The path to paradise: Mortification, self-annihilation, and the desert as a spiritual crucible

“ How could Bill, as yet scarcely tried by life, comprehend the purging flames through which she had passed or realize time's power to reveal unsuspected truths.
“When you've been married to a man nearly twenty-two years and have built up a place together, there's bound to be a bond between you,” she eluded. “He just lives for this farm. It's almost as dear to him as you are to me, son, and it's a wonderful heritage, Bill, a magnificent heritage. Just think! Two generations have labored to build it out of the dust. Your father's whole life is in it. Your father's and mine. ”

“ Life to me has always been a strange world that I never got over thinking about and trying to understand, and at the same time hustling to get through with every day of it as fast as I could by keeping at the only thing I knew which would make it all more bearable. There's a lot of pain in work, but it's only of the muscles and my pain has always been in the things I've thought about. The awful waste and futility of it all! Take this farm—I came here when this was hardly more than a desert. You ought to have seen how thick the dust was the first day we got down here. ”

“ Secondly, I am to consider that God our Lord, seeing the forgetfulness and pride of Adam, condemned him to the sentence of death, and to return into the dust of which he was formed, wherein principally He intended three ends for his good and ours.
i. To chastise his sin with it, and that we ail might perceive how grievous an evil sin is, seeing it is sufficient to destroy and to turn into dust so beautiful and rich a frame as is man; for if Adam had not sinned he had not died, but had been translated into heaven in body and soul with all his integrity and perfection. ”

“ It is a strong life. It is the desert world.
It is under these lights that one contemplates the wretched human lot in the wild glory of nature. The grandeur of the natural scene—the miserable life of men—no eye can miss that contrast over all these horizons. The splendid force of nature, visible in all its energies, on a scale of sublimity, triumphant, the master of the world! But life—it is la misère. Look at the crouching tent, irregularly striped with brown and white, wool and camel skin, pitched under the crest of the great yellow dunes or in some wrinkle of the rock face of the waste. ”

“ Martin felt embarrassed. He was not looking for happiness but merely for more of the physical comforts, and an escape from loneliness. He was practical; he fancied he knew about what could be expected from marriage, just as he knew exactly how many steers and hogs his farm could support. This was a new idea—happiness. It had never entered into his calculations. Life as he knew it was hard. There was no happiness in those fields when burned by the hot August winds, the soil breaking into cakes that left crevices which seemed to groan for water. ”

“ But if the soul is in heaven, the body is forsaken, dead, and thus the medium, the organ of connection between the world and the soul is annihilated. Death, the separation of the soul from the body, at least from this gross, material, sinful body, is the entrance into heaven. But if death is the condition of blessedness and moral perfection, then necessarily mortification is the one law of morality. Moral death is the necessary anticipation of natural death ”

“ Temperance, self-denial, and mortification to the world, do very much befriend the exercises of piety, and help to transmit the observance of them to posterity. The more dead we are to the delights of sense the better we are disposed for the service of God; but nothing is more fatal to the entail of religion in a family than pride and luxury. ”

“ This temptation, at bottom, can only come from one source—the love of self. The irreligious man's correspondences are concentrated upon himself. He worships himself. Self-gratification rather than self-denial; independence rather than submission—these are the rules of life. And this is at once the poorest and the commonest form of idolatry.
But whichever of these views of sin we emphasize, we find both equally connected with Death. If sin is estrangement from God, this very estrangement is Death. It is a want of correspondence. If sin is selfishness, it is conducted at the expense of life. ”

“ All that you have to do, is to oppose, resist, to renounce the evil tempers, and workings of your earthly nature. You want no deliverance, but from the power of yourself. This is the one murderer of the divine life within you. And every thing that your earthly nature does, is under the influence of self-will, self-love, and self-seeking, whether it carries you to laudable, or blameable practices, all is done in the nature and spirit of Cain, and only helps you to such goodness, as when Cain slew his brother. ”

“ You can commence to purify yourself, and by so doing can arrive at peace, or you can refuse to purify yourself, and so remain with suffering. Step aside, then; come out of the fret and the fever of life; away from the scorching heat of self, and enter the inward resting-place where the cooling airs of peace will calm, renew, and restore you. Come out of the storms of sin and anguish. Why be troubled and tempest-tossed when the haven of Peace of God is yours! Give up all self-seeking; give up self, and lo! the Peace of God is yours! Subdue the animal within you ”

“ You attain to immortality by filling your minds with truth. Therefore, become like unto vessels fit to receive the Master's words. Cleanse yourselves of evil and sanctify your lives. There is no other way of reaching truth. 14 [Pg 4]
Learn to distinguish between Self and Truth. Self is the cause of selfishness and the source of evil; truth cleaves to no self; it is universal and leads to justice and righteousness. 15
Self, that which seems to those who love their self as their being, is not the eternal, the everlasting, the imperishable. Seek not self, but seek the truth. ”

