One Way Home

Extract

‘Laetati sumus pro diebus, quibus nos humiliasti, annis quibus vidimas mala.’ (Ps. 89.)

There are as many roads to Rome as there are travellers. Each one’s experience is different, so that the record of each journey has a unique value. I was a girl of eighteen when the Church first attracted me, and a woman of fifty-four when I was finally received. What follows is the story of a long, bitter and unavailing struggle against the endless patience of God.

I was the only child of an Oxford don who died young, and was brought up in the traditional beauty of an ancient university town. My mother was a devout High Anglican, but very tolerant: religion was never forced on me, and as a child I took little or no interest in it. At seventeen I read a little Plato at school, and thus discovered a new world of spiritual values. In this way, helped by my mother’s influence, and probably impelled also by some hidden process of inward conversion, I was drawn towards the religion which had hitherto been to me mere words and conventional churchgoing. I began to go to church of my own will, and to read the gospels, The Imitation of Christ, a book of selections from the German mystics, Dante, and St Augustine’s Confessions. There also developed a profound interest in the contemplative life, which persisted, sometimes consciously, but more often in secret, through all the years of my infidelity, working like a recurrent fever in the system. At this time I seriously thought of becoming a Catholic, and was encouraged by my mother, who, like so many Anglicans, had a great admiration for Rome, combined with an intensely patriotic attachment to her national church. I had also a secret desire, which I kept to myself, of eventually joining one of the Contemplative Orders.