The close affinity between sexual Eros and deceit is very startling - as in infatuation, infidelity and jealousy: " Quoniam lumbi mei repleti sunt il… - Ida Friederike Görres

people run away from burdens these days. There's nothing they hate more than to be burdened or tied. This accounts for this perverse cult of youthfulness: youth is in itself the yet unburdened state - so we worship youthful looks as the sign and symbol of that craving, almost the promise of its fulfilment. But to attempt to keep it for ever only leads to sterility in every sense: monstrous perversion of youth, destined as blossom of the fruit...

I've come to the end of von Hügel's voluminous work on Catherine of Genoa. For such outlay in erudition, it's basically an unrewarding book (for me!), but full of interesting side-lights...Curious, for instance, that Catherine, always universally cited as the recognised authority, the most important and competent witness to the nature of Purgatory, should actually never have had a vision of it - neither as shewing nor as visiting in spirit, as other mystics did..Her statements are pure conclusions, analogies, based on her own spiritual experiences of suffering and bliss: "So that's what it must be like in Purgatory!"

Take my own case: from nursery days we were taught to believe the worst of people...We were drilled, in principle and emphatically, never to believe anyone, never to trust anyone, all people are liars, people are always hypocrites, especially if they are nice to you, everyone can be bought, etc..Scandal was the sole topic of conversation in Stockau: 'Just to show you what the world is really like.'...I was fiercely determined to have no illusions, to confront even the ugliest reality face to face. I would smuggle The History of Prostitution and such-like books out of the library, disclosures of financial scandals I couldn't understand, books on the crimes of colonial government...And what was the result? I believed every word people told me, they could lie and swindle and make up whatever they liked...Could it be that my insatiable and often so incautious hunger for people who are good, pure, beautiful and holy is in fact the direct result of that early training to despise people?