On Avoiding Decisions in Desolation (Fr. Nix)

Avoiding Decisions in Desolation, Part 1: Generalities
https://www.padreperegrino.org/2023/04/decision1/

Avoiding Decisions in Desolation, Part 2: Specifics
https://www.padreperegrino.org/2023/04/decisions2/

I obviously endorse the rejection of gender change surgeries in part 2. I'm less sanguine about Jordan Peterson, though he's on the right side in this issue.

As to part 1, I think some are misusing a very important adage here, by faking facts about me.

In time of desolation, we should never make any change, but remain firm and constant in the resolution and decision which guided us the day before the desolation, or in the decision to which we adhered in the preceding consolation. For just as in consolation the good spirit guides and counsels us, so in desolation the evil spirit guides and counsels. Following his [the evil spirit’s] counsels, we can never find the way to a right decision.—Spiritual Exercises Rule I.5.

Some people think that all of my existence as a homeless has been one single desolation, so any decision I take now, per definition, is one to avoid. I obviously heartily disagree.

But on top of that, some who have for years on end ignored my actual and longstanding decision will, when confronted with it, pretend it's one reached (or adumbrated in a hopefully non-stable manner) recently while under desolation.

• To marry. Some may know that parts of the last millennium, I thought of becoming celibate, monk, priest or both. In fact, I did a check-up (in non-ideal circumstances) by writing a monastery. They said no. That's it for me. This was 25 years ago, in early 2000.
• To marry a lady younger than myself. By then I was 31. The ideal age for a lady's first childbirth is between 17 and 25. I keep getting further away from that age. So, my personally ideal age gap keeps growing.
• To avoid a job as a teacher. I have tried it. It's not a case of desolation, but of simple realism to know I'm not good at keeping a classroom together.
• To earn my money as a writer. This had been my ideal since my teens or even late pre-teens. Since then I have also come a long way in actual writing, as an essayist, as opposed to just dreaming of it. Novelist is still unreached, but essaysist, yeah, I can do that basically every day, and for a long time, lazy days can be compensated for what I have already written.

The people who pretend I should not be allowed to take that decision "right now" have in fact unjustly kept me back and in a kind of loose but nevertheless real quicksand style slavery. Their ideas on what I would ideally do instead (become a monk, enter a same sex relation, marry a divorced woman, become a teacher, as if that had been my plan A, get manual work where I would need some mentoring and consequently get a mentor) or what I would write instead if just give just one more chance to change my mind (novels with prewritten outlines and without doctrines that don't stop because I reach a plot problem or doctrine problem, essays for some other world view than my own: Vatican II "Catholicism" as per the views of the Archdiocese of Paris (pro-Evolution, against Abraham receiving tradition from Adam or even any believers at all), Spinozan Judaism, Noahidism, Evangelical Protestantism, Atheist Evolutionism fully embracing "Science" ...) are so uninstructed. There are people to do those things and defend those doctrines or write those non-doctrinal ways. I'm not that. I don't feel a need to become that just because I'm in the street. Doesn't make me THAT desolate.

The real decision to avoid on the principle given is actually to ave in to the kind of pressures I have mentioned.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Narn of Bergamo
27.VIII.2025

Bergomi sancti Narni, qui, a beato Barnaba baptizatus, primus ab ipso ejusdem civitatis Episcopus ordinatus est

I'm sometimes reminded of how some English royalty have tyrannised the lives of dynastic members. The court forcing Charles Edward to become Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha and thus to be on opposite sides of WW-I. The conditions Henry VIII put on the marriage and bloodline of his sister, Mary Tudor, Queen of France to Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk. I seem to be involved with people as tyrannical and paranoid.