What would you like to see next?

I have completed PATHS TO CONTEMPLATION.  Interest has not been high, but enough folks have accessed the blog that I am willing to continue it if at a couple people email me that they want to see me continue it.  If you are one of those folks, email me and also tell me what spiritual or faith topic you would like discussed.  I am also willing to have others contribute to this blog.  If you have some ideas you want posted, or for me to react to, send them via email and this may start a new thread.  Email me at mgmign2@hal-pc.org.

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This is a continuation of a serialization of PATHS TO CONTEMPLATION.  If you are joining the blog at this point and want to start and the beginning, you can find Part 1 either in the posts below or in the archives.  Subsequent posts can also be accessed below or in the archives as well.  I sincerely invite your comments, questions, and suggestions for improving this blog.  You are also invited to propose questions and topics on which you would like me to comment.  You can email directly at mgmign2@hal-pc.org, or post your comments using the comment section below.

NOTE: The comments feature is not working as I expected it to work, so even the comments I have tried to post when I accessed the blog directly are not being posted.  If you have something you want to appear as a comment, send it to me via email, and I will make sure it is posted under your name.

Should you seek contemplative prayer?

There are an increasing number of workshops, classes, groups and organizations devoted to contemplative prayer, frequently one of the two forms of centering prayer.  The reasons that people participate in these activities vary.   Some find centering prayer relaxing or pleasurable.  Some think that centering prayer will be a shortcut to infused contemplation.  Some are looking for a prayer technique that might help their spiritual growth.  Some may simply be looking for the companionship of other seekers.  Casual participants are likely to drop out quickly because of the long periods of silence that centering prayer involves.  Contemplative prayer requires a love of, or at least an ability to cope with, silence.

As always, the best course is to say yes to God’s invitation to come to God in uniting love and to be open to God’s action in bringing this about.  A good, though dangerous prayer, is this:

God, I want to love you with all my heart and mind and soul and strength, and I know that this is your will for me.  Teach me how to love according to your will.  Transform me that I may be completely yours.  Take by force what I cannot willingly give up if it stands between us.  Make me all that you have created me to be.  I trust completely in your love and in your mercy.  Amen.

This prayer is good because it is entirely in accordance with God’s will for each and every human being.  It is dangerous because if God answers the prayer, as God surely will, then the pray-er’s life will be transformed in ways that he or she could never have imagined.  She will be led down paths she never expected to travel.  Far from having all her questions answered, more questions will arise, and even the questions will become uncertain as she is drawn more deeply into the mystery that is God.

Should you seek contemplative prayer?  There is nothing wrong with asking God for the gift of contemplative prayer.  Contemplative prayer is but one of a number of prayer techniques by which we might become more open to God’s transforming grace.  But whatever prayer one prays, that prayer should be offered in the spirit of the prayer suggested above, a desire to love God above all else, to belong to God completely, to abandon oneself to God’s love and to follow wherever that love may lead.  What you are seeking is not contemplative prayer, but union with God in love.  If God grants the gift of contemplative prayer, well and good, but it is God’s choice, not yours.  Your choice should be God.  Your goal should be God.  Seek first the Kingdom of God and all things will be added on.

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Potential dangers on the paths to contemplation

Anyone who wants to love God faithfully and fully should not expect an easy time of it.  Christ himself had to endure the Cross and death before he could rise again glorious.  To belong to God alone, we must die to self, give up everything we are and have to God so that God can mold us into what God wills us to become.  Death to self is not easy, even when we endure it so that we be more fully alive in God.

There are many dangers on the paths to contemplation.  I will discuss only some of them, but so long as we keep the goal firmly in mind – the goal is God – and trust God completely rather than putting our confidence in our own ability and strength, we will be safe.  Here then are a few of the dangers:

Making our own desires the measure of our spiritual growth

In dying to self, the hardest thing any human being has to give up is control.  We all want to control our own destinies.  Many people want to have large amounts of money, not for the money’s sake, but because money is a form of control.  Those who have large amounts of money are, or at least think they are, more in control of their lives.  One misfortune that is almost universally feared is to lose control of the ability to care for ourselves due to old age or serious illness.  We all have a natural desire to be in control.

We all want to choose the path we will follow, and then we ask God to bless our journey.  We decide what ministries we would like to be involved with and then ask God to help us in the work we have chosen.  

You may well argue that God has not told you what work he wants of you, so you choose the work that seems best, perhaps that work most in keeping with your abilities and interests.  That is a good way to start, but, if we are serious in our desire to be open to God, God will lead us in the directions he wants us to go.  Our success in the eyes of the world may depend on our job title and how large our salary is, but success in the eyes of God is measured by love.  We are entirely dependent on God’s strength, not our own, for spiritual success.  This means that we must give control of our lives and our ministry to God.  There is always the danger that we will retain control even when we know God is calling us to turn control over to him.

