But here and throughout, formal private prayer, at set periods and according to some plan, remains subserviant to habitual recollection. It is in the streets of King's Lynn and Norwich, on roads and ships and pilgrimage, that Margery's vivid meditations and colloquies take place. Even with the English anchoress, like the Benedictine monk, it is constant recollection of Christ's presence, rather than formal meditation, that links up the Offices and liturgy.
The Caroline emphasis is also on a total Christian life in the world, supported by the liturgy, especially by the morning and evening Offices, but here the moral element, the practical doing of God's will, is much more pronounced than the affective. We shall see that neither recollective technique is wholly satisfactory, and that if modern Christians are to live continually in their faith they must be guided by a combination of both fourteenth- and seventeenth-century practice: the one supplies what the other lacks.
It is here and in the preceding characteristic that the meditative methods and techniques of Counter-Reformation spirituality can be either a blessing or a curse. Sensibly used, they can help us to a more vivid sense of the presence of Christ and to a more intimate understanding of his mind, to be carried over into habitual recollection. An undisciplined enthusiasm for these methods which detracts from recollection, or worse still supplants the daily Office, ends in chaos. Parts of the teaching of St Ignatius Loyola supply something useful which the English tradition lacks, while the complete Exercises form an ascetical system incompatible with our own.
Martin Thornton, 1915-1986
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