And so I was led into the Church's ministry. My period in the diaconate has been rewarding and illuminating as I serve my necessary apprenticeship prior to the final ordination to the priesthood that awaits me, as I write, in about three months' time. I have found no reason to doubt the rightness of my decision to become a minister of the Church. Although more work has consequently fallen on my shoulders, I find the presence of the Lord a constant support in all my undertakings. Nor has my professional life suffered; indeed, it goes on from strength to strength.
May all this continue as God wills it.
What my future work is to be, I do not know. In myself I find the greatest affinity with the spirit and writings of the mature William Law - not so much the younger man whose A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life so influenced John Wesley, as the older man made wise by his study of the mystical writings of Jakob Boehme fertilised by his own experience of life. The fruits of this were his two beautiful autumnal works, The Spirit of Prayer and The Spirit of Love. In them he shows a union of the sacramental devotion of the Catholic Church with the authority of the inner light of man, that great spiritual truth established by the Quaker witness to Christ. Perhaps I too may blaze this trail of a truly Christian universalism, which sees the power of Christ as an inherent property of the human soul (which, as Tertullian pointed out, is naturally Christian) manifesting in the "heathen" saints as well as the Christian ones.
Since William Law's day the glory of the Hindu and Buddhist way to reality has been brought to the notice of the Christian world, and great Catholics, of whom Thomas Merton is the finest contemporary example, have been able to include this wisdom in a fuller understanding of the Catholic faith. I pray to God that all I have learnt in my scientific studies, my psychical experiences and researches, and my mystical illumination may be bequeathed to mankind, so that it may follow the path I have trodden, am treading, and will be treading. It truly involves precarious living, but it does lead "from the unreal to the real, from darkness to light, from death to immortality."