Pride

Sinful pride is attributing to ourselves virtue or excellence that we do not possess.   Sinful pride is the opposite of humility, which is seeing ourselves as we are, being honest about who and what we have and can do.  Thus, sinful pride – as opposed to taking “pride,” or honest pleasure, in an achievement – is a form of lying.  We think of ourselves as we are not.  Humility is truthfulness about ourselves.

If I can play the piano well, I am engaging in false modesty, a form of pride, if I tell people I cannot play the piano.  If I am gifted by God with contemplative prayer and believe that I have achieved this gift by my own merits, or that God loves me more than he loves other human beings, I am being prideful.

As we grow more and more into the life of God, we should recognize more clearly that we are utterly dependent on God to come to God.  It is only through the mercy and love of God that we have any chance of knowing God, and that we, of our power, could never achieve such knowledge.  And as we come to know God more fully, we should recognize the infinite gulf that separates us from God, a gulf we can cross only because God allows to do so through the exercise of his power, not our own.

Receiving God’s gift of contemplative prayer, far from making us prideful, should give us insight into our sinfulness, our separation from God, and God’s desire to welcome us back into union with himself.  This insight should, in turn, make us more compassionate toward others, unwilling to consider ourselves better than others, and more able to see God’s beauty in every human being.  If this does not happen, then there is a strong possibility that spiritual progress is not taking place, even if the contemplative prayer is, in fact, genuine.

Discouragement

Because the seeker may experience long periods of dryness in prayer, she may become discouraged and abandon her original dedication.  Someone who is seeking contemplative prayer for the spiritual “highs” is even more likely to abandon his efforts to pray if he does not achieve the results he expects, or the consolations God gave initially to encourage him are withdrawn.  

To avoid discouragement, a seeker must remember that the goal of the practice of contemplative prayer, or any form of prayer, is not pleasure but accepting God’s invitation to come to union with God and to allow God to bring that union about.  The seeker must also remember that fidelity to God is not an emotion but constantly choosing as she believes God wants her to choose, a union of her will with God’s will.  This is true love of God, and this love is brought to perfection not in times of consolations and contemplative gifts, but in times of dryness and seeming desolation.

Misplaced priorities

I repeat that God gives us the gifts we need to come to union with him.  We choose whether we are willing to accept those gifts, or not.  One danger in contemplative prayer is that it is so sweet a form of prayer that, for some, it may become an end in itself.  Then the seeker is chasing after the gift rather than the giver, a misplaced priority.  The goal of prayer must always be God and the service of God.

A seeker may also be so inspired by contemplative prayer that she resolves to redouble her ministry to others.  Perhaps she even enters a religious community or seeks ordination.  

Certainly, ministry to others should be a fruit of our spiritual growth.  God’s love should 

flow out from us to others.  To seek the consolations of prayer without regard to care for the community in which we live or concern for God’s Creation is a dangerous heresy.  Experiencing God should make us more aware of the needs of our neighbor.  Jesus did not teach that his disciples should abandon the world, but that they should go out into the world and bring the Good News of salvation to others.  He even identified himself with the least of humankind, saying that whatever we did for the least of his brothers or sisters, we did for him.  

But ministry must not become an end in itself.  If we lose sight of why we are engaged in ministry, or, worse, we engage in ministry because it feeds our egos, we have let a good thing become a misplaced priority.   The only goal we should ever have that is an end in itself is God.  When we serve others, we should do so because we see God’s image in them, and we can love in God because we recognize that we have first been loved by God.

As T. S. Eliot reminds us in MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL, the greatest temptation is to do the right thing for the wrong reason.  We may become so attracted to contemplative prayer or some ministry that, even though these are good things, we pursue them instead of pursuing God.  We must always keep God as our first priority.

From just the four dangers discussed briefly above, we see that even those gifted with contemplative prayer, and perhaps especially these, must honestly examine their motives and their openness to what God wants of them, rather than what they want for themselves.  Humility, honesty about oneself, is an essential virtue, and having a spiritual director may help the seeker preserve a more honest view of herself and keep her priorities straight.

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Chapter 12 - Some Final Considerations

Special graces and the discernment of spirits

Many people think of mysticism and contemplative prayer in terms of visions of angels, saints kneeling in ecstatic prayer in the early morning hours, the glow from their bodies bright enough to read by, or someone oblivious to the world rising gently toward the ceiling.  If you look back on what you have read in this book up until this point, there is no mention of such phenomena, and for good reason.  They are by no means essential to contemplative prayer, and, when they do occur, which is very rarely, they are generally to be ignored.

We must always keep in mind that only God can change us into what God wants us to become.  Only God can bring us to union with God, and only God can give us the direct knowledge of himself, knowledge that begins with infused contemplation but which is not perfected until we see God face to face in heaven.

