• by DAVID TORKINGTON
It’s not every day that you have the opportunity of consulting a hermit who was once a professor of physics at a major university, and who had been a disciple of Padre Pio for over 20 years.
-How an imperfect man like me could become more like the man I aspired to be.
“By purification and transformation.” he replied.
“But how does God purify us?” I asked.
“Firstly,” he said, “God doesn’t, unless we allow Him in by choosing to open our hearts to Him in prayer. If we don’t pray then He can’t get in for long enough to purify us from all that keeps Him out.”
“At first, after the difficulties any beginner experiences, there usually follows a time when prayer becomes relatively easy and enjoyable until the purification proper begins in earnest. You see, things that are not alike cannot be united. God cannot transform self-centred human beings until they are purified of everything that keeps Him out.
“The more prayer enables a person to be open to His love, the quicker it can purify all the dross that is within us. You may remember from your schooldays what happens when an irresistible force strikes an immovable object. It generates heat.
“When the pure love of God begins to strike the pure selfishness that hardens the human heart, it generates heat.
“This is what some of the mystics call the baptism of fire, that follows the first baptism when those who so choose, choose to open themselves radically to the fire of the Holy Spirit.
“It can be extremely painful and exhausting because it's hard work. Although it’s primarily God's work, we have to participate in it if it is to be successful.
“The first principle of thermo-dynamics states that work is heat, and heat is work, and the heat that is generated as the fire of the Holy Spirit is brought to bear on the human heart, generating the highest form of energy, which is love.
“Let me explain more clearly what I mean. Isaac Newton discovered that although light is colourless it contains within itself all the colours of the spectrum.
“They remain unseen until they are refracted in such a way that the colours of the rainbow become visible for all to see.
“Now it's exactly the same with the love of God. When that love strikes a purified human heart, that heart acts like a spiritual prism that separates what is one in God into many gifts in man, as the Divine is transposed into the human. Then these gifts become visible to others as the person who has been transformed begins to act and behave in a perfect Christ-like way.
“The lives of the saints give one example after another of how a man or woman who has been transformed by the love of God can do more for others in a matter of moments than an unpurified person can do in a lifetime. It enables them to do for others, even those who they may never have met, something of what has been done for them.
“If their own hearts became like prisms that enabled God’s gifts to be channelled into every part of their being then they gradually become prisms themselves that enable that same love to be channeled to others.
“The second principle of thermo-dynamics states that a cold body cannot communicate heat to a hotter body. But a body set afire by the Holy Spirit can set everybody else on fire as we have seen time and time again in the lives of the saints.
“We have never needed more than we do now, people who are willing to allow themselves to be purified into spiritual prisms so that they can set the world afire with love before it's set afire with a hatred that will destroy it.”