A Child’s Complaint

The commonest difficulty of the interior life, certainly for Catholics, probably for many who never belong to the Visible Church, is to continue to cope faithfully and charitably with daily events when the sense of pleasure in those events has unaccountably vanished. It is apparent in a man’s working life when every decision and action has to be made, as it were, against the grain – when the ordinary sense of satisfaction has been replaced by an opposite feeling of tedium, discord and personal incapability. It is apparent in home life when, for example, a woman feels that she no longer ‘loves’ her husband, that her children are eating her alive, that she is bound to a bleak and terrible routine. These are not abnormal states. After the departure of the special spiritual or biological bonus that the Creator seems to give to the young, they are recurrent in the lives of all adults, though fortunately permanent for only a few of us. In advice to a penitent, a priest will usually call these states of mind crosses, suggest a relaxed abandonment to the Divine Will, and offer one or two minor practical ideas for better adjustment. I suggest (perhaps presumptuously, and chiefly to myself, though it may be of use to others) a form of prayer one could use on such occasions.

Prayer Expressing a Dislike for the Human Condition

Dear Lord – You are the King and I am the servant: you are the Landlord and I am the tenant. I confess that I have often abused your hospitality. But at the moment my own faults are not foremost in my mind. The inscrutable way other people behave does trouble me – they are so unpredictable, so demanding, so oblivious to my needs. I recognise that the Fall of Man is largely responsible for this; but that doesn’t make me like it any more. It hurts me too when those nearest to me, my lifelong companions, have the same faults as myself – or different faults – but either way, apparently designed topage 430 touch me in the sorest places. I would like to live in a world of beauty; but I see ugliness and spiritual squalor everywhere around me, and also everywhere inside me. I would like to be in the company of saints; but I am not. I would like to be a saint myself, for You and for me, to please both of us; but as You know, I am not a saint.

The weather, the sequences of time, human society, and my own psychology and biology, seem to be peculiarly designed for my discomfort. I don’t like this at all. When I look at You on the Cross, I see that You suffered all this, and far far more. It should make me ashamed of grumbling. But You know I am not You. A small fraction of your suffering would drive me round the bend in no time at all. Suffering has no appeal to me. I want sweetness, love, harmony, friendship – I am at present a small cold frog in the middle of a big, smelly bog.

You could answer – ‘Child, why all this emphasis on the First Person? Can’t you love a bit more and forget yourself?’ Well, Lord, that sounds excellent; but it’s not the way I’m built. You made me, a human organism, sensitive to every change in the world around me, acutely aware of self; You implanted in me this ferociously strong instinct of self-preservation, this inextinguishable desire for happiness. There was a reason for it; there’s a reason for everything You do. The answer is that I’m not intended chiefly for earth, this place of darkness and exile, but for Heaven. But I don’t like the road there: the pains of age, the slowly failing faculties, the unavoidable gate of death which is my admittedly suitable share in your Cross. No; I don’t really blame my fellow-beings. At times, my God, I secretly, semi-consciously blame You – for being so different from me, for seeming to disregard what I am able to bear or not able to bear.

Dear Lord, there You are! The terrible secret is out now, of which You were perfectly aware all the time. There are occasions when I dislike You. Nevertheless I trust in You; nevertheless You are my King. A child is unhappy when its toys are taken away – intellectual pleasure, human love, physical well-being, sex, alcohol, the making of poems, pleasure in a good meal or the waves breaking, a satisfying conversation with a friend You have shut away these toys in your cupboard. Please give me some of them back now and then. What did you play with when You were a Child? The story goes that You made clay birds and turned them into real ones. Remember I am still, and may always be, nothing more than a child.

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