“ It is the supreme end, Nonentity. The attaining of this is the object to which we ought to aspire, and for that purpose we should seek to destroy within ourselves all cleaving to existence, weaning ourselves from every earthly object, from every earthly pursuit. We should resort to monastic life, to penance, to self-denial, self-mortification, and so gradually learn to sink into perfect quietude or apathy, in imitation of that state to which we must come at last, and to which, by such preparation, we may all the more rapidly approach. ”

“ And if there was one man on earth whom Peter admired as much as he did Romuald, it was a certain mail-coated Dominicus, a virtuoso in self-mortification. He exhibits its purging and penitential motives. Scourging purifies the body from carnality; that is one motive. It also atones for sins, and lessens the purgatorial period after death; this is another. There is a third which is rooted rather in temperament than in reason. This is contrition; the contrite heart may love to flagellate itself in love of Him who suffered sinless. ”

“ But if he departs out of his Self-hood, and forsakes his own Damnation, and continually casts himself only into God's Mercy, viz. into the Suffering and Death of Christ, and into his Resurrection and Restoration, and wills Nothing of himself, but what God wills in him, and by him, then the Will is dead to the Life and Desire of God's Anger; for it has no own Life, but lies in the Death of Self-hood and the Desire of the Devil ”

“ A dying must come upon all that would hinder God's working through us--all interests, all impulses, all energies that are "born of the flesh"--all that is merely human and apart from His Spirit. Only thus can the Life of Jesus, in its intensity of love for sinners, have its way in our souls.
Death to Self is the Way Out into a Life of Sacrifice.
This dandelion has long ago surrendered its golden petals, and has reached its crowning stage of dying--the delicate seed-globe must break up now--it gives and gives till it has nothing left. ”

“ Every Life which will be without Spot, must die in the Will-Spirit to Nature in the Fire of the Abominate to the first Impression of the Wrath, and must give itself forth, in the Will-Spirit to Nature, as a resigned Will through the Mortification in the Light of Love: Let it be either heavenly or earthly it must hold that process, or else it comes not to the highest Perfection in its Degree; for Man could not be helped unless the Love-Centre of the Love-Desire did enter again into the Humanity, and bring forth the own Life, viz. ”

“ Self-annihilation was the secret of the influence of those glorious women of the ages of faith who have since been placed upon the altars of the church. O restless, self-seeking women of to-day! striving for a power which will curse and not bless you, where is the sweet perfume of your humility? Where are the fruits of mortification? Where the aureola of sanctity? Where are those grand works for God, offspring of a faith that believes all and a love that dares all? For these are the virtues in a S. Catherine or a S. Teresa which all can imitate. ”

“ THE HEART OF BENICIA The Desert of Altar is transcendence of silence. From the savage Growler range in Arizona south to the obsidian bastions of Pinacate, by the dead Gulf, is space to crowd five million people with their tumult of cities, their crash of machines, hoot of locomotives and shriek of steel under stress. ”

“ THE GARDEN OF SOLITUDE Benicia O’Donoju by the side of the big Papago Quelele and with the twin towns on the Line behind her—ahead the unlimned immensity of the wilderness—gave herself to the exhilaration of flight. For the skimming and dipping of the little car over the wave crests of the desert was like the flight of the desert quail, who rarely lifts himself above the height of the mesquite in his unerring dartings from bush to bush. ”

“ Divinity, force, original cause—whatever may be your term for that power which jewels the grass with dew and swings the suns in their courses—this is very close in the desert. In great cities man has driven the Presence far from him by his silly rackets of steam and electricity, by his farcical reproductions of cliffs and pinnacles. ”

“ In the Desert of Altar he walks in silence and with God. The very air is kinetic with the energy that brought forth life on a cooled planet.
The desert had been Benicia’s teacher; had moulded her spirit to its own pattern of elemental strength. Born the last of the O’Donojus in the desert oasis that was the ultimate remnant of the once kingly Rancho [70] del Refugio—grant of a Spanish Philip to her ancestor—she had been reared in the asperities of the land, had absorbed into her bone and tissue the rigours and simple verities of a wilderness. ”

“ Rain comes only with occasional summer thunder storms up from the Gulf, storms which wake dead rivers into furious flood. So precious is this water from the sky that the primitive peoples weave mystic rain symbols into their basketry for a fetish, and their songs are all of thunderheads and croaking frogs.
Here in the Desert of Altar the impossible becomes commonplace. A man caught in a river bed by the spearhead of a freshet drowns in sand made mud and irresistibly rushing. Cattle drink no water for months on end but are sustained by munching cactus whose spines can penetrate sole leather. ”

