Existential Crisis and Recusants outside England

I don't think anyone reads this blog anymore but here it is anyway.

I've been slowly driven into lunacy by my applications for grad school. Today there was this horrific fiasco wherein for a good 3 hours, I thought I wasn't going to be able to apply at all because of a professor. During that time period I got in a huge fight with my father who blamed me for everything and said that I was throwing away my whole future. Strangely the thing I was most angry about was that religious orders no longer accept sort of 'walk-in' members. If it had been the 13th century, I would've just joined the Dominicans as they were walking by.

Anyway, by some miracle it was all solved and appears (at least for today) that all will be well. However I had a long existential crisis for a while. I felt like failure might've been my chance to really become a saint. To flee from all things worldly. To smash my computer, pick up a habit, and just kiss the world goodbye. Become a hermit of St. Catharines and rid myself of excess weight and vice. In some ways it could be the best thing that ever happened to me.

I was thinking about the Recusants after 1688 and how some people just left England forever and tried to survive in Belgium gradually selling their jewelry, etc. Perhaps if they were rich nobles in comfort and toleration back home, their souls would've been in peril.

I dunno. I'm just going to school to get my peices of paper. Then perhaps, I will have the courage to reject the faith of my parents (ie. faith in education, titles, wealth, etc) and become poor, and save my soul.

I was strangely comfortable with my life in shambles, however there is one thing I do love, and that is learning. I was truly sad today because for a minute I thought, I won't be able to learn anymore for classes. Learning is like the oxygen of my soul, as is history. Who knows what I'd be without it.

In any case, I'm in safety again, slacking off, already sinking back into vice, apathy, and ingratitude. Comfort is the chief tool of the devil methinks.

Lord have mercy.

It wasn't until 1871 that Roman Catholics could attend Cambridge or Oxford, when the Test Act was repealed. The Test Act