You Can't Avoid the Dark Night By Redefinition

I went to see my Spiritual Director today. He had some cold hard truths to tell me about where I am in my current spiritual path.

For a while now I have been struggling with a new and for lack of a better term mystifying (interesting coming from someone who has such a fascination with mystics) prayer life. Me, the person who loves words, has been unable to pray with words or receive answer to prayer in words. What I do get when I pray is either great silence, or images. Neither causes me great distress, but neither gives me comfort, because I have no idea what to do with these images.

I am what you might call an idea person. Give me a topic and a sufficient amount of time and I can come up or brainstorm an entire notebook of ideas about that topic, so when I first started getting images in prayer I would immediately go into brainstorm mode and come up with 99 interpretations for what the image might mean. With no one to guide my mind's wandering or to help me sift through the processing (or so I thought) I was left confused most of the time until after the fact when suddenly I could see in hindsight how the image fit into what was going on in my life.

I could feel myself slipping into a lost state, and knew that God was trying to stretch me by this new form of communication in prayer, but somehow I was the one who wasn't getting the message; I was the imperfect receptacle. I kept thinking to myself, If I know that God wants to stretch me, and I know that it has something to do with the images, can I avoid the pain and loneliness of the Dark Night?

It was at this point that my wise Spiritual Director stopped me. "Don't you see," he said to me "that you are already in the dark night, just because you understand what it looks like and want to call it something else doesn't change the fact that your prayer is no longer consoling and life giving, but confused and causing you great pain."

That stopped me short. Here was that amazing mirror that good Spiritual Directors use. He held it up in front of me and helped me to see myself exactly as I am. No matter how rationally I think about where I have been, and where I need to go, there is no denying the pain and loneliness and confusion of where I am at this moment. No matter how many books I try to read on prayer or dreams or divine imagery I can't deny that where I am is in the Darkness.

What I do know is that what used to work for me doesn't any longer. What I need to do is learn to be comfortable where I am; with the images. If there is some meaning that is supposed to be attached to an image, it will come, if not, it isn't my job to try so hard to find it.

Teresa of Avila uses the imagery of prayer as water. You go to the well, and draw water from the well using a bucket. It is labor intensive, but it works. Eventually the well runs dry because God wants you to move to a different kind of prayer.

In the second form of prayer your fields are irrigated by a stream that runs near it, it is much easier to get the water this way, much less labor intensive.

God eventually sends rain onto the fields, and all you have to do for that kind of prayer is be present, and the water falls upon you, no movement on your part is necessary at all in this form of prayer.

And finally there is the water in the stream or ocean that surrounds you; this form of prayer doesn't just touch you, it engulfs you. You can fight against the water or you can rest in it, allowing your own buoyancy to keep you afloat and upright.

My Spiritual Director thinks there might be one more invitation. If God is the ocean. Then perhaps some of us are called to stop just floating, and to learn to totally let go, let God and be open to the total metamorphosis into an ocean dwelling creature who can be content to be totally submerged always and no longer need to breath air. Is that where I am in my prayer life, am I still fighting to breathe air and God is asking me to let go (die to self) and let God become even my breathing apparatus, so that I am totally engulfed in God alone? Am I being called to let my entire life "be prayer"?

This was what my Spiritual Director left me to ponder. This is my dark night, learning to totally die to self, learning how to breathe God alone, so that my life can be prayer. It is a staggeringly humbling thought.

Could it happen?

Pax

Is is Really Mystic Monday Again?:

Today dear children I want to revisit our dear friend John of the Cross.


I want to with you something very simple today but something deeply profound. Something I have been meditating upon for the last week concerning my own life situation:

Deny your desires and you will find what your heart longs for.

For how do you know if any desire of yours is according to God?

John believed that the only way for true grace to enter into one's soul was for all other earthly desires to be banished. ' Nada, nada, nada' was his credo. Want nothing, save for God alone and God will give you all you really need.

Unfortunately for me, in the last few weeks I have been indulging in my earthly desires for good food and rest, and entertainment, when my mind should be occupied with other things. So dear children today's visit with our mystical brother was more for me than for the rest of you. A little denial might do me a lot of good.

Pax

Mystic Monday John of the Cross on Love: all is nothing

Today dear children I am in a wistful mood, having just celebrated the birthday of the love of my life yesterday. So I think we shall visit our friend John of the Cross who knew a bit about love. .

His father Gonzalo was of noble blood and as a young man fell in love with a beautiful orphan girl, Catalina who made a living from weaving. His family were scandalized by the liaison and told him that they would disown him if he married this woman. John's father chose love over money and family loyalty, and married her anyway. John was the third son of this poor but happy union. Not long after John was born his father died due to lack of good health care.

The lesson John learned, taught to him by his father's example and his mother's self sacrificing love was that true love is worth any price, and if it is authentic, it is worth any sacrifice one has to make to achieve it.

