I will illustrate this from a living example:  that of the Sadhu Sundar Singh.  No one, I suppose, who came into personal contact with the Sadhu, doubted that they were in the presence of a person who was living, in the full sense, the spiritual life.  Even those who could not accept the symbols in which he described his experience and asked others to share it, acknowledged that there had been worked in him a great transformation; that the sense of the abiding and eternal went with him everywhere, and flowed out from him, to calm and to correct our feverish lives.  He fully satisfies in his own person the demands of Baron von Huegel’s definition:  both contact with and renunciation of the Particular and Fleeting, seeking and finding of the Eternal, incarnating within his own experience that transcendent Otherness.  Now the Sadhu has discovered for himself and practises as the condition of his extraordinary activity, power and endurance, just that balance of life which St. Benedict’s rule ordained.  He is a wandering missionary, constantly undertaking great journeys, enduring hardship and danger, and practising the absolute poverty of St. Francis.  He is perfectly healthy, strong, extraordinarily attractive, full of power.  But this power he is careful to nourish.  His irreducible minimum is two hours spent in meditation and wordless communication with God at the beginning of each day.  He prefers three or four hours when work permits; and a long period of prayer and meditation always precedes his public address.  If forced to curtail or hurry these hours of prayer, he feels restless and unhappy, and his efficiency is reduced.  “Prayer,” he says, “is as important as breathing; and we never say we have no time to breathe."[140]

All this has been explained away by critics of the muscular Christian sort, who say that the Sadhu’s Christianity is of a typically Eastern kind.  But this is simply not true.  It were much better to acknowledge that we, more and more, are tending to develop a typically Western kind of Christianity, marked by the Western emphasis on doing and Western contempt for being; and that if we go sufficiently far on this path we shall find ourselves cut off from our source.  The Sadhu’s Christianity is fully Christian; that is to say, it is whole and complete.  The power in which he does his works is that in which St. Paul carried through his heroic missionary career, St. Benedict formed a spiritual family that transformed European culture, Wesley made the world his parish, Elizabeth Fry faced the Newgate criminals.  It is idle to talk of the revival of a personal spiritual life among ourselves, or of a spiritual regeneration of society—­for this can only come through the individual remaking of each of its members—­unless we are willing, at the sacrifice of some personal convenience, to make a place and time for these acts of recollection; this willing and loving—­and even more fruitful, the more willing and loving—­communion with, response to Reality, to God.  It is true that a fully lived spiritual life involves far more than this.  But this is the only condition on which it will exist at all.