The transforming work that God is carrying on in us and for us does not depend on glorious visions, locutions(audible words spoken to us by God), or even infused contemplation for that matter.  God gives us the gifts we need to be united to him in love, not necessarily the gifts we want.  Those who have experienced ecstatic prayer that literally took them outside themselves, or have been levitated, rising into the air in front of their companions, have often prayed that these “wonders” would cease since they were a distraction both to themselves and others, and they made the one experiencing them the center of attention rather than God.  Great saints usually do not want to have attention called to themselves because they want others to give glory to God, deeming themselves unworthy of praise.

Holiness is centered in the choices we make, not in how we feel or the seeming miracles that surround us.  Satan can appear, as St. Paul tells us, to be an “angel of light.”  If a light show is what we want, Satan can provide one.  If we want to float in the air, Satan could arrange that too.  The devil is more interested in those who are serious in their search for God than bothering with those who care little about being responsive to God’s invitation to come to him in love.  Thus, if the devil can find a way to divert us from being open to God to focus on something that is not God, he will certainly do so. 

John of the Cross taught that if someone receives visions or locutions, she should ignore them.  God, John reminded his readers, is doing the work to transform us into what God wants us to become.  If someone experiences a vision or the like, whatever God wanted to achieve through that gift, assuming it is from God, has already taken place.  If we dwell on the experience, we risk becoming sidetracked, or, worse, we may believe that we are holier than others or more special in the sight of God.  Our prayer, instead, should be that God will continue to work in us, and that God will protect us from sin and the deceits of the devil.

But you might argue that God is trying to tell or teach you something that you need to know to better serve God, or so that you can inform others about what they need to know.  The Roman Catholic Church, for example, has recognized certain appearances of the Virgin Mary as genuine.  Perhaps God has given a vision or locution so that the one who receives it can gives others a message that God wants them to hear.

If God does convey some message to someone so that that person can proclaim it to others, then we have what is known as a special revelation.  God reveals something he wants others on earth to know.   Special revelations are outside the scope of this book because they are not concerned with contemplative prayer.  They are a communication from God, not the knowledge or experience of God in prayer.   

Moreover, a possible special revelation must be tested by the authority of the Church.  It is all too easy for someone to claim that God revealed something to him or her, not for his or her own benefit, but so that it could be proclaimed to the world as a message from God himself.  The danger for deception, even unintended, is great.  Moreover, no special revelation could be required for coming to union with God since all that is necessary in that regard has been supplied in and through Jesus Christ.  This is all we will say about special revelations since they are not contemplative prayer, even if genuine.

In sum, if special gifts such as vision and locutions or ecstasies come along with contemplative prayer, do not let them become the center of your attention, much less long for them instead of genuine union of your will with God’s will.   Such gifts can bring with them confusion and embarrassment as well as deep joy.

If such gifts are present, pray for God to protect you from being deceived.  You may even pray that such gifts cease since your utmost desire is to be united to God in love and not to enjoy unusual phenomena, even if they seem to come from God.  Once again, it is best to have a spiritual director to help you in your discernment concerning such gifts.  Always keep the goal in front of you.  You are continually to accept God’s invitation to be united to him and to be open to his transforming grace to bring about that union.  There are, unfortunately, many ways to be sidetracked from that one essential goal.

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What if you cannot find a spiritual director?

Regardless of whether one can find a suitable director, the goals of spiritual direction are still important for anyone who is actively seeking to be found by God: 1) accountability; 2) discernment of God’s action and 3) responding appropriately to God’s action; and 4) receiving encouragement and prayer support.  The deeper a soul is brought into relationship with God, the more important direction becomes, particularly if the soul begins to experience contemplative gifts or enters the Night of the Senses.  But it is not always possible to find a suitable director.  What other steps can someone take to try to gain the advantages of direction when a director cannot be found?

Even if a compatible spiritual director is available, and especially if one is not, a “soul friend,” or spiritual companion can be of immense value.  A soul friend is someone who can listen compassionately and non-judgmentally to what is happening with you spiritually.  The soul friend is someone who can pray with you when you need prayers, someone who can share your joys and your sorrows on your pilgrimage.  The difference between a soul friend and a spiritual director is that a director generally has more training and experience in spirituality, and will often know of resources, such as books, workshops, or prayer techniques that might assist a particular directee.   The director can, and should, tailor his or her advice to the specific temperament and life situation of the directee, and the director can do so because he or she can draw on her training and experience in fashioning such advice.

But we are not meant to travel our spiritual journeys alone.  A spiritual companion who does nothing more than listen to, and pray with, you can help you to clarify how God is acting in your life and how your might respond appropriately in order to cooperate most effectively with God.

Reading is also often helpful.  You can read spiritual classics like the works of Teresa of Avila or John of the Cross, or you might read works that use more contemporary language and modes of expression.  A suggested reading list is given in Appendix – .  This list is by no means exhaustive, and it does not take into account any special interests that you may have, such as healing prayer or the religious formation of children.  If you feel you are called to some particular ministry, then you will, no doubt, want to read more about that ministry to prepare yourself to exercise it more faithfully and to listen attentively for any special work that God might want of you.

