me seven years earlier when I had first read Baba’s book. I had the sense that Providence had placed this book in my hands for a purpose I could not yet discern. When I returned to my room, I read until my eyes grew tired and sleep overcame me; when I awoke, I immediately picked up the book and resumed where I had left off. The early chapters seemed to confirm me in my path, as they dealt with the necessity to detach oneself from the pleasures of the senses. All their advice and admonitions accorded with my ascetic practices. It was when St. John began to treat of experiences in meditation and contemplation that I realized he was counseling me to reject all that I had accepted as the guarantee of the authenticity of the guru and his teachings. He even named specific experiences highly prized by devotees, such as the visions of lights, the waves of bliss, inner sounds and apparitions. All of these, the saint warned, are rooted in the senses, internal or external, and in the imagination. They may come from God, or the demons, or be the product of our own invention. His standing order is to reject them. Totally. One is neither to become attached to them in memory, reason about them nor desire them. To do so is to open oneself to delusions, human or demonic. Even if the experiences come from God, he warns, we may misunderstand their meaning and allow them to become a source of vanity. We will lose nothing by turning away from them, he assures us, for God will do His work in our souls as He pleases, and He prizes our good intentions above our curiosity and longing for the exotic.
I found St. John’s reasoning simultaneously comforting and troubling. It freed me from my thralldom to the admittedly fascinating occurrences in meditation, but it also stripped me of my certainty that I had found the true path to God. I could not doubt that St. John was right, yet, he cast me into a spiritual no-man’s land. What was I to do now?
Reading the Ascent, however, had another effect on me: it roused memories of my boyhood devotion. I began to re-examine the claims of the Catholic faith, casting aside all the stupidities of the post-conciliar debacle and concentrating on essential doctrine. I bought a copy of the New Testament and spent most of my spare time reading and pondering passages from the Gospels, particularly that of St. John. I felt increasingly uncomfortable in the ashram and studiously limited my contacts with other devotees. I avoided the dining hall and subsisted mostly on a cache of fruit, rice cakes and bottled water.
One afternoon, shortly after waking, I felt a strong desire to take a long walk, to get away from the ashram. It was winter, but I decided to brave the cold and stuffed a few provisions into my pockets along with the New Testament. I made my way to a dense wood beyond the bounds of the ashram property. A rough path led into the forest for about a hundred yards, then ended; I proceeded into the trackless wilderness until the ground began to climb and rocks and boulders appeared. I came to a clearing amid a grove of oak trees where I found an outcropping of rock like a flat table jutting from the hillside. I climbed onto it and sat there cross-legged and began to read St. John’s Gospel.
Thus, I formed a daily routine. I spoke very little to anyone, and my job afforded me the solitude I desired. One afternoon, after assuming my accustomed perch atop my rock table, I read the passage in which St. Peter denies Our Lord. A terrible sadness overwhelmed me: I felt sorry for Peter and thought of how, later, he would have given anything if only he could take back those words of betrayal. I felt a kinship with Peter, and then a realization of my own betrayal swept over me. I wept, as Peter must have wept. But I knew, as Peter must have known, that I was forgiven.
When I returned to the ashram, I knew that I was finished with it. I resigned my post and, once again, headed out into the world with no prospects, having only a few dollars, a half-formed faith, but a great hope. I tried to return to the Church; went to confession for the first time in nearly two decades, talked to priests and read voraciously, but I was ill at ease. Something was fraudulent, either in my conversion or in the new teachings I was receiving. Eventually, I came to realize that the faith had been altered by those charged with its protection and propagation. The new Mass became a torment to me, as did many of the homilies I suffered through, but I tried to make the best of it. There seemed no other place left to go.
I had, meanwhile, gotten a job on the copy desk of a daily newspaper, the resort of many ne’er-do-wells. When it was learned that I had an interest in religion, a rare thing in a newsroom, I was asked to contribute a weekly feature on the subject. The paper published a page every Saturday with announcements of church services and an article on some personality or event of an ecclesiastical nature. While casting about for my weekly topic in the summer of 1988, I came upon a story about a French archbishop who had been excommunicated for disobeying the pope. In my researches, I learned of outposts manned by the Society of St. Pius X and by independent priests where the Traditional Latin Mass was said and the full Catholic faith preached and practiced.
