Reflection on suffering and longing for God – St. Teresa of Avila

Woe is me, woe is me, Lord, how very long has been this exile! And it passes with great sufferings of longing for my God! Lord, what can a soul placed in this prison do? O Jesus, how long is the life of humans, even though it is said to be short! It is short, my God, for gaining through it a life that cannot end; but it is very long for the soul that desires to come into the presence of its God. What remedy do You provide for this suffering? There isn’t any, except when one suffers for you.

Soliloquies  – #15

What role does “experience” play in our life of faith? Is it bad?

Q: Dear Father John, I have been following your blog since the beginning, and I have noticed a pattern in your answers – a pattern that disturbs me. You seem consistently to counsel people against trusting in their experience of God. You seem to recommend instead a kind of abstract faith. But didn’t Jesus become man precisely in order to give us an experience, so that our faith wouldn’t have to be so abstract and dry? You have confused me.

A: This is one of the disadvantages of the blogosphere; you just can’t ever seem to explain yourself fully! I am pained at causing you confusion and internal turbulence. Let me see if I can clarify some things in order to start untying this knot.

Different Kinds of Experience

On the one hand, I fear that I am guilty as charged. I do council you against trusting too much in one particular kind of experience of God: emotional experience. As human beings, we have different levels of experience. We experience things on the level of our five senses, our instincts and passions (the drives and inclinations built in to our bodily nature), our emotions, our conscience, our intellect, and our will. These are different levels, but they are not entirely distinct; the human person is a wonderful harmony of physical and spiritual interaction. That’s how God designed us. But even though the different levels are not entirely distinct, not totally isolated from each other, there is a hierarchy of importance among them.

Ordering Experience for Maturity

To understand this, think about the term “maturity.” Infants are immature. They live only at the level of sense experience and instinct. They cry when they are hungry, cold, or uncomfortable. Children are a bit more mature. They are learning to govern their senses and their instincts, so they ask mom for a snack when they’re hungry, instead of crying. But they are still emotionally and spiritually immature. This is one of the reasons they can be so endearing, and so infuriating. They don’t know how to think and judge for themselves – they still need dad to hold their hands when they go out for a walk. Nor do they know what they are supposed to do with their emotions – they don’t understand why mom won’t let them watch a certain very enjoyable TV show; they can’t grasp how it could be bad for them if it is so enjoyable.

A sign of maturity in an adult is consistent order among all the levels of human experience. Mature adults keep their senses, instincts, and emotions in harmony, guided by their reason and faith towards their true life-purpose: to know, love, and serve God, and to love their neighbors as themselves. They are like a master charioteer who is able to keep four different horses pulling together in harmony towards his worthwhile destination (to borrow an image from Plato). They don’t let strong passions or instincts, or waves of negative or positive emotions, or intellectual pride lead them away from the path of God’s will (the commandments, the responsibilities of their state in life, the inspirations of the Holy Spirit).

The Place of Emotional Experience

So we have different levels of experience, and the level of emotional experience is not the most important one. My emotions can be affected by all kinds of irrational factors: weather, biorhythms, other people’s offensive behavior… And so, if I guide my life by my emotions, I will inevitably be led astray; I will have an unstable life, like a dry leaf being blown around in the autumn breeze. This doesn’t mean that emotions are unimportant. God gave them to us, and without them we would be inhuman. The point is, we need to educate our emotions, just as infants need to learn how to govern instincts and passions. We need to understand that the experience of faith is rooted in a deeper place than our emotions; it is rooted in our minds and our wills. Our friendship with God is based on a spiritual recognition, which occurs under the influence of grace, that God is our Lord and Savior, that he is worthy of our love, reverence, and obedience. That recognition is an ongoing thing; it may begin with a powerful, born-again experience that involves not only our intellect and will, but also our emotions and our passions. It may be boosted and renewed periodically through powerful, emotionally charged experiences of God’s presence. But if God takes away those gratifying emotional experiences for a period, which could be long or short, that doesn’t alter the reality of the recognition, the reality of our experience of God’s majesty and goodness. Rather, he is teaching us to “walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7).