And, as always, the Sacraments and worship with a faith community are powerful aids to gain strength and advice for spiritual growth.

Always remember that whether you can find a spiritual director, or not, God will never abandon you.  God wants to transform you into what God has called all human beings to become, his lovers, united to him in intimacy and grace, sharing his life, coming to know him as he knows us.

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What should a directee bring to direction?

Just as the director has responsibilities toward the directee, so too a directee has responsibilities if the relationship is to bear good fruit.  These are the characteristics I myself want to see in a directee:

1) Openness and honesty - a willingness to be as truthful as possible about him- or herself,  and to share frankly his or her deepest spiritual issues and experiences with the director.

2) Perseverance - a willingness to continue working toward spiritual progress, even when little progress is apparent.  The directee should not change spiritual directors without a compelling reason, although changes are sometimes necessary.

3) Deference toward the director’s advice -  The directee should always treat the director's advice with respect, and, if he chooses to act contrary to it, should make the reasons therefore known to the director.  Where a directee finds herself disagreeing regularly with her director, the two should explore whether the relationship should be continued.

4) Alan Jones in his excellent book, EXPLORING SPIRITUAL DIRECTION, points out, and I agree, that, just as a director should treat communications from the directee as confidential, the directee should also treat what the director says as confidential.  The directee must understand that what the director tells him or her is meant for her alone.  Advice that is sound for one person may be harmful to another.  Since a director must address each directee as an individual, the directee must take the advice of the director as a personal and privileged communication.   

5) The most important attribute I look for is the directee’s  sincere desire to progress in the spiritual life.  Direction is not for those who are half-hearted in their search.  Direction requires an investment on the part of the director that must be warranted by the investment of the directee.  This does not mean that the directee must be far advanced before coming to direction, or even that the directee is already on a clear path, but the desire must be there to love God completely and to follow wherever God might lead.  Direction is not casual conversation about theological matters.  It should relate to a passionate search for what it most important in every human life.

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What makes a good spiritual director?

As noted above, spiritual direction is a special ministry within the Body of Christ.  Ordination is not required, and, in fact, many clergy would not be good spiritual directors, nor would they claim to do spiritual direction.  A member of the clergy, or anyone else for that matter, who has fixed views about how someone must act or how someone must pray in order to grow spiritually, would not make a good spiritual director since the real work of sanctification proceeds from the Holy Spirit, not from the director.  The director is there to help the directee identify how the Spirit is acting in his or her life and how to respond to it, not to insist on the director’s own biases.

A spiritual director must be clear on what spiritual direction is not, lest the director engage in practicing in areas in which he is not qualified, or mistake other forms of care-giving for spiritual direction.

Spiritual direction should not be confused with psychotherapy or pastoral counseling.  Psychotherapy is directed toward solving a psychological problem that interferes with the patient’s ability to function as happily or effectively as the patient would like.  Once the problem has been addressed to the patient’s satisfaction, there is no longer any need for psychotherapy.  Psychotherapy is problem-oriented and time-limited, while spiritual direction can continue indefinitely and is oriented toward enriching the directee’s relationship with God.  A person may be in direction and therapy at the same time, but the director, in general, should not be the therapist, and vice versa.

Pastoral counseling addresses “life issues,” such as preparation for marriage or making a difficult moral decision, for example, whether to have an abortion.   Thus, pastoral counseling, unlike direction, but like psychotherapy, is also issue- or problem-focused and time-limited since the counseling has served its purpose once the issue has been resolved.

No doubt moral issues will arise from time to time in direction, but direction is not the confessional, nor is it a forum for such pastoral services as marriage counseling.  A director may also identify psychological problems that might benefit from professional treatment and suggest the directee see a psychotherapist.  But a director is not the directee’s therapist nor should the directee see the director primarily as a therapist or pastoral counselor.  The director is a spiritual mentor who walks together with the directee on his or her pilgrimage.

The director, therefore, must understand the boundaries of spiritual direction.  Moreover, the director must keep appropriate boundaries with the directee.  If the director becomes too emotionally involved with the directee, then the director loses the objectivity needed to help the directee see God’s action in her life more clearly.

The director, according to Teresa of Avila, should have three characteristics: theological knowledge to prevent the directee from falling into serious error, experience in the spiritual life, and common sense.  In Teresa’s time, when the Spanish Inquisition was active,  heresy and lapsing from the Roman Catholic faith and practice were offenses that could result in prison and even death.  In our day, creedal purity is not considered important by many, and so one might reasonably ask if theological knowledge is still important to a spiritual director.

My own response to the need for theological training is based on the view that a directee must find a director whom she feels is able to understand and appreciate her own religious outlook, and the director, in turn, must be able to understand and be comfortable with that outlook.   Thus, a director who sees say primarily Roman Catholics should have a grounding in Roman Catholic doctrine and worship in order to be able to better understand and advise Roman Catholic directees.

