Tag: ConsolationConsolation & Desolation: What are “spiritualized capital sins”?Q: Dear Father John, You used the phrase “spiritualized capital sins” in your post on consolation and desolation. I have never heard this idea before. What are spiritualized capital sins and how do they “attempt” to re-conquer A: We have to remember that here on earth we are members of the Church militant. We are in the midst of a battle. As we grow spiritually, the enemies of our souls (the devil and his demons) don’t sit idly by. Did you know that the Church’s most notable heresiarchs (people who start heresies) were almost all priests in their forties? Pelagius, Arius, Apollinaris, Nestorius… These were all men of God, passionately dedicated to the Church and to seeking deeper intimacy with Christ, advanced in theological knowledge and in the spiritual life. Who would have guessed that they would become instruments of ecclesial devastation and spiritual shipwreck? And yet, they did. We can never forget this: as we grow spiritually, the battle doesn’t go away. But our enemies are smart. They know that temptation has to be customized to the situation of the person being tempted. They can’t invent new sins (the seven capital sins are always the primary categories for sinful behavior), but they can disguise them in new ways. So, for someone who is well along the road towards spiritual maturity, the tempters will have to clothe the capital sins in spiritual garments. “Spiritualized” Capital Sins For example, the inclination to vanity can appear in a subtle desire to have one’s new and advanced piety noticed. You start trying to draw attention to the outward manifestation of your devotion. Or you find yourself seeking to impress your spiritual director – hiding real struggles from them, lest they think you are less holy than you want to appear. You may even switch spiritual directors, not for any objective reason, but simply because you don’t want to follow anyone’s advice except your own. The inclination to pride can show up in a sort of complacency in your religious works. You think you are really doing well, and so you start planning all kinds of great spiritual projects, but you don’t actually follow through on any of them. Or, you start talking about spiritual things with other people just to give them lessons, instead of seeking ways to put the lessons into practice yourself. In the area of sensuality, you can become attached to the consolations that God has given you in your prayer and sacramental life. So you find yourself trying to force certain emotional reactions during your meditation or after Communion. You start to seek spiritual feelings too much, forgetting that the goal of holiness is union with God in mind and will, not feelings of consolation. You can even begin to become attached to friendships or relationships that seem to be based on spiritual values, but in truth you invest in them because of the emotional payback you feel instead of the mutual spiritual support they are supposed to provide; this can become a kind of spiritual lust. Spiritual greed can take the form of an insatiable desire to read every spiritual book, to accumulate rosaries and holy cards and icons, to jump around from devotion to devotion trying to imbibe the entire spiritual patrimony of the Church all at once even to the neglect of life’s basic duties (like one’s responsibilities to family members), instead of seeking patiently to go deep in the essentials. Keeping Our Eye on the Ball: “Thy Will Be Done – Not Mine!” These are some examples. You can find a more systematic summary of this spiritual trap in Fr. Tanquerey’s treatise on the spiritual life, #’s 1262-1269. We need to know that these types of attachments and self-absorption are possible, and that they can hinder spiritual progress as much as the less subtle sins. But we need not become obsessed with them. As always in the spiritual life, the compass and anchor remain the same: I love God by accepting and fulfilling his will in each moment of my life. That’s the litmus test, and that’s the surest guide through the shadows and tangles of this earthly pilgrimage – as sure a guide for us as it was for Jesus: “My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me and to accomplish His work” (John 4:34). Consolation and Desolation: What does it really mean?Q: Dear Father John, I know you wrote before about consolation and A: This is a great question – and an important one, for Christians in today’s society. Consolation and Desolation: Grasping the Terms First, we have to have a quick review of what we mean by “consolation and desolation” in the spiritual life. Usually, these terms refer to the felt presence of God in our soul (consolation), or the absence of that feeling (desolation). By faith we know that God is always thinking of us, with us, interested in our lives, and loving us with a personal, determined love. We know that by faith. But we don’t always feel that in our emotional world. In fact, sometimes we can feel an intense and painful emptiness inside. Sometimes we can feel absolutely no excitement or pleasure at the thought of spiritual things. Sometimes we can