Carmelite Mystics to the Rescue

Whilst giving a series of lectures on prayer at Belmont Abbey, I was cornered by one of the participants who demanded to know my qualifications. Although I was taken aback, I couldn’t but concede that he had every right to know whether or not the lecturer was worth the time and money he had spent. After all, if I’d been giving a course on scripture, theology or canon law the participants would have had every right to expect that I had an MA – if not a PhD – in the relevant subject on which I was holding forth. I found it embarrassing to admit therefore that I hadn’t any such qualifications in those subjects. On reflection, however, I realized that it was precisely because I had no such qualification that I was able to give the lectures and, for that matter, write all my books.
You see, ‘My name is David and I am a dyslexic.’ It took more than forty years before I was able to say those words, thanks to a chance meeting with a doctor who knew something about what she called ‘my gift’. It was a tremendous relief to meet someone at long last who understood what nobody had been able to understand before, and that included me. At school my teachers subscribed to one of two theories – either ‘That boy is stupid!’ or ‘That boy is lazy’. For myself I didn’t know what to think. All I knew was that I wasn’t stupid; I knew I had a good mind even if it didn’t easily conform to traditional teaching methods devised for the majority and the examinations set to validate them. When my form master wrote on my school report, ‘You could scourge this boy and he wouldn’t work’, I just had to accept that what he said was true. Funnily enough, when in later life I had managed to master most of the other deadly sins, I found that despite what I had been forced to believe I never really mastered sloth.   read on