The Soul Being Separated from the Body: The Dialogue of St. Catherine of Siena – Manuel Marrero
January 26, 2026
On January 1st, my father suffered a TIA. With under twenty four hours to make my decision, he had stabilized and was likely to be admitted one night for monitoring and test results. I told him at the hospital that I was boarding my flight to Montreal in the early morning as planned. He was asking whether he had caught some virus, and asked me not to kiss him. I said I’d come see him soon.
Planes to and from Canada are pleasantly empty. Canada has abandoned God. The devil lives in Montreal. In this life, you’re either a tool for God or the devil and I’m a soldier for the king. I love God. After Montreal, I’ll never be cold again.
Canadian ICE was brusque but polite. I noticed they never failed to return “have a nice day.” I was flagged as suspicious I suppose and sent to a room where a guy sternly kept calling me and asking me to divulge details about my life and intentions in Canada. They googled me, probably saw the NFT thing, and were struggling to parse me together. You can google the girl I’m staying with on my site, proof we met because I published her poem. By discretion or grace, the engagement ring in my bag slipped my mind when asked to disclose gifts, though rosary served as a phatic decoy, an offering of eccentricity. Their border is secure and I respect it.
The majority of my work is notes. All I see is God, and ministry and charism, and while the softness of souls and the godliness of hearts, bodies temples, hearts altars, may console me, fear and trembling through this path isn’t likely to lead me to material riches but poverty, albeit perhaps permanently away from interior desolation and institutional capture. There is a narrow door, keys of obedience and a bridge of doctrine, crosses and crowns in a spiritual warzone, structure to practice faith, and faith is a hard-sought practice. And God is amazing and lives in your chest, and sees through your eyes at hard truths. If you believe it, it makes it real, or faith. The metaphysics. “Gnawed by the worm of conscience” again. As an oldhead I need peace in my heart for my nervous system. We should all obey the pope, lest he be a prophet unheeded in his time. I like to push the limits a little bit. Secular life is just how it happens on TV. Phenomenology is where metaphysics makes you die in real life. I’m not one of these socially liberal, doctrinally constrained types. I’m just wrong again, and that’s okay. We are so far removed from what is good. We must carry a cross if we ask to carry anything else. Pray for prayer’s sake and for continuity of prayer.
The spiritual and the corporal works of mercy and the works of salvation. God is tiny, quiet, and he whispers in stillness. My will is dead my sensuality mortified. My will is dead in Christ. I see your will in intention and disposition, and not just words. Intention personifies will, not words. Only the Word. Will ordered rightly a primitive faculty may serve God. Depart from me I never knew you. Faith is impossible. It’s a practice. Fruits from the abundance of contemplation.
To know God is to desire to love perfectly. To be so eroded by annihilation only love is left. Only perfect love enters heaven and you are purified of inordinate attachments here on earth or in purgatory, a product of the masochistic Catholic imagination, if you must.
I firmly resolve to amend my life. What could the creator of the universe have in mind for me?
The “madman of love” is demanding, offering the “food of truth.” “Die to the world and hasten along this way of truth.”
I had to go see about a girl like good will hunting to learn flight from fidelity. Immured and interred me, but out of your sensual prison into the fire I go.
Waging intense spiritual warfare for the human condition, “uncreated light” working through me.
A deeply ascetic mystical experience, the manuscript circulated among the Dominican Order for about a century before it was fixed, standardized, and typeset as a book. It has the structure of prayer and repetition and the texture of biography, one can sense the high medieval phenomenon that was authorship, your critical thinking not wanted or valued in faith, macabre morbid and bleak times she grew up in, half of Europe’s population decimated in the black death, factionalized papacy and geopolitical schism, nations ruptured. In ecstatic fervor she, illiterate, dictated this to her scribes. It exhorts “holy hatred,” “holy prayer” to go straight to heaven. Hell is a place with a shape and Heaven is a wedding feast.