The heroic man is simple, and in his heroic act becomes the simpler. Every heroic act is the victory of a dominant aim over a multitude of petty ties and distractions. All experiences which enlarge our hearts, which expand and embolden our souls, and which render us able to sacrifice inferior things heroically—as does, above all, a great love under Jesus—contribute to our achieving true simplicity. What we must seek is a general readiness to give away lower things for the sake of higher ones, according to the divinely sanctioned legitimate order of values, and in this sense, ultimately, even to abandon any and every high good for the sake of the highest one—that is, Christ.

This pursuit of simplicity makes it imperative for us to lead a collected life. Certainly, recollection—the process of collecting ourselves—is not only a corollary of true simplicity but, more generally, one of the most important elements in our transformation in Christ. Therefore, a more extensive study of this subject follows. But even at first glance its close relationship to simplicity must be perceptible. Like simplicity, recollection implies a process of integration and unification, as contrasted to dispersion and dissipation. The very same words of Our Lord that stress the primacy of contemplation also contain an admonition to true simplicity, which must ever sound in the Christian’s ears: “Martha, Martha, thou art careful, and art troubled about many things; but one thing alone is necessary” (Luke 10:41-42).

6. Recollection and Contemplation

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Recollection and Contemplation

IN recollection and contemplation—kindred but not identical attitudes—we encounter two more basic constituents of religious life. Recollection is a condition of all truly wakeful and deep modes of living, and hence indispensable for our transformation in Christ. Contemplation, again, is the source that feeds all life in Christ, and at the same time, the end in which that life finds its fulfillment.

Distraction as the inability to concentrate

What, then, is recollection? It is primarily an antithesis to distraction. We say sometimes we are not able to recollect ourselves in prayer: we are distracted. We then mean that we are unable to concentrate our attention on one point; we are controlled by the automatism of our associations; our mind is flying from one object to another; the images of our fantasy fitfully displace one another. This state of mind, in which we do not attend fully to any object and fail to penetrate the logos of any part of being but are at the mercy of our mechanism of associations, is properly termed distraction—a state of being dragged along from one object to another, never touching any of them but superficially. That distraction is the exact antithesis to recollection.

Distraction as the inability to determine the object of our concentration