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Since the Incarnation, however, all baptized persons who frequent the sacraments are in a certain degree adepts, for in those sacraments they may be truly said to see, handle, hear and taste the Word of Life. Other powers, however, are still reserved to those who are the masters of the spiritual life; for not all persons, however holy, are contemplatives, ecstatics, or seers.
What solved these questions was the analogy that just as solar systems in the spilling universe rarely have planets capable of sustaining life, few are the contemplatives in the movements of sociable and voracious man.
To this same apprehension of Reality, this linking up of each finite expression with its Origin, this search for the inner significance of every fragment of life, one of the greatest and most balanced contemplatives of the nineteenth century, Florence Nightingale, reached out when she exclaimed in an hour of self-examination, "I must strive to see only God in my friends, and God in my cats."
How to convert these sluggish contemplatives, what type of Catholicity would be likely to flourish in the East, and how it could be reconciled with the stirring traits of the West, busied his mind. He often recalls his distant friends and contrasts new America with old Egypt.
The real task of her life was to suffer for the Church and for some of its members, whose distress was shown her in spirit, or who asked her prayers without knowing that this poor sick nun had something more to do for them than to say the Pater noster, but that all their spiritual and corporal sufferings became her own, and that she had to endure patiently the most terrible pains, without being assisted, like the contemplatives of former days, by the sympathising prayers of an entire community.
The limits of this enlargement have not yet been discovered. The greatest contemplatives, returning from their highest ascents, can only tell us of a world that is "unwalled."
This is why the great contemplatives utter again and again their solemn warning against the deceptiveness of thought when it ventures to deal with the spiritual intuitions of man; crying with the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, "Look that nothing live in thy working mind but a naked intent stretching" the voluntary tension of your ever-growing, ever-moving personality pushing out towards the Real.
She is one of the purest of Contemplatives; she knows, what we to-day too often forget, that the task is impossible without the vision. But it follows directly upon the vision, and this great mediaeval mystic is one of the most efficient characters of her age.
Yearning to depart from the bathos of contemporary society for the sublime colors of Titian, the circular idealism of Raphael, the ugly angular and emaciated forms of El Greco in that complex inner intensity that rendered beauty, the mysterious shaded faces of Caravaggio, and the true internal lives captured in the words of Shakespeare and Hardy, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Melville and James, Plato, Parmenides, and all dead contemplatives, she snobbishly wished to remove herself from the masses of men.
Being with that same man 24 hours a day at a Kentucky Derby, an Indianapolis 500 or other non-Parmenidetian activity that was paradise to the masses and vile to philosophers and contemplatives would have caused her to grab the nearest Time or Newsweek as quickly as most women reached for sanitary napkins.
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