“ Guadalupe’s sparse vocabulary of Spanish words was drained; but the manner of his resuming the forward hike was sufficiently eloquent. Guadalupe, born to the desert code and grown to manhood under the inexorable desert law, had in mind but a single impulse—to survive. His mind plumped through the bog of discomforts wherein Stooder’s was mired to read clearly the tablets of the desert’s decalogue: ten commandments in one—live! In extremity throw over loyalty, discard obligations of oath or of blood, strip the soul to its elemental selfishness; but live! ”

“ THIRST The sun went down before the sand storm abated. Two men, the one called civilized, the other a savage, crouched like rabbits in a covert beneath the body of the little car with a high sand drift piled up to windward even over the radiator top. Two mites in the wind-scourged wilderness of Altar with love o’ life the leveller that made them kin. ”

“ The desert under sun at the meridian flexed its harsh hand to pinch the crawling caterpillar of chained men. Heat waves made all the [93] ragged summits of the Sierras pulsate. A dust tasting of desert salts spread a low cloud about the marching column. Thirst that was a poignant agony was made all the more unendurable by the tactics of the guards. From time to time one of them would unhitch a canteen from the pack mule’s burden and in the sight of the eight helpless sufferers tilt his head and guzzle noisily. ”

“ To-day this forgotten remnant of a high road of adventure and hot romance exists a streak in an incandescent inferno of sand and lava slag, wherein death is the omnipresent fact. Occasionally a prospector putters along its dreary stretches, chipping at ledge and rimrock. A Papago or a Cocopa creeps over caliche-stained flats with baskets of salt from the Pinacate marshes near the Gulf.
That is all. The Dead Men hold their road inviolable. It is dust of the desert. ”

“ THE COMING OF EL DOCTOR The sandstorm that overwhelmed Stooder and his guide on the Road of the Dead Men brought the mighty voice of the desert to the Garden of Solitude in requiem for the soul of Don Padraic O’Donoju. Savage elegy of a life lived in communion with the spirit of the wild.
There was no priest to order the funeral rites of the Church. Though a day’s journey in Quelele’s car to Caborca and back would have fetched a minister of religion, Benicia was determined word of her father’s death should not reach the man who provoked it sooner than the courses of rumour allowed. ”

“ The light had the preternatural purity which gives a foretaste of mirage: it was the light in which magic becomes real, and which helps to understand how, to people living in such an atmosphere, the boundary between fact and dream perpetually fluctuates.
The sand was scored with tracks and ruts innumerable, for the road between Rabat and Fez is travelled not only by French government motors but by native caravans and trains of pilgrims to and from the sacred city of Moulay Idriss, the founder of the Idrissite dynasty, whose tomb is in the Zerhoun, the mountain ridge above Volubilis. ”

“ Silence of the day is intensified to such a degree that the inner ear catches a humming of supernal machinery in the heavens. The eye measures perspectives between the near and far planets. And the soul of man hearkens to strange voices; sighings from the pale mouths of the desert scrubs, born to a servitude of thirst; whisperings passed from mountain top to mountain top; faint stirrings of the earth relaxed from the torsion of the sun.
Doc Stooder, desert familiar as he was, never could blunt his senses to this emptiness of night in the wastes. ”

“ He rallied himself, for such drifting into the subjective was a new and puzzling experience for a practical man. But minute by minute the spirit of the desert, which is the spirit of chaos become ponderable, stole over him, chaining his [180] imagination to things felt but not seen of men. A chill of the untoward and the unreal swept over him. He seemed to be braced nervously for some blow out of the void. His imagination played with a dim figure, the shape of El Rojo of the red hair riding—riding through the dark on his eternal mission of damnation. ”

“ Every detail of our trip from Tangier to Rabat had been carefully planned to keep us in unbroken contact with civilization. We were to "tub" in one European hotel, and to dine in another, with just enough picnicking between to give a touch of local colour. But let one little cog slip and the whole plan falls to bits, and we are alone in the old untamed Moghreb, as remote from Europe as any mediaeval adventurer. If one lose one's way in Morocco, civilization vanishes as though it were a magic carpet rolled up by a Djinn. ”

“ Riding by Benicia’s side in the starshine, the man began to feel the emanations of a mastering will which poured from her as the pungent prickles of ozone surround a high-power dynamo. Her consciousness was frozen into a mould of purpose, locked against any distractions. Benicia was alive only to the single resolve to free herself from the curse of the Red One. Man nor spirit could invade that preoccupation.
There under the steady-burning desert lamps the man of the cities began to feel again that spell of the infinite which had chained him the night of Don Padraic’s passing. ”

“ From the first, his life was based on self-mortification and the practice of devotion. It is recorded that he said: “For thirty years I was active in self-mortification, and I found nothing harder than to learn divinity and follow its precepts. But for the disagreement of divines I should have utterly failed in my endeavour. The disagreement of divines is a mercy save on the point of Unification.” This is true indeed, for human nature is more prone to ignorance than to knowledge, and while many things can be done easily with 107ignorance, not a single step can be made easily with knowledge. ”

