My Name is David

WHILST giving a series of lectures on prayer at Belmont Abbey Retreat Centre I was cornered by one of the participants, who demanded to know my qualifications. Although I was taken aback I couldn’t but concede that he had every right to know whether or not the lecturer was worth the time and money he had spent. After all, if I’d been giving a course on scripture, theology or canon law the participants would have every right to expect that I had an MA, if not a PhD, in the relevant subject on which I was holding forth. I found it embarrassing to admit that I hadn’t any such qualification. On reflection however I realised that it was precisely because I had no such qualification that I was able to give the lectures and, for that matter, write these monthly articles.





A dyslexic





You see, “My name is David, and I am a dyslexic”. It took more than forty years before I was able to say those words thanks to a chance meeting with a doctor who knew something about what she called “my gift”. It was a tremendous relief to meet someone at long last who understood what nobody had been able to understand before, and that included me. At school my teachers subscribed to one of two theories – either ‘That boy is stupid!’ or ‘That boy is lazy’. For myself I didn’t know what to think. All I knew was that I wasn’t stupid; I knew I had a good mind even if it didn’t easily conform to traditional teaching methods devised for the majority, and the examinations set to validate them. When my form master wrote on my school report, “You could scourge this boy and he wouldn’t work,” I just had to accept that what he said was true. Funnily enough, when in later life I had managed to master most of the other deadly sins, I found that, despite what I had been forced to believe, I had never really mastered sloth.





The philosopher’s stone





It was a welcome relief to have an explanation of something that had puzzled me all through my life. I came to see how, what is generally seen as a terrible affliction, had, in fact, been for me the spiritual equivalent of the philosopher’s stone. At first it had seemed to be little more than a curse that made me an academic cripple, the school dunce and the comedian of the class, as I used the wits I undoubtedly had to draw attention away from the strange inexplicable debilitation that shamed me.



I don’t remember too much of my school days because my ‘little problem’ made them one long continuous dark night that I wanted to blot out of my memory for good. However things began to change for the better when the priest giving the annual school retreat said that God was not only everywhere, but knew everything and knew each one of us through and through, even our most secret thoughts. It suddenly occurred to me that if this was true He would know what was wrong with me and could show me how I could make something of a life that seemed doomed to failure before it had hardly begun. There and then I decided to turn to Him for the help that I hadn’t been able to find from anyone else. Fortunately for me the school had its own spiritual director. I asked him to sign me up for his weekly seminar on meditation for those who wanted to learn how to pray. I threw myself into it as if my life depended on it, because in a sense it did. I never gave less than half an hour a day to prayer and I often gave much longer. Meditation soon became comparatively easy, even enjoyable, and within months I was enjoying my first fervour that lasted for more than a year.





Rock bottom





Suddenly my lack of academic achievement seemed as nothing, indeed I already began to see it as a gift, because it had led an otherwise godless youth to turn to the only One who could help him. The fervour and the feeling generated in prayer made me feel special, made me feel that I was called to lead and guide others with the profound spiritual wisdom that had been given me. Then suddenly quite out of the blue everything changed. At the very moment I thought I had arrived at the top of Mt Carmel I found myself at the bottom, banished without rhyme or reason from the new and exciting spiritual world that I was beginning to think was my birthright. I was utterly bereft and turned to one spiritual director after another, but nobody could help me. When I told them about my first fervour they all said, “Oh, we all go through that at the beginning,” but nobody seemed to know why it suddenly came to an end, and what, if anything, came next. When other boys came to the same impasse they just dropped prayer and gave all their energy to studying for university because they had a future, but I didn’t. I just stuck to prayer no matter how difficult it became, not because I was a particularly pious youth (because I wasn’t), but simply because I had nowhere else to go, and no one else to whom to turn.





Strength in weakness





Then quite by chance I came across a book in the library called The Dark Night of the Soul by St John of the Cross. I’d never heard of him at the time. I couldn’t believe what I read; I couldn’t believe how this Carmelite saint, who I’d never heard about before, seemed to understand with such precision exactly what I’d been through, where I was at, and where I should be going. Frankel once said that you could bear anything, if it has meaning, and St John of the Cross had given meaning to what had been meaningless before. It was this knowledge that encouraged me to journey on ‘come what may’. In time and with perseverance light began to enter my darkness to encourage me along the way of purification. It was then that I turned to St John’s ‘big sister in Carmel’, St Teresa of Avila, and to her masterwork Interior Castle, that explained these moments of light as clearly as he had explained the darkness. I hungrily devoured all their works. They not only helped my spiritual life, but they helped my dyslexia too, because I simply had to read and re-read their every word to plunder the spiritual riches that I couldn’t find anywhere else.



 At long last I can thank God for what I have finally come to see as the greatest gift that has been given to me, for, as St Paul came to realise from his own experience, God’s power works most powerfully in weakness. Without my weakness I would never have turned to prayer in the first place, never have discovered and been able to understand and be supported by the two greatest of all mystical writers. I owe more to them than to anyone else for all that I have written, including all the articles on prayer that I have written over the past months in the Messenger of Saint Anthony and most of all for my book Wisdom from the Western Isles that has just been published. It is my life’s work that I have written for you and for all who want their lives to be changed by the power of Gods’ love working in weakness.