How have I spent, and with what fruit, so wide a tract of days?

I recently took our second child to college and was covered in memories from my own time in school. It was a time of discovering the deep solitude that can be filled with the first true friendship with God; discovering “the other,” “Thou,” a la Martin Buber, lying the in grass on the green at the University of Vermont. They were haunted days; living day-in and day-out with this sense that another presence was seeing through my eyes, hearing through my ears, feeling through my heart, and eventually thinking through my thoughts, as though a co-pilot sat next to me exchanging glances as the ground grew small and the clouds grew large. It was then that I discovered the myth of being “alone” in this world; discovering that we are actually never alone unless we choose to block the presence and the light of God that is already in our midst. This haunting often left me speechless, running out of words, bereft of metaphors, causing me to lean on the words of others; often I was left with nothing but a piece of music that might give some voice or shape to the nearness of the numinous companion who walked with me during those days.

My “cell,” my refuge, became the music collection in the basement of the university library. That’s where I would set up shop for hours. Listening to the compositions of Steve Reich, John Adams, Copeland, Beethoven, Bach, catching glimpses of this new inner mountainous terrain called soul and spirit. It was also there that I would open the poetry of Blake, Eliot, Yeats, Dickinson, Whitman, Rilke, and the essays of Thoreau, Emmerson, Plato, Augustine, Lewis and begin to pull together the language that would begin my conversation with God. Listening to the music I would simply write down passages from their work in a kind of fever of inspiration; if I could not find my own words then I would simply borrow theirs.

It was also a kind atelier in prayer, contemplation, learning to climb and run at higher altitudes. These were the building blocks of what would become my “theology,” my own personal knowledge of God. They would also become the bridge into the interplanetary study of Theology and Christian devotion found in the great souls of the Church. I recently stumbled across a fellow traveler in The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Robert Louis Wilken, Aurelius Clemens Prudentius, a Fourth Century Christian poet from Northern Spain who has captured the spirit of the visitations that I now seem to be having. The river that is time continues to flow heavenward.

Blessings and Godspeed

https://ccel.org/ccel/prudentius/cathimerinon/cathimerinon.titlpage.html

PRUDENTIUS

Full fifty years my span of life hath run,

Unless I err, and seven revolving years

Have further sped while I the sun enjoy.

Yet now the end draws nigh, and by God’s will

Old age’s bound is reached: how have I spent

And with what fruit so wide a tract of days?

I wept in boyhood ‘neath the sounding rod:

Youth’s toga donned, the rhetorician’s arts

I plied and with deceitful pleadings sinned:

Anon a wanton life and dalliance gross

(Alas! the recollection stings to shame!)

Fouled and polluted manhood’s opening bloom:

And then the forum’s strife my restless wits

Enthralled, and the keen lust of victory

Drove me to many a bitterness and fall.

Twice held I in fair cities of renown

The reins of office, and administered

To good men justice and to guilty doom.

At length the Emperor’s will beneficent

Exalted me to military power

And to the rank that borders on the throne.

The years are speeding onward, and gray hairs

Of old have mantled o’er my brows

And Salia’s consulship from memory dies.

What frost-bound winters since that natal year

Have fled, what vernal suns reclothed

The meads with roses,–this white crown declares.

Yet what avail the prizes or the blows

Of fortune, when the body’s spark is quenched

And death annuls whatever state I held?

This sentence I must hear: “Whate’er thou art,

Thy mind hath lost the world it loved: not God’s

The things thou soughtest, Whose thou now shalt be.”

Yet now, ere hence I pass, my sinning soul

Shall doff its folly and shall praise my Lord

If not by deeds, at least with humble lips.

Let each day link itself with grateful hymns

And every night re-echo songs of God:

Yea, be it mine to fight all heresies,

Unfold the meanings of the Catholic faith,

Trample on Gentile rites, thy gods, O Rome,

Dethrone, the Martyrs laud, th’ Apostles sing.

O while such themes my pen and tongue employ,

May death strike off these fetters of the flesh

And bear me whither my last breath shall rise!

THE HYMNS of PRUDENTIUS; TRANSLATED by R · MARTIN · POPE; MDCCCCV PUBLISHED; BY J.M. DENT AND CO: ALDINE HOUSE LONDON W C