--a spiritual autobiography—

Dear Reader,

                This book is written under protest. My spiritual director has encouraged me to write down my life story, but I have resisted the idea for a long time. I have two different, highly ambivalent sets of feelings on the matter. One part of me knows that this story is my own individuation journey and, at the same instant, is the next doorway through which I must pass in the ongoing emergence of my own Self; it is both the end and the means. And that, dear reader, is precisely why the other part of me resists vigorously. Nobody ever said that the process of individuation, or Self emergence, or spiritual healing is easy—at least nobody who has experienced it. There is also something to be said for the idea that for any man to write his autobiography when he is only forty years old might be pushing things just a little bit.Then there is the issue of objectivity. No autobiography has even a chance of being objective. I make no such claim. It is difficult enough for even a historian to achieve relative objectivity when writing the biography of somebody else. It would be foolish for me to even aspire to such omniscient detachment. So I will not even try.

But a spiritual autobiography is a very different genre. It is not historiography. I am incapable of objectively evaluating the events of my own history anyway. Those events, people and happenings are of no ultimate importance whatever. People come and they go; scenes change like a kaleidoscope; careers come into being and are later replaced by other "life-long" vocations. But what is really important is how I felt about all of those things and how I feel about them now. What those events taught me about myself, about God as I understand Him, about my reason for being—those are the things that are really important. Events are not important; my perception of them is important. Exterior appearance is not relevant; interior reality is relevant.And so, dear reader, be aware that the events I shall narrate are but signs pointing to truth—truth which I am still in the process of sorting out. I do not know who you are. I do not know that anyone other than me will ever read these words. But if you are reading these words, know that they all ultimately mean only one thing, one reason for writing, one reason for being—love. For through every word on every page of this book, I remainAffectionately yours,

Randall Dale Horton "Randy"

The Hermitage of St. Antony of the Desert

--edited and enlarged in February, 2001

originally written in 1982