I wrote my article, a rather transparent apologia for Archbishop Lefebvre, but as it was only a religious matter, the agnostic editors either didn’t mind or didn’t notice its tendentious nature and allowed it to be published. I also traveled that Sunday to the nearest Tridentine Mass at an independent chapel about eighty miles distant.
After Mass, I remained in the chapel to make my thanksgiving and I remembered something ironic the guru had once said: that it doesn’t matter if the teacher is false, so long as the disciple is true, for the true disciple sooner or later finds the true teacher.
I had been lost for so many years, had traveled down so many dead-end streets and lived through so many desperate hours, but God had never let me go, for no matter how far astray I went, I carried in my heart a longing for the truth, a desire to know God. And as St. Augustine wrote: “He who seeks God has found Him.”
And so, on the verge of middle age, with my unified vision restored, I felt ready to begin life in earnest. I married, had three children in quick order and resigned myself to my job in the newsroom, which I regarded with a measure of gratitude for enabling me to support my family and granting me a modicum of respectability. It was, in other ways, purgatorial: slogging my way through all the dull and poorly written copy I regarded as a way of expiating my sin of sloth. God had given me a small talent for writing and I had never developed it, partly because I was confused but largely because I was lazy. And so I was now reduced to the school-marmish task of correcting the grammar and punctuation and syntax of the marginally literate.
But God is merciful, and St. Paul wrote truly that all things work together for good for those who love God. I continued to read about and ponder the condition of the Church and came to know some well-informed traditional Catholics. One of them suggested that, as I was in the newspaper business, I should write articles for Traditional Catholic publications. I had never considered doing so, but the idea grew on me and, at long last, I submitted a piece. It was published and became the first of more than a hundred such offerings during the past fifteen years.
I know little of theology or philosophy, so I write about what I do know: my life. For I realize that I am but one of many children in this sorry epoch who has felt abandoned by Mother Church and has wandered through strange lands, physically and spiritually, trying to find her again. I tell my stories and try to find in each anecdote something instructive, a bit of good counsel that might be of use to others.
And in doing so I have discovered that nothing goes to waste in the economy of salvation; that every idea, whether it come from Nietzsche or Baba, contains some truth, or else it would have no substance and be inexpressible. I am, in a way, still guided by the notion of eternal recurrence as I now realize that all we do in time gives shape to our eternity; that all of my actions indeed have an everlasting character; that I will forever taste their sweetness or bitterness in heaven or in hell.
And all of my hours of mediation in the ashram taught me how to sit quietly. It is sad how few of us know how to do this, for it is a prerequisite for contemplation, which is the goal of the spiritual life and the vocation of every Catholic. Heaven, after all, will be simply unbroken contemplation. Our Lord told us that eternal life is to know God and Jesus Christ whom He has sent, and we cannot know God if we are constantly bustling about, full of our own thoughts and plans and desires. We have to empty ourselves of all this and make room for God. So the Desert Fathers and the great Carmelite mystics tell us. And so the lure of false mysticism rests on a solid truth: that our true nature can only be realized when we surrender our will in silence to our Creator.
And I learned something else from my years of attachment to Baba: how to be a disciple. This sense of closeness to the master is what so moved the apostles and the early Christians, and is so lacking among many modern Catholics, even those loyal to Tradition. We may disdain the sentimentality of certain Protestants who talk volubly about their “personal relationship with Jesus Christ,” mostly because Protestants don’t really know Christ or His Church. But a personal relationship with Our Lord is the only way to salvation: “I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except by me.”
And I also now realize that one must be patient with those who lack faith, ever hoping for their reclamation and refraining from judgment. For many years I remained away from the Church and the sacraments. I gave ample reason for those who loved me to despair of me, and little promise that I would ever right myself and do anything in the least worthwhile. But God waits for us, sometimes through the greater part of a lifetime, and we never know who He has marked out for His saving grace. Nor can we be certain of our own perseverance. It is part of the mystery of Providence that God sometimes allows us to fall and to wander far away, only to bring us back to Him, wiser through our fall than we were in our former virtue. We learn mercy by receiving mercy....
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