My Relations with the Church III

The last description of the text of Mis Relaciones consists of commenting on certain fragments of the text. I found it difficult. All of them seemed relevant to me. So I have been obliged to make a selection. And if, from time to time, I sought the opinion of the much-loved Fr. Eulogio, it turned out to be quite an epic.

When the author does not wish to do so, communications should be deleted. Did Palau want them permanently unpublished? Crossing its threshold could mean gaining access, with dubious legitimacy, to the hidden sanctuary of his soul in love, surprising it in moments of maximum affective effusion.

There is only the outward appearance of a book here. Between the printed volume and the original notebooks, there is a wealth of experience. In time, more than a century. In dissemination, the abyss that separates a hermetic secret and its indefinite publicity. What sprouted stealthily as an intimate expansion, forbidden to any indiscreet curiosity, is now revealed with respect and even veneration. But without residue or restrictions.

The reader should approach this work with obligatory caution. For he is the one who discovers a soul caught by surprise. Without the faintest of clouds to hide it. To penetrate a psychology and scrutinise a heart without logic is an arduous task: the result of what is demanded of the reader here. The reader will not be able to crown his efforts with success if he does not decide to look and look again, to read insistently, to leaf through these autobiographical memories with patience and love.

Although there is always a logic in the most intimate part of the human being, it is the most difficult thing to understand about each person. To penetrate into Palau's spirit, one has to immerse oneself in his intense ecclesiastical passions, to relive the logic of his life, dominated by an insatiable desire for clarity.

Without a rapport with its spirit, it will sound like a continuous exaggeration to those who do not live according to this story of uncontainable expansion. What is decisive lies in the key to the writing, in its mysterious plot. Hidden, but warming, is here the living flame. Never has the expression been more apt: the ember hidden in the ash so much about the Carmelite vocation of Francis. All it takes is a faint, prolonged breath to ignite the fire. For the ember to be followed by the flame.

Intimate and reserved writing. Both writing and conversation are a privileged means of communicating with others. To share ideas and feelings with others. However, there is a major difference between oral and written communication. In the former, there is no prior composition. In the latter, there is normally a predetermined order. For in this field it is no more than a literary device. An expressive device without a real interlocutor present. This absence is what the aforementioned written communication with the addressee tries to alleviate. Known and direct in conversation. Not always in literary compositions.

Whether near or far, there is always an addressee, of course. Sometimes the paper modestly hides intimate confidants. Others crave, without dissimulation, multitudinous audiences. Even personal notes often caress a mysterious and indefinite effusive prolongation. Secrets guarded, on many occasions, as inviolable, end up being let loose and sail at the mercy of publicity. This is the fate of these pages, unpublished for a long time. Written conversations, Palau's intimate conversations, without a known addressee.

The pages of Mis Relaciones are too strong to be reduced to the colourless zone of intimate notes or papers. Not because they suffer from impersonal traces, which they have, but because they are on the borderline between the best-characterised forms of the autobiographical. They border on all of them without belonging fully to any of them.

It does not refer, directly, to the expression  fragments the partial disappearance of the autograph, which is also a fact. It does point out two things: that there is no lifetime diary and that there is no complete description of the years assigned as boundaries - 1864-1867 - only a certain number of dates are recorded, not proposed in an uninterrupted series. They are staggered, without a regular sequence. Although the most relevant is the one that frames cycles of varying temporal duration. Apart from exceptional cases, they correspond to days of retreat and spiritual exercises. They show notable regularity in the marking of dates and times. From time to time, they are altered by digressions of a temporary nature. The interspersed pages serve to define them better.

Almost exclusively, the dominant point of view looks at the author's intimacy, isolating it, as far as possible, from the surrounding environment. In such a narrow perspective, the reliving of spiritual experiences is concentrated in fixed hours or moments: morning and evening. They are like two extreme props that support the experience and the reflections of our protagonist. They hold no mystery. They are the rhythmic rhythm of his spirituality, framed in the moulds of the Carmelite-Teresian tradition. A kind of condensation that seems to occur in the first and last hours of the day. It is nothing other than the reference to morning and evening prayer. And it serves as a canvas for him to write his private diary, by putting down his meditations in writing.