Late Have I Loved You: Recollections of a Life

By John Michael Talbot

John Michael Talbot's first autobiographical work Late Have I Lived You picks up where his previous two best-selling biographies (Troubadour for the Lord and Signatures) left off. This work includes many new personal recollections from his multi-faceted life without the book becoming cumbersome or indulgent.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Feb 14, 2024
• ISBN: 9798350940589

John Michael Talbot

John Michael Talbot is the founder and spiritual father of the Catholic-based community the Brothers and Sisters of Charity. He leads an active ministry from Little Portion Hermitage and Monastery in Arkansas and St. Clare Monastery in Texas. He is also a Grammy– and Dove–award-winning, multiplatinum-selling Contemporary Christian Music pioneer, and a bestselling author of more than thirty books.

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Copyright © 2024 Troubadour for the Lord Publishing

350 County Road 248

Berryville, AR 72616

877-504-9865

www.troubadourforthelord.net

ISBN 979-8-35094-057-2 paperback

ISBN 979-8-35094-058-9 ebook

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Manuscript Edited by Jaymie Stuart Wolfe

Cover Photo and Design by Michael S. Zabrocki

Table of Contents

Endorsements

Foreword

Introduction

One: Beginnings

Two: Baseball and Music

Three: The Sounds Unlimited and School

Four: Mason Proffit

Five: The Jesus Revolution and Marriage

Six: Visions and Dreams

Seven: Jesus Music and Break Ups

Eight: The Franciscans and the Catholic Church

Nine: Catholic Christian Music

Ten: Troubadour

Eleven: Little Portion Hermitage

Twelve: Reform

Thirteen: Marriage and Monasticism

Fourteen: Where the Music Lives

Fifteen: Writing Books

Sixteen: Fire!

Seventeen: Rebuilding and Itinerant Ministry

Eighteen: The Rebuilding Process

Nineteen: St. Clare Monastery

Twenty: Television and the Online Inner Room School of Spirituality

Twenty-One: More Recordings and Books

Twenty-Two: Little Portion Bakery

Twenty-Three: Illness and Recovery

Twenty-Four: Hermitage

Twenty-Five: The Fruit of the Hermitage

Twenty-Six: Ministries and Memories

Postscript

Awards / Nominations

John Michael Talbot Discography and Book List

Endorsements

This is a life steeped in the tradition of the Fathers. John Michael Talbot’s music and community represent authentic developments in that tradition. If you want to understand the history of spirituality in the last fifty years, you need to read this book. It’s a primary document. And it’s just a fascinating story.

Mike Aquilina - Award winning Catholic Author, The Mass of the Early Christians

Many have written much about John Michael Talbot. Including me. But now we receive an inspiring narrative from the man himself: Late Have I Loved You, in which Talbot reveals first-person perspectives from his amazing pilgrimage. Prepare for a power-boost of faith for your own journey onward and upward!

Dan O’Neill – Author of John Michael Talbot’s Biography Signatures and Founder of Mercy Corps, Senior Advisor to Little Portion

How did God weave JMT’s life in such a way that he became a spiritual father figure to countless souls like me?  This riveting account of God’s tapestry that is JMT is page-turning and inspiring.

W. Mark Lanier – Founder and CEO of the Lanier Law Firm, Founder of the Lanier Theological Library, Christian Author

This book is dedicated to:

The Brothers and Sisters of Charity,

the Brothers and Sisters of Charity Domestic,

Viola Talbot,

and to the memory of Dick and Jamie Talbot,

loving parents of John Michael Talbot.

Late have I loved Thee, O Beauty so ancient and so new; late have I loved Thee!

For behold Thou were within me, and I outside; and I sought Thee outside and in my unloveliness fell upon those lovely things that Thou hast made.

Thou were with me and I was not with Thee. I was kept from Thee by those things, yet had they not been in Thee, they would not have been at all.

Thou didst call and cry to my and break open my deafness: and Thou didst send forth Thy beams and shine upon me and chase away my blindness: Thou didst breathe fragrance upon me, and I drew in my breath and do not pant for Thee: I tasted Thee, and now hunger and thirst for Thee: Thou didst touch me, and I have burned for Thy peace.

—St. Augustine, Confessions, Book 10, Chapter XXVII

Foreword

Some years back, when blogs were still a novelty, my daughter Mary Agnes started a music blog. With her first post she declared her listening preferences. She wrote, …my favorites growing up were Paul Simon, John Michael Talbot, Elvis, and The Beatles.

Those were the cassette tapes she heard in the car from her gestational months forward. The Big Four: Paul Simon, John Michael Talbot, Elvis, and The Beatles.

With due respect to my daughter, however, I would place John Michael in different company. The difference between my daughter and me is that she lives in the present century and I live in the Fourth.

And it’s there – in the mid-300s - that I find the best company for John Michael. I would place him with Ephrem of Syria and Basil of Caesarea.

Ephrem was a deacon who served first the city of Nisibis and later in Edessa. We remember him among the great expositors of Scripture - both Old Testament and the New. Ephrem was brilliant in his mastery of the Bible’s literal, historical sense. But he was also an insightful master of the spiritual senses. And when he proclaimed these riches, he couldn’t keep from singing. He composed homilies in meter, and he sang them from the pulpit.

Ephrem recognized that music was a perfect delivery system for Christian doctrine. Music made messages memorable. So, he composed perhaps thousands of teaching hymns, in many different forms and many different styles. He borrowed the best forms from secular and folk music. He even took songs composed by heretics and fitted them out with new, orthodox lyrics. Then he presented them in new ways. He gathered a choir of women to sing God’s glories – not in church – but in the marketplace!

