The School of Charity. Evelyn Underhill

Spiritual creation means a series of changes, which at last produce Holiness, God’s aim for men.

      “O support me,” says Newman, “as I proceed in this great, awful, happy change, with the grace of Thy unchangeableness. My unchangeableness, here below, is perseverance in changing.” The inner life consists in an enduring of this deep transforming process. The chief object of prayer is to help it on: not merely for our own soul’s sake, but for a reason which lifts the devotional life above all pettiness—because this is part of the great creative action which is lifting up humanity to the supernatural order, turning the flour and water of our common nature into the living Bread of Eternal Life. So, the first movement of our prayer must surely be a self-giving to this total purpose, whatever discipline and suffering it may involve for us.

      It is a part of the great virtue of self-abandonment, to acknowledge the plain fact that God knows the recipe He is working from and the result He wants to obtain, and we do not. Some need the flame, and respond to its quick action. Others, like the cracknel, come to perfection by moving at a steady pace through the long dark oven which makes a perfect biscuit from a dab of paste. A generous acceptance of this ceaseless creative process, as the thing that matters most in human life, and a willingness to be transformed in whatever way is wanted and at whatever ‘cost, unselfs the inner life, and makes it from the beginning accessible to the searching and delicate action of God; working in ways of which we know nothing, entering and controlling every action, and using every creature, its efforts, sufferings and sacrifices, for the accomplishment of His hidden design.

      In Paul Claudel’s great play, “The Satin Slipper,” the whole of the action is made to depend on the single prayer of a dying missionary, left by pirates on a derelict ship. Bound to a spar as to a Cross, he offers up his death; and so gives it the quality of a creative martyrdom, moves the secret springs of the spiritual world, and sets going a series of events which, after long years, save his brother’s soul. The whole scene—the ship in the empty spaces of the Atlantic, the solitary man dying by inches, with the bodies of his companions piled up at his feet—looks to the world a frightful tragedy, a waste of noble lives. But the martyr himself takes it with great tranquillity, saying, “Doubtless the vintage could not come to pass without some disorder: but everything after a little stir, is gone back again into the great paternal peace.” It is as if he said, “I believe in the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth, whose vision and love penetrate His whole creation; and who deigns to use my small pain in the workshop of charity.” Within this unseen spiritual order—which is, after all, the order into which we pass whenever we really pray—he gives with solemn joy his agony and death; that so his brother, who will never know the price of his salvation, may be brought back to God. Twenty years later, the secret powers which his sacrifice released complete their work; and by many crooked paths and strange places his brother’s soul is brought to the feet of God.