All of this gets even more complicated when we remember that sin (both original and personal) has disrupted the harmony that should exist between the different levels of our human experience. Our senses, instincts, passions, emotions, and will often rebel against what our reason and faith show us to be true and good. Sometimes, in fact, our passions and emotions can pull us so strongly away from God’s will that we experience excruciating pain – think of Jesus in Gethsemane. He was taking our sin upon himself, and as a result his human nature entered into agony; it took intense prayer and heroic self-sacrifice for him to bring his whole human nature into harmony with his Father’s will.

Our Present Plague

Now, it is true that I have repeatedly cautioned against trusting too much in our emotional experience of God – at least, I have intended to do so. There is a specific reason for this. Our culture is consumeristic. That means we are constantly, daily, hourly, being bombarded by images, words, and jingles that are trying to convince us to buy something. Billboards, commercials, Web ads, radio ads, movie previews, spam, mass mailings – unless you live in a monastery (or go on retreat in one), you are positively besieged by consumer propositions. This is the air we breathe. Furthermore, what is the most effective way for these producers to convince you to buy their product? Is it by presenting you with a syllogism, an extended, rational defense of why you need a particular item and exactly how that item will add existential value to your life-experience? Hardly. The shortcut to your decision mechanism is through your instincts and emotions. A billboard doesn’t have time for syllogisms; it has to bypass your reason and grab you by manipulating your emotions, often subliminally. And so, from the time we were toddlers, we have been immersed in a cultural milieu saturated with expert emotional manipulation. As a result, we have been conditioned by this atmosphere to equate emotional experience with true value. This consumer conditioning has been further reinforced by the strong entertainment component that has emerged in our modern economies. Through technological developments, we have come to have much more time on our hands, which we tend to devote to entertainment, and entertainment (especially popular entertainment) stimulates, above all, the emotions.

The result of this is simply that in our culture we tend to depend too much on emotional experience and too little on the deeper experience of faith, virtue, and spiritual truth. If something doesn’t give us an emotional return pretty quickly, we tend to dispose of it or disregard it. This is why, for example, Dan Brown’s books are read by millions, while Tolstoy and Sienkiewicz are truly treasured by dozens. This is why, for example, more than half of Internet traffic is directed to pornography Web sites. This is why, for example, it is so hard for most of us to spend 30 minutes in silence and prayer without distractions, and so easy to pay full attention to a two-hour Hollywood film.

Stepping towards Maturity

To actually grow in our relationship with God, therefore, we need to wean ourselves off an over-dependence on emotional experience. This doesn’t mean we should stifle emotional experience – that would be inhuman. Rather, we need to learn to govern our emotions instead of being governed by them. We need to learn to evaluate our lives, relationships, and activities not primarily according to how we feel on an emotional level, but according to what we know to be true on the level of our reason enlightened by our Catholic faith. This is the path to recover the true interior harmony that will enable us to experience the deeper satisfactions of spiritual experience, an experience which gradually brings our emotions into sync with our faith. This is the path to Christian joy and peace, which are so deep that they turn crosses into resurrections and so contagious that they turn victims into victors.

I do not want to disparage emotional experience in our Christian journey: God also works through that experience. I only want to encourage spiritual maturity. And in a world like ours, that may require over-emphasizing, at least a little bit, the dangers of emotionalism.

I hope this has helped to dispel your confusion. In future posts I will try to discuss more often the positive role that emotions can have in our spiritual life, so as to avoid giving the wrong impression that we should all become Puritans.

Yours in Christ, Father John Bartunek, LC

XXI – Modeled After the Incarnate Word

The workings of God within us carry out in the course of time the designs which Eternal Wisdom has formed in regard to everything. In God all things have their own design, and His wisdom alone knows what that is. Though you read the will of God in regard to others, this knowledge cannot direct you in anything. In the Incarnate Word, in God Himself, is the design after which you were meant to be formed and which is the model of His work in you. In the Word, the divine action sees that to which every soul must be conformed. The Holy Scriptures contain one part of this design, and the divine activity formed by the Holy Spirit within the soul completes the design set forth by the Word. We must understand that the only way of receiving the impression of this eternal design is to remain quietly submissive to it, and that neither effort nor mental speculation can help us to attain it.

Is it not evident that a work such as this cannot be effected by subtlety of mind, skill, or intelligence, but can only follow on our submissive self-surrender to God’s will, yielding ourselves like metal to a mold, or canvas to the brush, or stone in the hands of the sculptor. Is it not clear that a knowledge of all the divine mysteries which the will of God carries out in all ages is not what makes us conformable to the design the Word has conceived for us? No, it is the impress of the divine Hand. This imprint is not graven on our minds by ideas, but in the will by its submission to the will of God.

