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DisorientingSneeze
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No special story. Some sneezes are disorienting. Lately I do feel like I’m living in the aftermath of some tremendous sneeze.
Aw, man. I was hoping that your username would have a cool story behind it.No special story. Some sneezes are disorienting. Lately I do feel like I’m living in the aftermath of some tremendous sneeze.
Sorry.Aw, man. I was hoping that your username would have a cool story behind it.![]()
Monsignor Vernon Johnson, an Anglican clergyman who converted to Catholicism and became a Catholic priest, was an apostle and teacher of the spirituality of St. Thérèse. He founded the Apostolic Association of Priests of St. Thérèse, which gave retreats based on her spirituality.
It was in the late autumn of 1924. I was standing in an Anglican convent and holding in my hands a book, the autobiography of Saint Therese of Lisieux. It had been put into my hands by the Reverend Mother of the Convent to which I had been sent to take a retreat.
I had protested, saying that that sort of book did not interest me, that I had looked into it some years before in a (Roman) Catholic shop and had come to the conclusion that it was sentimental and artificial, un-English, and that it was just another Roman Catholic scheme for exciting devotion amongst the public, and that I distrusted it. The Reverend Mother replied that I ought not to say that. So I submitted and took the book.
But to me, as I stood in that autumn of 1924 with the autobiography of Saint Thérèse in my hand, these doubts and wonderings had not as yet occurred. I was entirely absorbed in the conversion of souls to Our Blessed Lord through the Anglo-Catholic revival in the English Church. I had no sense whatever of insecurity, no doubts whatever as to my position. It was not till another year and a half had passed that I was to experience the beginnings of those torturing doubts and that sickening sense of fear that was gradually to fill my mind. The tremendous “jolt” had not come to me; it was to come at Lisieux, but not till eighteen months had passed.
I took the Life of Saint Thérèse up to my room and began to read it. The first two chapters did not appeal to me at all: indeed, I found it difficult to get through them. Gradually, however, the story gripped me, and it is quite impossible to describe my state of mind when at last, long after midnight, I laid down the book. All I can say is that it moved my whole being as no other piece of writing has ever done.