The Un-Autobiographical Catholic

   While Protestant devotional literature abounds with people telling stories about their lives & themselves & their beliefs etc., Catholic spiritual life has an anti-autobiographical basis. The Imitation of Christ is one of the central books of devotion because the goal of Catholic life is to lose all personal detail and to be wholly taken into the internal life with Christ, to lose the world, not to further attach oneself to the world by telling the tale of one's journey through it. Books that talk about one's "spiritual journey" are always monuments to the ego of the person writing them. The sole reason Blessed John Henry Newman wrote Apologia pro vita sua was to defend Holy Church. His veracity and devotion to Truth was casually written off by Charles Kingsley as things that Catholics always sacrificed to become perverts (the Anglican/Episcopalian term of contempt which is still operative today, tho' they keep it mostly to themselves). The goal of the sacraments & the spiritual life in Christ is divesting oneself of the things which are always entwined with the ego & with the ambitions & scheming of this world, and nothing is more exemplary of the ego of anti-Catholics than the exaltation of the Self under the guise of proving oneself a disciple of Christ. Christ, God the Son and Crucified outcast & sacred Victim on the altar, is tricked out, in Protestant autobiography, with all the accoutrements the spiritual autobiographer has chosen for him. So when Protestants read Catholic autobiography, they're dissatisfied -- they want more juicy tidbits about the "spiritual journey" of the writer, and a lot more fulsome material about God, rather than what they are likely to find. They also completely misread the posthumous book of Mother Teresa's letters which talked about the absence of spiritual consolatoins, overlaying it with their own lack of faith, saying that Mother Teresa had doubts. She never had doubts: she had the agony of knowing that Christ was always present in the Host, but never experiencing this emotionally, imaginatively, or through any visionary comfort -- this was the consequence of a first visitation from Him & a vow to serve Him among the destitute. This is unintelligible from the Protestant position, which absolutely requires having effusive feelings about God and expressing those feelings, even imposing them on friends & family members whether they're welcome or not. All normal encounters, family reunions or chance conversations, become the Protestant's pretext for telling more stories about themselves, in absorbing the reality of the others' lives in order to firm up their authenticity as believers in Christ.