feel dry as a desert even when we are at prayer: emotionally, we don’t even want to keep praying. We are like children with their homework: they know it is good for them to do it, and they know they should do it, but they just don’t feel like doing it. This lack of the felt presence of God, a lack of emotional pleasure or resonance regarding God’s will for us, is usually referred to by spiritual writers as sensible desolation. The contrary is sensible consolation. Now we can get to your question. If you are experiencing desolation, it can come from a variety of sources. Simply knowing what those sources are can help us reflect on one’s personal situation and, usually, identify its source. Our Own Fault First, desolation can be caused by our own sin. We may be inordinately attached to something: some habit, some relationship, some hope, some fear, even some hobby or pastime that may not be evil in itself… Or we may have committed some sin that we haven’t confessed or repented of yet. Sooner or later, disordered attachments will interfere with our relationship with God. God loves us too much to let us idolize anything for long. If we are following him, when the time is right he will speak to our conscience about putting that disordered room in our soul back into order. During the struggle to decide whether or not to obey what he is asking of us, we can experience desolation, because as we dilly-dally, our hearts are divided. In this case, we are actually pushing God away, and the desolation is our own fault. This happens frequently in the early stages of the spiritual life, but can return with a vengeance even after much growth, when the spiritualized capital sins attempt to re-conquer the soul. At times, it is hard to identify disordered attachments. If you are praying regularly (including at least an annual spiritual retreat), doing a regular examination of conscience, going to confession on a regular basis, and receiving some kind of spiritual direction (or at least you have a friend or small group of friends to whom you make yourself spiritually accountable), and following the commandments of God and the Church, you should be able to recognize these disordered attachments when the Holy Spirit points them out to you. If you are not following those basic spiritual practices, your desolation may have this cause, and I would recommend renewing your commitment to these means for spiritual growth that all spiritual writers recommend. Our Fallen Nature’s Fault Second, desolation can flow from advancing self-knowledge. As we grow in the spiritual life, God allows us to know ourselves better and better. We begin to see just how deep our self-centered tendencies really go. We begin to see just how vulnerable we are to temptations of vanity, pride, and sensuality. We begin to see just how helpless we really are, when it comes to growth in holiness, without the constant aid of God’s grace. This can create a disturbance in our relationship with God, because we no longer feel worthy of the great love he has for us. We truly love God. We truly want to follow him. But when we resist approaching him because we have discovered that we actually don’t “deserve” to be loved so unconditionally we begin to stumble. It’s like the spouse who has been unfaithful and has difficulty accepting their spouse’s forgiveness, or the mother who has aborted her child and simply can’t seem to accept God’s mercy. But in this stage of the spiritual life, the specific cause of the interior resistance is often less clear. Here again, we end up separating ourselves from God. This hurdle has to be faced and overcome, in order to become spiritually mature. You have probably already detected the real source of the spiritual reluctance that comes from this situation. It is a subtle form of pride. And the enemy of our souls will often seize on this, stir it up, and try to exaggerate it. The truly humble soul responds to its own unworthiness with peace and joy, throwing itself into God’s arms with total abandon, totally conscious of its absolute need for God’s grace, and contentedly aware of God’s delight in showing mercy to his needy children. The deep interior resistance so many people experience when it comes to activating that kind of abandonment shows just how difficult developing the virtue of humility really is. It is the bedrock of the spiritual life, and digging foundations is never fun. But you can do it. Read the lives of the saints (especially St. Therese of Lisieux’s Story of a Soul and St. Faustina’s Diary). Read the Psalms. And get on your knees in front of the Eucharist, simply learning to trust more deeply in God’s goodness by exercising whatever level of trust you can as you gaze at Our Lord, who has chosen to be there for you, no matter what. The Doctor at Work Finally, desolation can flow from God’s direct action on the soul. God can take away the consolation of his presence, without actually taking away his presence. This is a method he uses to purify the soul and to increase the soul’s capacity for love. If we can keep following God’s will in our lives even when we are passing through “a valley as dark as death” (Psalm 