Teresa’s two other requirements, common sense and experience in the spiritual life, are certainly valid today.  Someone without good judgment should not be advising souls.  Someone who has experienced the difficulties, valleys and peaks involved in opening oneself to God’s transforming grace will better understand what a directee is saying and is likely to be more compassionate with regard to the trials a directee may endure.  I would add that to do direction,  someone should be in direction.  This not only adds to the director’s experience he or she brings to the direction of others, but it requires accountability and honesty in his or her own pilgrimage.

I myself believe the most important characteristics of a spiritual director are the following:

1) The director must be someone with whom the directee feels personally comfortable, a person the directee is  willing to trust with his or her inmost thoughts.  Even if a director is otherwise splendidly qualified, he or she will not be able to help a directee if the directee feels uncomfortable with the director for reasons good or bad.

2) The director should be someone who is able and willing to recognize that the Spirit breathes as it will and that the director's way is not the only way to union with God.  A director must be open to prayerful discernment of where God is leading a directee as opposed to where the director might choose to lead.   Put another way, the director must treat each directee as an individual and seek to let his or her ministry reflect the mind of God rather than his or her own biases.  The director must also have the humility to recognize that many of his or her directees may well be more advanced spiritually than he or she is.  And a director must adopt the medical profession’s primary rule: First, do no harm.

3) The director should be experienced in the spiritual life rather than merely versed in the literature and theory of the spiritual life; yet, the director must have some theological grounding so that he or she will not fall inadvertently into serious error, and so that he or she will be able to communicate theological concepts more clearly.  Without extensive actual experience of the spiritual life, a director will be constructing mental images of what a spiritual life ought to be and risks substituting imagination for reality.   It is like a man claiming to know how to fly an airplane because he has read a book on the subject.

4) The director should be a person of prayer, recognizing that he or she is merely an imperfect instrument of God and that God must act through him or her if the direction is to be helpful.

5) The director must be able to keep confidences absolutely inviolate.

Frankly, it is not easy to find a suitable spiritual director.  There may be retreat houses and religious communities in the area that offer spiritual direction, and some churches may have persons on staff who practice spiritual direction, but finding a person who has the characteristics of a good director and with whom the directee feels comfortable can be difficult.

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Chapter 11 - Spiritual Direction

What is spiritual direction?

There is a cliche that says that no one should be the judge in his own case.  Every one of us has blind spots, particularly with regard to our motives and our spiritual condition.  We may think we are acting out of disinterested love of God, whereas we are, at least in part, seeking approval from others, or to “earn” our way into heaven.  We may think we have a vibrant prayer life, whereas we may be interested primarily in the emotional high we get from certain prayer techniques.  On the other hand, we may think our effort at prayer is an abject failure, whereas we may not realize that God is acting to lead us into a deeper and purer form of prayer.

Almost any seeker, therefore, can benefit from a spiritual companion who can help him or her in a variety of ways: First, the companion can be someone to whom the seeker will have degree of accountability in her walk with God.  Human nature is such that most of us are more apt to carry out our duties, even voluntary ones, more faithfully if there is someone to whom we must report on our performance.  For example, if I have made a commitment to engage in Centering Prayer 15 minutes, I am more apt to honor the commitment if my spiritual director knows of it and will ask me how my Centering Prayer is going.  If I am not keeping the commitment, then the director can help me explore why I am not keeping it, and whether Centering Prayer is an appropriate prayer technique given my temperament and circumstances.  Twelve-step groups derive much of their benefit from the fact that a member must report successes or failures to the group.  Likewise, if we have no one to whom we report our spiritual successes or failures, we may soon drop any pretense of trying to progress spiritually.  Accountability helps keep us “honest” and on track.

I may think that I perceive God is pushing me in a certain direction, or leading me to pray in a certain way, or has given me a deep spiritual insight, but, left to myself to ponder what has happened, I may easily misinterpret God’s message, and even be mistaken that the message is from God.  I may be choosing my own spiritual path and asking God to bless it rather than seeking God’s will in my regard.  My spiritual director can help me discern how God is acting in my life and how I might faithfully respond to God’s action.  If God, for example, is leading me into infused contemplative prayer or the Night of the Senses, a director can help me identify the situation and give gentle guidance to assist me down a path I have never traveled before.

Finally, a director can give me support in my pilgrimage, praying with me and for me that I might be ever faithful to God working in me.  Thus, a spiritual director can be helpful in at least four ways: 1) accountability, 2) aid in identifying how God is acting in my life,  3) formulating an appropriate response to God’s action once it is identified, and 4) receiving encouragement and prayer support.  Spiritual direction should include all of these components.