The wisdom of the simple soul consists in being content with its own business, in confining itself within the boundary of its path, and not going beyond its limits. It is not curious about God’s ways of acting, but is content with God’s will in regard to itself, making no effort to discover hidden meanings by comparisons or conjectures, but only desiring to understand what each moment reveals. It listens to the voice of the Word when it sounds in the depths of the heart. It does not ask what the divine Bridegroom has said to others, but is satisfied with what it receives for itself, so that moment by moment by everything, however insignificant or whatever its nature, the soul is sanctified without knowing it. In this way the Bridegroom speaks to His Bride, by the solid effects of His actions which the soul accepts with loving gratitude without curious scrutiny.

Thus the spirituality of such a soul is perfectly simple, absolutely solid, permeating its whole being. Its actions are not determined by ideas or by a tumult of words, which by themselves would only serve to inflate pride. People make a great use of the intellect in piety, yet it is of little use, and often detrimental to true piety. We must make use only of what God’s will gives us to do or to suffer, and not forsake this divine essential to occupy our minds with the historic wonders of God’s work, but rather we should increase these wonders by our own faithfulness.

The marvels of these works of God, which we read about to satisfy our curiosity, often tend only to disgust us with things that seem trifling, but by which, if we do not despise them, God’s love effects very great things in us. Foolish creatures that we are! We admire, we bless God’s action in written history, but when His love is ready to continue this writing on our hearts, we keep moving the paper and preventing its writing by our curiosity, to see what it is doing in us and what is is accomplishing elsewhere.

Forgive, divine Love, these defects; I can see them all in myself, and I have not yet learned what it is to abandon myself to Your hand. I have not yet yielded myself to the mold. I have walked through all Your workshops and admired all Your works of art, but have not as yet had the self-surrender needed to receive even the bare outlines of your brush. But at last I have found You, my dear Master, Teacher, Father, my beloved Friend.

Now I will be Your disciple; I will attend to no other school than Yours. I return, like the prodigal, hungering for Your bread. I relinquish the ideas which tend only to satisfy my curiosity. I will no longer run after teachers and books; no, I will use them only as Your holy will ordains them, not for my gratification but to obey You, by accepting all that You send me. I will confine myself solely to the duty of the present moment in order to prove my love and leave You free to do with me what You will.

Father Jean-Pierre de Caussade - Purchase The Joy of Full Surrender

Benedict XVI Recommends Spiritual Direction

VATICAN CITY, SEPT. 16, 2009 (Zenit.org).- Everyone — priests, religious, laypeople — and especially youth, should have a spiritual director to help them in the Christian life, says Benedict XVI.

The Pope affirmed this today when he reflected on Symeon the New Theologian during the general audience held in Paul VI Hall.

The Holy Father mentioned how important spiritual direction was in the life of the 11th century monk, and affirmed that the invitation to seek guidance in the spiritual life “continues to be valid for all.”

The Bishop of Rome encouraged especially young people, but also priests, consecrated persons and laypeople”to take recourse to the counsels of a good spiritual father.”

He mentioned that a spiritual guide should help to grow in knowledge of oneself and lead a person “to union with the Lord, so that one’s life is increasingly conformed to the Gospel.”

“We always need a guide, dialogue, to go to the Lord,” Benedict XVI affirmed. “We cannot do it with our reflections alone. And this is also the meaning of the ecclesiality of our faith, of finding this guide.”

What does the “born again” experience have to do with our salvation, and with our friendship with Christ?

Q: Dear Father John, I am a fairly recent convert to the faith. My conversion took place over a period of 3 years in which I had a series of powerful experiences of God’s presence and action in my life. It wasn’t just coming into the Church for me – it was discovering that Jesus is a real person, someone interested in my life. During my conversion, I understood this turn-around (this discovery of Jesus) as being “born again.” I also have understood this kind of experience as being necessary to have my place secure in heaven. And yet, I now know so many Catholics who have never had this kind of experience. They don’t talk about Jesus as if he is a real person. But they seem to think their place in heaven is secure anyway. This is all kind of vague, but I guess my basic question is: What does the “born again” experience have to do with our salvation, and with our friendship with Christ? Am I overemphasizing it, or are other people under-emphasizing it?