Imagine the noise of the bazaar – the live animals – the buyers and sellers laughing and arguing – the people gossiping and laughing – when suddenly those women’s voices brought it all to a hush. That’s the power of sacred music. That’s the power wielded by Ephrem of Syria.

Basil did something similar with the forms of communal ascetical life. He knew that God was calling him to be a monk. But what did that mean in the fourth century? The solitaries and cloistered groups were beginning to emerge in that first generation of legal Christianity. They were still working out the kinks.

So Basil embarked on a tour of places renowned for their asceticism – Palestine, Egypt, Syria and Mesopotamia. He met with many solitaries and observed their life. Finally, he returned to Cappadocia to establish his own religious community on a remote property owned by his family.

His mother and sister joined him there and drew a number of others, both women and men. It was there he composed his monastic Rule, which he would continue to adapt and edit throughout his life. It was through Basil’s influence that contemplatives in the Church began increasingly to favor disciplined community life over the solitary life of the desert hermits.

I have known John Michael Talbot for more than a quarter-century, and I do not hesitate to situate him with Ephrem and Basil. He shares with them profound intellectual curiosity – and the ability to synthesize seemingly disparate ideas. Again like them, he follows through. His ideas find form. Harmonious form. His words take flesh, because he does not stop at dreaming, but proceeds to doing.

And he’s willing to do whatever it takes to fulfill God’s will: research, writing, speaking, teaching, composing, singing… He’s made his permanent mark on vinyl, on tape, on disc, on TV, on the Web, and on paper. His melodies are unforgettable.

I cannot sing his Marian masterpiece without weeping. But I believe he will be remembered as well for his spiritual teaching and his communal vision. Remembered not just with Lennon and McCartney and Simon and Presley, but with Ephrem and with Basil.

Mike Aquilina - Award winning Catholic Author, The Mass of the Early Christians

Introduction

It was a typical night at St. Clare Monastery in Houston, Texas. Although many considered St. Clare’s a little bit of heavenly peace in the sprawling city, we, the Brothers and Sisters of Charity at Little Portion, had established it as a temporary residence, with an eye toward eventually building a more permanent monastic foundation in the countryside. I had prayed Compline (Night Prayer) and dozed off to sleep. In the middle of the night, however, I was awakened by a screaming headache. My blood pressure reading—200+ / 100+—prompted an immediate call to 9-1-1 and a hospital admission.

That’s when everything about that night stopped being ordinary. While praying at the hospital, I had an experience. Whether I was in or out of my body, I don’t know. Two angels I believe were my guardian angel and the angel of death supported me under each arm, escorted me out of the hospital room, and allowed me to view Paradise from a distance. In one intuitive flash beyond time, I experienced all my sins and all of God’s mercy and forgiveness simultaneously. It was an Eternal Moment that reduced me to tears of sorrow and joy all at once. It was if all my earthly blinders came off and I could really see; my being exploded into Eternity and I could truly be who God made me to be for the first time.

The experience and its effects lingered. Afterward, I could do nothing but weep when I prayed, especially during the Mass. And this went on intensely for a couple of years, making community prayers very difficult. Though I have more composure now than I once did, corporate prayers are still a challenge. I repent, rejoice, and praise God, but I cannot get much beyond that. I am often brought to tears by the awesome presence of God.

This experience, however, has left me with something else: an awareness at this late stage of my ministerial life that I have accomplished next to nothing in the eyes of the Lord. Nearly sixty recordings and multiplatinum sales, almost fifty books (several of them bestsellers), founding a new consecration of life monastic community, and thousands of concerts and speaking engagements around the world: all these fall short of God’s glory. To quote St. Thomas Aquinas, they are just so much straw. This is not to say that my accomplishments have no value. But compared to the great holiness of real saints, it’s clear that my ego and pride have often caused me to miss the mark. I can only rely on the mercy of Jesus.

Catholics and Christians over forty are likely to remember something about my music and ministry. Those younger than that may never have heard of me. Yet the impact of the contributions God has enabled me to make to the mission of Christ has continued over the course of more than five decades. Once a nominal Christian and rising country-rock musician, I embraced the Catholic Church and everything that came with it. At the top of creative and worldly success, I adopted a simple lifestyle, a dark brown habit, and a completely new artistic direction, and dedicated myself to building a community of faith where monasticism, mysticism, and music could bear witness to Jesus Christ. And yet, I feel like I am just now barely getting started as a Christian, and as a Catholic monastic. Everything up to this point has just been practice.

Now, as I reflect on my life’s journey, it is like seeing a shadow of myself—or someone else—in a dream. Relating what God has done through me over the years sounds proud and egotistical now. But after years of crosses in community and ministry—and my experience in the hospital—it is all like so much straw in contrast to the blazing fire of God’s love in heaven. Yet at the same time, I look back with real love for the people and events that have shaped me and how God used all of them to touch millions of people, including those closest to me, one by one. That is the story I share here. This account will include only the highlights. I start with the beginning of my life and continue to the present time. And though it may appear otherwise on the surface, my own life has taught me the truth of St. Augustine’s words: Late have I loved you, O Lord.

One:

Beginnings

I was born on May 8, 1954, to Richard Charles (Dick) and Jimmie Margaret (Jamie) Talbot—but almost didn’t make into this life alive. As an Rh-negative baby, I was born with a serious, possibly fatal, condition arising from blood type incompatibility between mother and child. If it weren’t for receiving a transfusion immediately after birth, a new treatment for this condition in that era, I may not have survived for more than a few hours.

That question still haunts me: Should I have lived at all? If left to nature alone, I may well not have. Had I been born twenty years earlier, it is likely I would have died soon after birth. God intervenes in our lives in many ways, and He has a mission and purpose for each one