I’m reading Carlo Carretto again (Letters from the Desert),
an intimate work that follows Carretto’s feet and mind into the desert of North
Africa.
He had been very active in the Church for many years, and
quite suddenly he hears God call him to leave it all behind in his homeland of
Italy and follow God into the desert.
At one point towards the beginning of the book, he is
contemplating his earnest, dedicated labors and activity in the church back
home, his practice of running “continually from one project to another, from
one meeting to another, from one city to another”. While involved in all of that, he had been
operating on a worldview that went something like this: God created the world and then stepped aside
to rest; Christ founded the Church and then disappeared in to heaven to let the
Church save the world. Carretto says he
imagined that his frenzied life and work were somehow part of the column that
was holding everything up and everything together.
I drew back suddenly,
as though to fee myself from this weight.
What had happened? Everything
remained in its place, motionless. Not a
movement, not a sound. After twenty-five
years I had realized that nothing was burdening on my shoulders and that the
column was my own creation—sham, unreal, the product of my own imagination and
my vanity.
I had walked, run,
spoken, organized, worked, in the belief that I was supporting something; and
in reality I had been holding up absolutely nothing.
The weight of the world
was all on Christ Crucified. I was
nothing, absolutely nothing.
What amazing relief…to know that it does not depend on
me. May I never again be suckered into
the “sham, unreal…product of my own imagination and vanity.”
(All quotations taken from:
Carretto, Carlos. “You are
Nothing.” Letters from the Desert.
Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002.)
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