Paths to Contemplation - 57

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.