Read Online Providence by Daniel Quinn - Free Book Online

magnificent, but you would of courseknow it was just a trick. What I was seeing was
reality,
was the world as it actually is, every moment of every day.…
    No, no, I wasn’t in a trance. I wasn’t in anything remotely
like
a trance. I was gathering kindling, for God’s sake! I had trailed the novices for awhile, walking through this madly radiant land, then had been signed to head off into the brush to get started. So there I was, stooping and picking up sticks, and breaking them across my knee or leaning them up against a rock to stamp them into smaller lengths, and making piles that would later be loaded into a cart, and all the while tears were pouring down my cheeks like a waterfall. It was lucky I was working alone, though I don’t think I would have felt the least self-conscious about my tears if there had been dozens around me. Who could have cared? Certainly not me.
    It lasted for about an hour. The radiance just faded away, gradually subsided, and the world resumed its normal appearance. The rest of the crew came along, and we loaded up the kindling and headed back.
    Well, obviously that was the question: What did it mean? I would spend the next thirty years looking for an answer, and I want you to see how that answer developed.
    This is how I understood it at the time: God had ratified the choice I’d made sitting in the classroom. God had said, “See? You made the right choice.” It wasn’t a reward, it was an affirmation. I had summoned my will and said yes to God, and God had summoned his will and said yes to me.
    As I say, this is how I understood it at the time. It isn’t the way I understand it now. Very far from it.…
    Yes, naturally you want to know what I meant when I said, “And the god spoke.” I’ll get to it, believe me, as soon as I can, but I can’t deal with it yet.
    At the time, I dealt with it in the context I was operating in. I was a Christian pursuing the contemplative life, and there was a definite place in that context for the experience I’d had. God had made me a gift, a “free” gift, in that it hadn’t been earned in any sense. It isn’t possible to earn such a gift. In fact, in the literature of the mystical life, the gift has a name. It’s called
infused contemplation.
    Now I had a problem. I had to tell Father Louis about this event—at least it seemed so to me. To keep it a secret from my spiritual director would have amounted to a sin of pride, would be to say, “Well, look, Father Louis, God and I have a few things going between us that you don’t need to know about.”
    I had the rather naive notion that Father Louis would rejoice with me over this, so I didn’t bother to think it through. I didn’t try to anticipate his reactions, I just blurted it out. He listened for about ten seconds, then abruptly cut me off. My impression was that he was disgusted with me, disillusioned. Disappointed that I’d make something up like this in order to inflate my importance in his eyes. It was never mentioned again.…
    Yes, I suppose I do feel somewhat bitter about this. He took it for granted that I’d made it up. There was no doubt of that. If he’d thought anything else—that I was mistaken or that I was psychotically deluded—he obviously would have wanted to know much more. By refusingto listen to what I was trying to say, he was clearly letting me know that he wasn’t about to be taken in by some greenhorn postulant.…
    Well, I understand what you’re saying, but I see it differently. Father Louis wasn’t a saint, wasn’t perfect. As he would have said himself, the people in that monastery were very ordinary people, leading a very ordinary life. I didn’t take that into account when I told him what had happened. I expected him to be perfect. I expected him to behave like a saint, and instead he behaved like an ordinary person.…
    Yes, you’re probably right: I still think he should have behaved like a saint. I would say rather that I
wish
he’d