THE facts answer

NOW I LOOK AT REALITY AS THOUGH FOR THE FIRST TIME
A book to write, the appearance of an illness, and the Mystery that takes my hand. This is how I came to know my mortality and my eternality.

by John waters

I have a book coming out this month, called Beyond Consolation. It takes up, approximately, where my last book, Lapsed Agnostic, left off, though the focus this time is more on the cultural than the personal. The sub-title elaborates: “On how we became too clever for God–and our own good.”
   I wrote most of it last year, and it was a difficult experience. We underestimate the extent to which we become puppets of the common mentality. I may think I am thinking, but the culture does the work. It tells me what is “true” and puts a cynical smile on my face before I know it, lest I seek to exit these “truths.” My book is an attempt to unpick this process in myself, to stand on my own and become aware of what forces assail or, for a price, “support” me. The book begins with an account of the final interview of my late colleague Nuala O’Faolain, who spoke of her despair on being diagnosed with cancer. Really, the book is my attempt to put myself in something like her position, facing both my mortality and my eternality.
   Writing the book, I had to let go, one by one, of life’s illusions. I had to let the Mystery hold my hand as I took a few faltering steps, as though I had just gotten out of bed after a long, debilitating illness. For a moment or two, I stood upright, and understood that this was possible. Then I grabbed again at something I could see. I found myself, therefore, in this odd place: between my illusions and the Truth–trying to walk the few steps between them. It was exhilarating and terrifying. I glimpsed freedom, but also glanced off a terror such as I had never known, like a child thrown into the water by a father who wants him to swim by some instinct in himself. I made a few tentative strokes and then clutched at the bar.
Almost immediately after finishing, I became very ill and lay in bed for many weeks, as though something vital in me had died. I think what died were my illusions, which I could never again rely upon in the old way. And yet, there was no euphoric sense of having arrived in a new place. Lying in bed, I revisited many times Carron’s warning: “Everything vanishes.” If we do not constantly seek to judge our experience in the deepest way, we return to the safe area. But, without illusions, the safe area becomes a desert of despair. I stumbled through this desert for several months.
But I had seen something. And I had a method, the Giussani method, which tells me to go back to the beginning. I open my eyes. I look at reality as though for the first time. How can I not be amazed? How can I decide anything other than that I do not make myself and must therefore be the creature of Something that I know only in my own most inscrutable depths?