23:4), we will emerge with a much more mature faith, a more vibrant hope, and a deeper love. These are the theological virtues that unite the soul to God – and union with God is what we were created for, and what God yearns us to achieve and deepen. So when he takes away interior consolation in this way, we can rest assured that his wisdom and goodness will permit us, when emerged from the darkness, to undergo greater consolations than we ever imagined, because our soul’s capacity to experience God will have been increased by God directly. These periods of purification initiated by God are often called the “dark night.” We can have dark nights of the senses, of the spirit, of the intellect… It is when God, the doctor of our soul, lays us on the spiritual operating table and takes direct action. Our job in this case is to trust and endure by continuing to seek and embrace God’s will in our lives (the commandments, the duties of our state in life, etc…). The recent book on Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Come Be My Light: The Private Writings of the Saint of Calcutta, chronicles a truly amazing journey through this kind of darkness. I hope these reflections have helped you identify both where your current desolation is coming from, and how to react to it. If not, I recommend taking up the prayer Jesus taught us through St. Faustina, and making it the constant refrain of your heart and mind throughout this season of your spiritual journey: “Jesus, I trust in you.” Sayings of Light and Love #19
Saint John of the Cross Dryness in Prayer – Part III – God’s Part in the Struggle
Lack of consolation in prayer (also known as dryness) may be a result of un-confessed and un-repented sin, or it may come from sloppiness or laziness in our effort to pray. But if we are making a reasonable effort to do our part, and yet we still don’t experience (or stop experiencing) consolation, it’s probably God’s fault, not ours. God is not a vending machine; he doesn’t have to reveal himself to us in a tangible way every time we try to press his buttons. This is one of the big differences between Christianity and many other religions. In pagan religions, for example, the gods were obliged to respond to worshippers in a certain way, if the worshipper performed a specific ritual, likewise in Satan worship. But Christ isn’t like that. We can’t control him. He can hold us back from feeling his presence in our souls, even when we are sincerely and conscientiously doing our part. Why? Why would he allow us to experience dryness in prayer? Because he wants our love for him to mature. At times, we can become subtly attached to our experience of God in prayer – to the consolations that we feel as we gaze upon his beauty or taste his goodness. Subconsciously, we can begin to seek those consolations even more than their source. We begin to value the gifts of God more than the God who gives them, like the little child who enjoys Uncle Ernie’s company because Uncle Ernie always gives out candy. Candy is a good sign of Uncle Ernie’s goodness and love for a child, but getting to know Uncle Ernie better and developing a more mature relationship with him means learning to go beyond the gum-drops. When God withholds consolations, he is purifying us of this subtle attachment to our feelings, so that our faith can grow and mature. To become mature Christians, we must learn more and more to “walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7). In this context of spiritual growth, dryness in prayer is an opportunity to truly adore God himself, regardless of personal preferences and satisfactions. The mature love is the love that “lays down its life for the beloved” (John 15:13), not the love that “has no root deep down and does not last, should some trial come…” (Mark 4:17). Dryness is an invitation to give ourselves to God, putting aside our desire to get things from him. Doing Our Part Amid Dryness When God sends us this kind of purification, our reaction should be like a patient on an operating table. We must not try to avoid the often painful dryness, nor panic in the midst of it. Rather, we should persevere in our good efforts, trusting that the wise doctor of our souls is hard at work in ways that we cannot see or feel, healing us of spiritual cancers that we may not even know we have. (St. Ignatius of Loyola used to advise keeping to the exact minute of the time reserved to meditation whether we experience immense consolation or immense desolation.) This is what spiritual writers call “passive purification.” Active purification is when we consciously deny our natural inclinations in order to follow Christ more closely (see our blog posts on mortification). Passive purification is when God puts us into the fire in order to burn away impurities that are beyond our reach. The result is marvelous: purified silver is more fully itself after being put through the fire; we become more fully what God made us to be after he purifies us. But the process is often painful. When this dryness occurs for long periods of time on the level of emotions or imagination, it is sometimes referred as the “dark night of the senses.” The “dark