Perhaps the reader is wondering why I am including a chapter on spiritual direction in a work on contemplative prayer.  Several times in the previous chapters I pointed out that having an experienced spiritual director to turn to for advice, or even as a compassionate sounding board, can be an invaluable aid for the soul who is seriously trying to open herself to God’s transforming grace.  Christ did, for better or worse, give us one another as companions on the journey and commanded that we carry out his work of ministry to the world and one another.  Spiritual direction is a ministry to which one is called by God.   Pity the person who chooses it for him or herself without that call.  

Contemplative prayer, particularly infused contemplation, is certain to be a mysterious experience and may even be a frightening one as well if it is entered through the Night of the Senses.  We all need all the help we can get.

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What follows the Night of the Soul?

As Teresa of Avila observed, few, even of the devout, seem to enter this Night.  For one who has entered the Night, there is no prognosis anyone can give on how long this period of purification will last.  God will act as God will act, but always for the good of the soul.

The highest state that can be achieved in this life is “spiritual marriage,” also known as “transforming union.”  According to Teresa of Avila, this state is distinguished by three characteristics: intimacy with God, serenity and indissolubility or permanence.

The soul is so intimate with God that God’s life and the soul’s life are as one.  Teresa likens the intimacy with rain water from heaven mixing with spring water on earth such that one cannot tell which is rain water and which is spring water.  As much as any created being can on this earth, the soul shares in the life of God.

The serenity or peace that the soul experiences is that of a happily married person who is certain of the love of her spouse.  A soul in the state of transforming union is no longer subject to the trials of the Nights.  The soul has effectively forgotten itself and lives only in God.

Obviously, if there are few who reach the Night of the Soul, there are fewer still who are blessed with Transforming Union, but it is a state to which every soul should aspire since it is as close to our final goal of union with God as any soul can reach on earth.

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The temptations encountered in the Night of the Soul

There are many dangers in the Night, one of the more serious being despair.  There is a danger of scrupulosity as the soul searches in vain for a reason that God has left it, and to find some way to attract God back.   The soul may be tempted to stop reaching for a God who is no longer present to it, or even to hate the God who seems so fickle and cruel.  But the memory of the experience of God drives the soul on.  It is as if a lover has been kissed by the beloved just before the beloved vanishes from the sight.  The remembrance of that kiss and its indescribable joy and peace serves to inspire the soul to have faith, hope, and love even when God seems to have abandoned it.

By the time a soul reaches the Night of the Spirit, it is already highly purified, though not beyond the reach of sin.  Indeed, should a soul fall from the state of grace that it has reached by the Night of Spirit, great would be its fall.  The rewards are greater, but so are the dangers.  One cannot trust in one’s own power to resist the storms that will assault the soul during the Night, but must depend totally on God to sustain her.

Because, in the Night of the Soul, God is acting powerfully and mysteriously in the soul, even an experienced spiritual director can, and probably should, do little more than support the soul in the difficult time, assuring her of God’s continuing love, and praying with her to cooperate with God in the work that only God can do.  

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The effect of the Night of the Soul

The purpose of the night, as I indicated earlier, is to separate us from the remaining vestiges of attachment to self or those things that are not God, even those world-views and assumptions about God, religion, and the world that shaped us from our youth and that have formed the framework for our thinking.  God is total mystery, unlike anything we have ever experienced, or ever could experience, that is not God.  To leave behind our cherished notions of what and who God is, or even how to love God, is painful, perhaps devastating, but it is necessary to bring us more completely into the all-passionate and all-mysterious life of the one who St. John of the Cross described as todo y nada, all and nothing.  Whether we think of God as darkness or as light, the night strips away all our concepts and paradigms.

The Night of the Senses teaches us to separate ourselves from sensate and emotional consolations and rewards as God leads us into the knowledge of God through faith alone.  With the Night of the Senses we begin our journey out of what our natural capabilities can give us into the experience God in freedom, peace, and love in a manner that only God can accomplish.    The pinnacle of this union with God is spiritual marriage, which very few achieve in this life.  Through the Night of the Spirit, one becomes a sacrifice of love to God.  Listen to the beautiful prayer of Teresa of Avila:

In order to live in one single act of perfect Love, I offer myself as a victim of holocaust to your merciful love, asking you to consume me incessantly, allowing the waves of infinite tenderness shut up within you to overflow into my soul, and that thus I may become a martyr of your love.

Gone are any images of God, any dependence on consolations, in a sense any framework in which one’s world is fixed.  God draws the soul into the infinite darkness of God’s mystery.  The soul desires nothing more and can live with nothing less.  

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Signs of the Night of the Soul

In discussing signs of the advent of the Night of the Soul or its characteristics, we should be aware that the Night is not necessarily continuous, nor do all souls that enter it experience it in the same way.  Indeed, since each soul has its own peculiar obstacles to union, God need not treat each soul alike.  Moreover, in God’s mercy, the rigors of the Night may be interspersed with periods of deep consolation to strengthen the soul for what must yet take place.  Spiritual growth is generally not continually upward, but may encounter plateaus and even times when the soul regresses at times before moving ahead again.  In one aspect of spirituality, the soul may be advanced, yet in another it may still be a novice.  Do not make too much of the signs and characteristics, because like Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief and the much discussed characteristics of near-death experience, what follows are generalizations.  Individual experiences may differ.