A: I think I detect two different questions in your note.

God and Emotions

The first is: Does someone have to have a deeply felt born-again experience in order to get into heaven? The answer is no. It doesn’t have to be deeply felt. It doesn’t have to be emotional. It just has to be real. There is a difference between “emotional” and “real.” On the one hand, I can have a profoundly moving emotional experience in the movie theater, but the drama that caused it wasn’t real. On the other hand, I can have a profound but un-dramatic relationship with a relative who is confined to a hospital bed, someone I visit regularly over an extended period of time without experiencing any strong emotions during those visits. Normally, some kind of interaction happens between the realm of real interpersonal experience and the realm of intense emotion, but we must keep in mind that the two realms only overlap; they are not equivalent. The same thing goes for our friendship with Christ.

Remember, God deals with each of us in a personal, individual way. He has given you (and many of us) a very dramatic, emotionally undeniable experience of his love, his truth, and his presence. But to others he gives different graces. I have known people who have lived in deep intimacy with God for more than 80 years without ever having a “born-again” experience. It’s as if they are continually, quietly born again every day, every time they go to confession, every time they go to Mass. This is real. It proves its reality in the way they live, the way they pray. Remember Matthew 25? The “final exam” on Judgment Day isn’t whether or not we had an emotional, dramatic born-again experience. The wisdom of the Church also provides for a gradual growth in intimacy with Christ, and a quiet, discrete way of giving one’s life to Christ over and over again through the years, through the liturgy and the sacraments. I think you and I should be grateful for the dramatic, emotional born again experiences that God has given us. God knows we need them, and that’s why he gives them to us. But it is not our place to define how God should work in everyone else’s life. We need to trust his wisdom, and the wisdom of his Church. And we also need to make sure that our love for Christ isn’t built solely on those positive emotional experiences; it would constitute the classic mistake of loving the gifts more than the Giver of the gifts, and it can get us into trouble.

Our Place in Heaven

Second question: Is your place in heaven secure? Yes. Is mine? Yes. Is everyone’s? Yes. The place is secure. God “will’s all men’s salvation” as St Paul puts it. The INSECURE part is whether we will end up occupying it. That doesn’t depend just on God. It also depends on us. Remember, the essence of Christianity is a living relationship with Jesus Christ, a friendship with him. Now, common sense tells us that no real friendship automatically lasts forever. I can break a friendship. I can leave my friends and not come back to them. This is because I am a human being; I am free. This freedom is not eliminated by Christ. He doesn’t make us less human when he offers us his friendship. It is possible to backslide. It is possible to be seduced by the devil and to abandon Christ. Just look at the New Testament – Judas, Peter… This is why the New Testament at times seems to contradict itself. Our salvation is assured, because it depends on God; AND our salvation is a process, to be “worked out in fear and trembling” (Phil 2:12). It’s kind of a paradox, but it’s clear. We can fall away: “We ought, then, to turn our minds more attentively than before to what we have been taught, so that we do not drift away” (Heb 2:1). The most eloquent scriptural explanation of this comes from Revelation 2, 3, and 4. It’s all about Christ warning the Churches that they need to keep watch, they need to do their part to keep the faith, to keep their friendship with Christ vibrant and growing. This isn’t meant to be scary. If we make a decent effort to keep our prayer life in shape, if we stay close to the sacraments and continually follow God’s will as shown in Church teaching and in our well-formed conscience, the friendship will keep growing. That’s why we can have that quiet assurance in our hearts and look forward to heaven (this is the virtue of hope). But we can’t put it on automatic pilot. Real friendships don’t work like that (this is the sin of presumption).

Both of these issues can have a strong effort on our efforts towards spiritual growth. If we are too concerned about concocting emotional experiences, our prayer life and sacramental life may start leaning towards self-centeredness instead of Christ-centeredness. If we become obsessed about whether or not our salvation is assured, the devil can use that worry to cause interior turbulence, leading to distractions and, once again, self-absorption.

I hope these reflections have settled your mind, and I also hope they help you discover the magnificent variety of ways in which God touches the hearts of his beloved children.

Yours in Christ, Father John Bartunek, LC