If the periods of purposeful tension and relevant action require the balance of intervals of relaxation and recreation, the contemplative attention to high values, again—with the intense spiritual experience and elevation it implies—must be followed by pauses without any kind of intensity, during which the impressions received may thrive in stillness and strike root in our soul. Such a pause might, for example, take the form of a solitary walk during which we meditate, but without any effort or any express act of concentration, on what we have received, not intending, as we do in contemplation proper, to evoke a full response. Humble moments of this kind will contribute, in a unique and necessary sense, to the very completion of a deep and genuine spiritual experience. Or again, the pause we speak of may be represented by some external, neutral activities which we perform in solitude.

Thus, on the one hand, receptive contemplation will regenerate us so as to render us better able to accomplish valid and meaningful actions; but on the other hand, there is also a regenerative function proper to simple, neutral activities, which in its turn conditions our full capacity for realizing the contemplative attitude itself. It need hardly be said that regeneration is of a very different kind in the one and in the other case. The need for recreation in the broader and in the closer sense of the term is a specific stigma of our metaphysical insufficiency as fallen men in statu viae. The fact that we cannot maintain our life invariably on a level of high intensity but are obliged to intersperse it with nondescript, neutral moments, should evoke in us a humble awareness of our insufficiency. In contradistinction to the natural idealist, whose attitude was touched upon in Chapter 1, the Christian essentially accepts this limitation inherent in his human status. Avoiding the pitfalls of strained ambitiousness and exaltation, he is familiar with the reality of the limits imposed on us in statu viae. Yet, he envisions wistfully the status termini—the final state of man in our celestial home—in which he will never have to quit the highest intensity of being that fills the deep all-comprehensive “now” of eternity. “There we shall rest and we shall see; we shall see and we shall love; we shall love and we shall praise. Behold what shall be in the end without end!” (St. Augustine, De civitate Dei, 22.30).

Recollection nourishes simplicity

We perceive the profound relationship between recollection and simplicity. By virtue of recollection alone can we reduce everything to the common denominator that is Christ. In the attitude of habitare secum alone do we gain the stronghold where we are safe from all division by the multiformity of life. Recollection alone makes it possible for us to keep awake in ourselves the basic attitude of charity, elicited by the melting fire of Jesus’ love, and—notwithstanding the manifoldness of the different keys of emotional attention required by the changing situations—always to preserve our essential identity, to remain semper idem. Recollection provides the groundwork for that wakefulness thanks to which no mutually disparate currents of life can flow side by side in our soul without being confronted with one another.