Eventually this would be how John approached his own relationship with God. He would seek nothing, so that God could become everything for him. This is the bit I want to share with you today the way of nothing:

To come to savour all

seek to find savour in nothing;

To come to posses all,

seek possession in nothing;

to come to be all,

seek in all to be nothing. . .

to come to what you know not

you must go by a way where you know not . . .

to come to what you are not

you must go by a way where you are not.

It may be a bit of an enigma wrapped in a riddle locked in a puzzle for a very long time, but if you are seeking God, the way to true enlightenment and fulfillment is through self emptying sacrifice. If you seek to be empty, then God will fill the space.

Pax

Holy Week with John of the Cross

I didn't post on Wednesday or Thursday due to too may commitments outside the house. I will just skip adding those reflections and continue with my Friday John of the Cross meditation:

Where have you hidden ,

Beloved, and left me moaning?

You fled like the stag

After wounding me;

I went out calling you, and you were gone.

This is the way it feels in a Catholic Church after Holy Thursday Mass, when the Tabernacle is emptied, its light extinguished, and the altar is bare. Jesus has fled [to the altar of repose] . The church is somehow more quiet, more cold than it normally is. Something palpable is missing.

My mother used to say, Jesus is in hiding until Holy Saturday Mass when the consecration happens again and the balance is restored.

We are on our way toward the Resurrection, Happy Good Friday.

Pax

Tuesday of Holy Week: More John of the Cross

From The Spiritual Canticle:

Do not despise me;

For if, before you found me dark,

Now truly you can look at me

Since you have looked

And left in me grace and beauty.

This verse is a very personal verse to me. Again John could be writing my journey with these words.

Before I was closed off, unable to receive the grace that God was freely offering. Now I am open to the grace and beauty that God has given me. Now I can see myself more clearly as God sees me.

Pax

Mystic Monday: Holy Week Edition

Each Holy Week I spend my days in pursuit of a lofty goal; something I wouldn't do on any other normal day. Last year I read a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins each day of Holy Week. The sprung rhythm was a wonderful addition to my contemplation of the days as I moved toward Easter.

This year I have decided to delve more deeply into the poetry of John of the Cross. I am going to attempt to resisit the urge to read the commentary (you might not know this, but John wrote commentary for every line of poetry he wrote.) and just savor the words themselves without explanation.

Here is the stanza I have chosen today from The Spiritual Canticle:

Now I occupy my soul
And all my energy in his service,
I no longer tend the herd
Nor have I any other work
Now that my every act is love.

Without any commentary I believe that I understand this verse. Do any of you, dear children understand the feeling that one's life of work changes dramatically when one encounters He that is Love Personified?

Pax

Mystic Monday: John of the Cross

today dear children you get a big dose of John of the Cross because I am immersed in the writing of my final paper of the semester for my Spiritual Direction Internship and it happens to be on the writings of this holy mystic. Happily for us the excerpt for today's meditation also goes right along with our Lenten journey of denial of our appetites in order to make room for God who will enter into the space left behind.


John says:

We are not talking here about giving up things, because that does not
strip the soul if her affective drive remains set on them. We are talking
about stripping away the craving for gratification (gusto, apetito) in those
things. That is what leaves the person free and empty in their regard,
even though she still owns them. Because it is not the things of this
world that take up space in the person or do her harm. [...]No, it is the will
and the hunger for them that dwells inside her.

The person has only one will, and if this gets caught up in a particular thing, it will not be free, complete, single or pure - yet that is what is needed if got is to transform it.

So, you see dear children. When we give up those things we think we can't live without we allow space in our lives for God to enter in and transform our lives. This is the basis for our Lenten fasting, and even though it is already the fourth week of lent, what in your life are you craving to the point of distraction that you can let go of these last three weeks to allow God room to transform you?

Pax

They chose a predictable little piece about love and suffering.

Grab the book nearest you.
Turn to page 56.
Find the 5th sentence.
Post that sentence along with these instructions.
Don't dig for your favorite book, coolest book, most intellectual book, etc.
Only the NEAREST book.
Tag someone.

My sentence comes from The Impact of God: Soundings from St. John of the Cross by Iain Matthew.

h/t to root canal deprived Karen, greatly in need of prayer for her bad tooth for the link.


I choose to tag anyone who wants to join the fun.

The Wisdom of Lent From a Medieval Mystic

I am zipping happily through my final book for this semester of my Spiritual Direction Internship. This one happens to be on the writings of my old pal John of the Cross.

As I was reading this morning, and practicing my discipline for lent of "being open to whatever message God wants to send to me this lent at whatever time, in whatever way; I came across a wonderful passage in the writings of this spiritual master that defines exactly why we Catholics choose to deny ourselves during these 40 days:

"Say 'no' to your desires, and you will discover what your heart really
desires. What makes you think your longings are God's longings?"

If we stop filling up on the "things" in our lives, then there is so much more room for God to enter in and take that space and do with it what He wills. How much better for us to find what it is that we really need by stripping away all those things that we only think we can't live without.



Make room for God this lent.



Pax