“ Those who have not endured the ordeal, can scarcely calculate the degree of interior crucifixion, or, the amount of self-abandonment required."
"Many desire, and would gladly accept the gift of prayer, but few aim at, and labour for the spirit of humility and self-abnegation, without which there can be no true spirit of prayer or recollection. Devotion unsustained by mortification is of a doubtful character." ”

“ By it we weaken our self-love, reduce it to reason, and free ourselves from our imperfections. It is in vain that we flatter ourselves we love Jesus Christ, if we are not mortified. All the sublimest sentiments of piety, all the practices of devotion are to be suspected, if not accompanied by this perfect mortification. We wonder to see ourselves so imperfect, and after so many practices of piety, so many communions, to feel the various passions that continually agitate our heart. ”

“ They should rather drop their attention thereto, and remain in indifference, accepting with equality the good as the bad, the sweet as the bitter, and bend their whole attention to a labor of greater importance; namely, the mortification of the mind and self-will. They should begin by dropping all the activity of self, which can never be done without the most profound prayer; no more than the death of the senses can be perfected without profound recollection joined to mortification. Indeed, recollection is the chief means whereby we attain to a conquest of the senses. ”

“ Self-sacrifice which is sought after, and triumphed in, is usually foolish; and calamitous in its issue: and by the sentimental proclamation and pursuit of it, good people have not only made most of their own lives useless, but the whole framework of their religion so hollow, that at this moment, while the English nation, with its lips, pretends to teach every man to "love his neighbor as himself," with its hands and feet it clutches and tramples like a wild beast; and practically lives, every soul of it that can, on other people's labor. ”

“ Trust not yourself; but your defects to know,
Make use of ev'ry friend and ev'ry foe.
Both the beginning and conclusion of this precept are remarkable. The question is of the means to subdue pride. He directs the critic to begin with a distrust of himself; and this is modesty, the first mortification of pride: and then to seek the assistance of others, and make use even of an enemy; and this is humility, the last mortification of pride: for when a man can once bring himself to submit to profit by an enemy, he has either already subdued his vanity, or is in a fair way of so doing. ”

“ It may co-exist with much that looks like sacrifice; there may be much of usefulness and of outward self-denial, and yet below the surface may remain a clinging to our own judgment, a confidence in our own resources, an unconscious taking of our own way, even in God's service. And these things hold down, hold in our souls, and frustrate the Spirit in His working. The latent self-life needs to be brought down into the place of death before His breath can carry us hither and thither as the wind wafts the seeds. Are we ready for this last surrender? ”

“ But he in whom self has become extinct is free from lust; he will desire neither worldly nor heavenly pleasures, and the satisfaction of his natural waned will not defile him. However, let him be moderate, let him eat and drink according to the needs of the body.12
"Sensuality is enervating; the self-indulgent man is a slave to his passions, and pleasure-seeking is degrading and vulgar.15
"But to satisfy the necessities of life is not evil. To keep the body in good health is a duty, for otherwise we shall not be able to trim the lamp of wisdom, and keep our mind strong and clear. ”

“ Wrapped up unduly in selfish anxiety for our own happiness and dignity, we become too sensitive to the injuries of foes, the slights of friends, the cuts and wounds of fortune. The reason why we lack the lowliness of Jesus, and miss the blessedness of His heavenly peace, is our refusal to take up the cross and follow Him in the pathway of self-sacrifice. It was His detachment from self that made Him invulnerable to wounds, imperturbable amid wrongs, good and kind to the evil and to the froward. ”

“ But the self-indulgent man has not the moral life to resist, nor the strength to escape; he is easily led into sin and made the slave of the devil. The mortified man is like a flower which draws nothing but its necessary nourishment from the earth, and that through a slender stem, while it opens wide its bosom to the light and air of heaven; so he, by self-denial, has narrowed all those avenues of his soul which lie earthward, while his whole mind is open to the contemplation of God, and his heart is filled with the taste of His sweetness. ”

“ Destroy illusions and the contact with things will cease to beget misconception. Destroy misconception and you do away with thirst. Destroy thirst and you will be free of ail morbid cleaving. Remove the cleaving and you destroy the selfishness of selfhood. If the selfishness of selfhood is destroyed you will be above birth, old age, disease, and death, and you will escape all suffering. 9
The Enlightened One saw the four noble truths which point out the path that leads to Nirvāna or the extinction of self: 10
The first noble truth is the existence of sorrow. ”

“ The man who saves his life for his own personal gratification will soon find that he has no life to save. That which makes life life is gone. It is the habit of self-control, the spirit of self-surrender to the will of God, the purpose of self-dedication to the highest ends in sight, which puts power into the thrust of each man's effort. ”