The signs of the Night of the Soul are not unlike those of the Night of the Senses.  There is dryness in prayer, a sense of abandonment by God, and a confused state of mind and memory.  

But these signs are more intense than in the Night of the Senses because the soul at this stage has a more developed intimacy with God and has generally been gifted with profound experiences of infused contemplation.  Although the soul enduring the Night of the Senses loves God, the soul in the Night of the Soul is consumed by a love of God of the most intense sort.  God is the beloved for whom the soul longs with a longing that surpasses description.  Thus, when the soul feels as if God, its beloved, has abandoned it, the grief is particularly painful.  It is worse than if a beloved spouse of many years passed away suddenly, or, even worse, left to live with someone else.

Such symptoms may have causes other than the Night of the Soul, for example, clinical depression or the loss of a spouse, so the soul needs markers to discern whether she is truly in the Night of the Soul.  As always, a wise and compassionate spiritual director may be an invaluable help.  

A key sign of the Night is spiritual dryness of a particularly intense sort.  It is not just that one derives no pleasure from the senses.  One derives no pleasure even from spiritual things that used to bring great joy.  The soul has experienced the presence of God; thus, this absence of pleasure is not the same as that experienced in the Night of the Senses when the soul is being led to passive contemplation.  God, who was once near, is now absent in a painful and devastating way.

But because the soul has enjoyed a special friendship with God in contemplative prayer, it is now as if the heart’s one and only love has fled.  There is a longing for the beloved, a desire to be reunited with the object of the heart’s desire that is painful in the extreme.   Those who have not had a burning desire for God will never experience this feeling.  The soul has found God in the depths of unitive love and now the beloved is gone.  The poignant search of the bride for her bridegroom described in the SONG OF SONGS comes immediately to mind.

On my bed, at night,  I sought him

whom my heart loves.

I sought but did not find him.

So I will rise and go through the City;

in the streets and in the squares

I will seek him whom my heart loves.

. . . I sought but did not find him.

In the Night, the soul is bitterly aware of its powerlessness.  It can no longer meditate; spiritual reading is like eating dust.  And yet the soul’s longing continues.  The state is not caused by laziness or an unwillingness to pray.  It is caused by an inability to pray.  And yet, at this time, there may be a sense that God is acting powerfully within the soul to purify it and teach it pure and unconditional love.  

The psychiatrist Gerald May, a member of the faculty of the Shalem Institute near Washington, D.C., which has a respected program to train spiritual directors as well as other programs related to spiritual formation, in his book CARE OF MIND, CARE OF SPIRIT, gives several tests to distinguish the Night of the Soul from clinic depression:

1. Dark night experiences are not usually associated with loss of effectiveness in life or  work, as are primary depressions.  Often, in fact, the individual is mystified at how well he or she is continuing to function.

2. The sense of humor is retain.  It is often sparkling, rather than cynical and bitter as in depression.

3. Compassion for others is, if anything, enhanced.  The self-absorption of clinical depression is lacking.

4. In the dark night, one would really rather not have things otherwise.  While there might be great superficial dissatisfaction and confusion, the deepest response is that there is an underlying sense of rightness about it all.  This is in stark contrast to a primary depression in which one desires a radical, even miraculous, change.

5. The person does not seem to be pleading for help as does someone who is clinically depressed.  Explanations and evaluations may be sought, but there is no sense of “get me out of this.”

6. Very subtly, yet perhaps most importantly, one does not generally feel frustrated, resentful, or annoyed in the presence of someone undergoing a dark night experience.  While such feelings are common in working with depressed people because of their own internalized anger, one is much more likely to feel graced and consoled with someone experiencing the dark night.

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Contemplation and the erotic

One of the greatest poets of the Spanish language was John of the Cross, a contemporary of Teresa of Avila, and like her, an authority on the spiritual life.  He wrote poetry that expressed his own experiences with both the Night of the Senses and the Night of the Soul.  Later, when he was asked to explain the meaning of his poetry, he wrote commentaries on his poems.  The ASCENT OF MOUNT CARMEL deals with the Night of the Senses, and THE DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL with the Night of the Soul.  Susan Muto, an English writer on spiritual matters, authored two books with the same title as John’s, expressing John’s teaching in contemporary English.

John’s poetry is frequently erotic in its imagery.  Consider, for example, the following verse from THE SPIRITUAL CANTICLE:

Where have you hidden.

Beloved, and left me moaning?

You fled like a stag

After wounding me;

I went out calling you and you were gone.

