Walter Emerson Adams
One begins this journey best in the context of this preface.
The Dove and Rose is free. Consider becoming a monthly or yearly paid subscriber to support my work. Or, if you enjoy a post and want to make a one-time contribution, the gesture will be much appreciated! Most importantly, enjoy yourself because I appreciate that you are here.
Find the Dove and Rose podcast here and on YouTube and Spotify.
I am a business and education professional with an undergraduate degree in economics from Princeton University and a master’s degree in public and private management from Yale University. For twenty-five years, I lived a life of superficial worldly prestige built on my degrees and ensuing positions with a well-known corporation, a Park Avenue executive management consulting firm, and as a division president managing a global brand. That life ended in near death and misery. A new life began through the loving intercession of Mary, the Mother of God, with her daughters in heaven, St. Joan of Arc and St. Thérèse of Lisieux. They became my companions on a new pathway through life, one leading to a kingdom in the distance I still hope to enter. I enthusiastically left the old life for the new and began writing an ongoing diary of our adventures together along the way.
My story begins in the summer of 1977 before enrolling at Princeton. Fresh out of high school and still a Protestant, I participated in a six-week cultural program in Brittany, France with my French class. Before leaving France, we visited Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy where I encountered a statue of St. Joan of Arc. My new life began already hidden within my introduction to Joan there; though it would remain concealed for decades. I am convinced that the grace of God foreshadowed the trajectory of my life on earth at that moment, though I sensed nothing at the time beyond curiosity. Later, in 1985 just prior to my marriage, I converted to the Catholic Church through the intercession of St. Thérèse of Lisieux. The foreshadowing became more concrete, now with St. Thérèse joining St. Joan as my heavenly companion.
On July 16th, 1986, a little over a year after joining the Catholic Church, I submitted to the Holy Virgin Mary as her slave according to the method of St. Louis de Montfort. I had a powerful conviction to abandon myself to Divine Providence through her Immaculate Heart. Our Lady took me seriously. My prayer was sincere. Heaven received it well. I was praying for what Our Lord Jesus Christ wanted to give me.
Soon after my consecration to Mary, I entered twenty years of painful devastation. Over those two decades, I lost everything of earthly value except my faithful wife and son. We lost our family business. Despite later holding high-level corporate positions that came through my degrees from Princeton and Yale, I suffered humiliating personal failures, ridicule, the loss of respect of family and friends, the loss of self-respect, the loss of mental and physical health, and financial collapse. Two decades after my consecration to Mary, I had fallen to the bottom in life. This was the first major milestone and expression of loving grace on my journey.
As I plummeted, Our Lady and the Faith supported me. Never did Our Lord Jesus Christ abandon me. Despite my chronic failures and humiliations, the sacraments and the Mass remained central to my life. I remained drawn to the Virgin Mary and, still in spiritual chains, reconsecrated myself to her in 2004 following the method of St. Maximilian Kolbe. Still suffering in the summer of 2005, alone in a motel room, I writhed in pain on my bed. Suddenly, out of nowhere, with no forethought, I moaned, “I offer all my suffering in reparation for offenses committed against the Immaculate Heart of Mary.”
Heaven also received this prayer well. My living death ended the following year. A resurrection began at the feet of a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary in July 2006 while on retreat at an abandoned seminary. As I drove through the previous night to the site, I prayed persistently to Mary, asking her to give me the Holy Spirit. The next evening after confession, I stood before her statue. I perceived her speaking through my heart, “I am the channel of the Holy Spirit in your life. I have always been with you. You have always had the Holy Spirit.” At that instant, she freed me from the mental, emotional, and spiritual chains that had held me captive over the years. The following day, the priest read Matthew 6:33, “Seek ye therefore first the Kingdom of God, and his justice, and all these things shall be added unto you.” I knew those words were Our Lady’s instructions for me.
I began seeking first the Kingdom of God by visiting the Eucharist in adoration on a regular basis. My mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual health improved steadily. Life became orderly again. I found a new senior-level career position to get back on my feet professionally. However, my hopes of redeeming myself in the eyes of the world proved naive and immature. Our Lady had instructed me to seek the Kingdom of God first, not to return to the Kingdom of man to impress the world. Due to the poor economy, I lost the position within a year and once again needed employment. This loss was another major milestone and expression of loving grace.
In fall 2008, the moment happened. Through the influence of St. Thérèse’s plays and poetry, St. Joan of Arc instantaneously confronted me in the world through her silent Being. This was no vision, but an appropriation of Being in silence. Her sanctity astonished me, and the refulgence of her mysterious presence demanded my submission. I received a fervent, supernatural devotion to her. In that flash of a moment, St. Joan became an alethic herald for the coming of the Kingdom in my Being.
A few weeks later, not yet comprehending the spiritual significance of my previous job loss, I attended a large professional networking event attempting to find my next high-level corporate position. Halfway through the conference, the Holy Spirit inflicted me with an overwhelming revulsion toward everything discussed. I felt compelled to leave and did immediately. The meeting facilitator had asked us to write down our impressions of the meeting and drop the comments in a designated box. I wrote a note saying they all needed to study Joan of Arc and placed it in the box on my way out. I never attended another networking event. I had to focus on seeking first the Kingdom, which, in my case, meant something other than becoming wealthy, prominent, and professionally successful in the eyes of the world. I found obscure college and university-level adjunct teaching assignments that kept my income in respectable shape and allowed my wife and me to make ends meet.
I began writing. The Kingdom Our Lady referenced was inside me, and the way to seek it, to integrate this Kingdom into my deepest Being, was to write. I wrote for fifteen years. It was an ongoing prayer, an interior appropriation of the Kingdom in my Being.
During this time, in late February 2013, the relic tour of St. Mary Magdalene came to our area. We venerated her shin bone at the host parish. A few months later, a holy woman appeared to me in a dream, dressed in a brown robe and hood that resembled what I would imagine women wore in Our Lord’s time. She smiled at me just before I woke. My writing caught a second wind after that dream. The kingdom in the distance appeared more clearly as Mystical France, the land of the lady in my dream, St. Mary Magdalene who spent her last thirty years in a grotto in Provence. St. Joan of Arc came to my side in a contemplative vision to lead me there.
Recently, by the grace of God, we had the opportunity to visit southern France where we entered the tomb of St. Mary Magdalene and hiked the massif of La Sainte-Baume to pray in her Grotto. This visit was a miraculous answered prayer that brought me at last to the shores of Provence forty-seven years after beginning my journey before a statue of St. Joan of Arc at Mont Saint-Michel.
The story of my decades long spiritual, and literal, odyssey with St. Joan and St. Thérèse from Mont Saint-Michel to St. Mary Magdalene on the shores of Provence is the revelation of the story that had been written for me during my first visit to France after high school.
This project is the story and the result of my journey to “seek first the Kingdom.” Telling it, I have remained at the bottom of the world which is a treasured grace. My Being is with St. Joan of Arc, St. Thérèse of Lisieux, and St. Mary Magdalene on the shores of Provence. One can understand my project only in the context of this preface.
~ Walter Emerson Adams
Subscribe to The House of New Bethany, the natural extension of The Dove Rose.
Check out the Heroic Hearts podcast on Substack, Spotify, or Apple. Heroic Hearts is a podcast about healing, enchanting, and elevating our hearts through the stories and spirituality of St. Joan of Arc and St. Therese of Lisieux. Co-hosted with Amy Chase.
