Spiritual Excercises in a Cellar Bookstore

~ Brett Foster Hide me within Thy wounds, Memory, ennoble these afternoon passions— a busy day, register down, down on my luck, and in the corner of the store at the back of the Spanish section lies my dust-covered method perfectly at home in perused silence. The thin leaves composing the folio barely conserve the fading Imprimatur of Paul III. Last Sunday just before closing I considered his cave meditations to rid myself of "disordered tendencies." I sought the divine Will, and at least found some thrill of discipline; the physical act channeled the spiritual like a funnel, steered everything toward a single gesture: each time one falls into that particular sin or defect, let him put his hand on his breast, grieving for having fallen. I locked the store early and knelt below its shoebox of a window, the sky reminding me of our peculiar kingdom, heirs of time and eternity, a dual dominion shared not even with angels, a "singular privilege." After the prelude, evacutatio sensuum, the mind spilling through the body to clear itself, vacuous, then the terminal flare of Conscience, applicatio sensuum, the fiery iron of the senses branding the composition. Each heartbeat spans eons. The halted moment elevates my small Understanding: the smell of sweat and blood in the midnight garden, the vinegared sponge of Golgotha— and I can see you too, Ignazio, fallen soldier, leg twice broken. Last sacraments administered at Loyola castle, you convalesce by reading legends on the Bay of Biscay. On the altar you hang your sword before the Virgin and pronounce the vow, a celibate among the emerald fields of Monserrat, clothed in a hemless pilgrim's robe, voice robbed by your colloquy, then turned to sterling. Your Society proclaims you "trainer of men." The drama of one body's cosmography—immediate world willed from a little book—: heart, brain, vapors; I burst before the mass of history . . . gold silence of the shelves, dialogue of flowers sprouting from marrow, and the mind like white manna resplendent in the window, the sweet stars of Manresa moving swiftly – previously published in Mars Hill Review