Or these from THE DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL:

Upon my flowery breast, 

Kept wholly for himself alone,

There he stayed sleeping, and I caressed him, 

And the fanning of the cedars made a breeze.

It should not surprise us that the line between eroticism and mysticism is often thin.  The    soul is the beloved of God.  God draws the soul to himself as a lover his beloved.  The pleasure and ecstasy of carnal union between two persons who are deeply in love is but an analog, though a pale one, of the union of God with the beloved soul.

The instinct for God and the sexual instinct are two of the most powerful human drives, and they are not unrelated.  All normal humans yearn to be loved and to feel the warmth and joy of intimate companionship that has its most complete fulfillment in loving intercourse.  To feel the intimate embrace of God, to begin to know God as God knows us, is an experience that our carnal natures, which cannot know God directly, can only associate with sexual representations.

This should not scandalize or even surprise us.  Divine mysteries have their analogs in nature.  Human birth, growth and death is an analog of the spiritual life as we are born into God, grow to spiritual maturity and, ultimately, die to self that we might live most completely in God.  The heavens reveal the glory of God, and human beings are created in the image of God.  We come to know about God through God’s glory reflected in his creations.  The elements, such as bread and wine or oil, used in many religious celebrations are but symbols of a deeper reality that these elements represent.   There is a close relationship between the natural and the supernatural, between creation and its Creator.  We would be more surprised if such a relationship did not exist than that ideal carnal love is but a analog of  union with God.  It is not without reason that the highest state of union with God in this life is known as “spiritual marriage.”

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Chapter 10 -The Night of the Soul

The what and why of the Night of the Soul

The Night of the Soul – sometimes called the Dark Night of the Soul, or the Night of the Spirit -- is both similar to, yet different from, the Night of the Senses.   It is similar in its purpose which is purification to allow the soul to become more closely conformed to God, and it is similar in the difficulty the soul finds in praying.  But the Night of the Soul is far more intense than the Night of the Senses in the pain the soul suffers at the seeming loss of God, and the purification God uses this Night to effect is at a deeper level.

Teresa of Avila believed that while most souls intent on fidelity to God endure the Night of the Senses, few reach the Night of the Soul.  The very term “Night of the Soul” is often misused to designate a period of sadness or depression or other time of great stress or difficulty.   I have heard people say, “I am going through the Dark Night of the Soul,” in this latter sense when they were not in this Night as the term is properly used in the theology of the spiritual life.

A person who is led in the Night of the Soul has already achieved a high degree of union with God and has usually, though not invariably, been given the gift of infused contemplation.  The contemplative prayer with which the soul has been gifted may, at times, have caused it to forget the senses and the intellect; the soul may have seemed drawn out of the body, the body as if asleep, to raptures that were a foretaste of heaven, an embrace in the arms of God.

The soul is already so closely conformed to God, so much in love with God that it would rather die than commit the slightest offense against the Beloved, so devoted to the Lord that it would prefer to suffer any pain or endure any affliction than be separated from the One it loves above all else, even itself.  And so, if the soul has, by God’s grace, already reached such an advanced state of holiness, why is there the need for further purification, particularly in such a painful form as the Night of the Soul?

We are called on to love God with all our hearts and minds and souls and strength.  Someone who loves God with 99.8% of her heart and mind and soul and strength is certainly doing much better than average, but there is still some small part of her that does not yet belong entirely to God, some obstacle that prevents God from completing the transformation of the soul into all God wants it to become, his perfect beloved.

I find the term “purgative contemplation” to be key to the understanding of the Night, for during the Night, God is acting within the soul in a special way to cleanse it of all those last obstacles that yet remain to full union with the soul’s Beloved.  The soul itself has, in essence, gone as far as possible in conforming itself to God’s will and, through the grace of God, to living in accordance with the fulness of the Gospel.  But this is still not enough to purify it so perfectly that it may be brought into the bridal chamber of the One for whom it yearns so passionately.  At some point, only God knows what obstacles remain and, like a purifying flame, God must enter in and burn away the dross that yet remains.

The soul, so fervently in love with God, does not deliberately cling to these obstacles to God’s action.  If the soul knew what they were, she would do all she could to remove them.  But the soul at this stage is not aware of what they are and could not, of her power, remove them even if she were aware.  But God knows what they are and God has the power to remove them to make the soul completely his.

The Night of the Soul, like infused contemplation or the Night of the Senses, cannot be adequately described in verbal descriptions or artistic images.  Just as Jesus used parables to try to convey often mysterious spiritual realities, poetry is often a medium employed to try to convey what the soul endures during this Night.  Nor are terms such as suffering or pain adequate to describe the soul’s experience, for in this Night God is taking control of the soul and drawing it ever closer to himself.  The soul senses this and knows in faith that God has not abandoned it, no matter distant the beloved may seem to be.  The pain may be intense, but there is also a sense of safety, an inner assurance that good things are taking place.