night” is an image that St. John of the Cross used to sum up the whole phenomenon of dryness and passive purification. When this dryness occurs for long periods of time on the level of intellect and will (see part I of these posts on dryness in prayer for an explanation of these different faculties), it is sometimes referred to as the “dark night of the soul,” since these two faculties are the superior, spiritual faculties of the human soul. St. John of the Cross went into great detail about the signs by which authentic dark nights can be distinguished from dryness that comes from other sources. In summary, they are as follows: 1) we find no consolation in the things of God, but neither do we find any in the things of the world; 2) we find ourselves still attending very carefully to our prayer commitments, and our anxiety comes because we fear we are not serving him well; 3) we find ourselves unable (at least for unusually long periods of time) to make reflections and considerations when we go to mental prayer, as if our minds were somehow paralyzed. In these three areas, however, it is difficult for us to diagnose ourselves; it’s like trying to look at our backs in a mirror. Two Tangents Two more observations are needed before leaving this topic. First, those who are taking their spiritual lives seriously and striving to grow in prayer can sometimes be distracted by trying to figure out exactly where they are in the various stages of spiritual growth. It’s as if they think that having the perfect label will make their efforts more fruitful and helpful. This can be a pitfall. Because we are all individuals, and God leads us through unique paths of spiritual growth, it is not always easy to fit our real experience perfectly into the abstract categories that theology has to use to reflect systematically on these issues. We can become obsessed with finding the right label, instead of staying focused on loving God through prayer and action in obedience to his will. It is helpful to understand more and more the principles in the spiritual life, because then we can understand ourselves better as we begin to identify how those principles are at work in our experience. Yet, spiritual naval-gazing is unhelpful. This is one reason why spiritual direction is such a useful tool. It helps keeps us objective and balanced in our efforts to discern how God is acting in our lives. Second, those Christians who are living out their vocation to holiness as lay men and women often receive their purification in ways other than the “dark nights” of the senses and the soul. The suffering and the struggles for fidelity to Christ that come with the vocation to marriage can be acute. The suffering and struggles that come in one’s effort to build Christ’s Kingdom through work, community, and professional activities can also be acute. God can use those struggles and that suffering to perform his purification-operations. He is not limited to using dryness in prayer. This is one more reason why we should be wary of spiritual naval-gazing. The key to spiritual growth is accepting, embracing, and fulfilling God’s will moment by moment, not anticipating how God will work in us and then forcing him to follow our expectations. We must let the Doctor do his work, without demanding that he first teach us the whole science of medicine. Yours in Christ, Father John Bartunek, LC Dryness in Prayer – Part II – Our Part in the Struggle
Dryness in prayer is the contrary of consolation (the sense of satisfaction that God gives our emotions, imagination, intellect and will when we encounter his truth, goodness, and beauty). Dryness is the absence or lessening of those consolations, either every once in awhile, or for long periods of time. And the Catechism identifies dryness as one of the key obstacles in prayer. But we won’t be able to understand how to deal with the obstacle unless we understand, at least a little bit, what causes it. Dryness in prayer surfaces for one of two reasons: because of us, or because of God. Let’s start with the first reason. When the Going Gets Tough When we aren’t making a reasonable effort to do our part in the quest of prayer, dryness happens because of us. At times in the spiritual life, especially (but not only) at the beginning, God sends frequent and intense consolation to our souls. It is like a courtship, and he is courting us. He sends us flowers, gives us candy, takes us out on beautiful dates (in the spiritual sense). He is trying to convince us of his goodness, wisdom, and power. He is trying to win us over. As our relationship deepens, we realize that following God involves not just getting good gifts from him, but giving him the gift of ourselves. This we do through obeying his commandments and his will, through following his example, growing in virtue, building up the Church, loving our neighbor… All these things, since they are based on our desire to grow in our friendship with the One who is calling us, takes an effort on our part. We have to freely choose to respond to God’s action in our lives; it’s not automatic (if it were automatic, it wouldn’t be a relationship of love, or friendship). As this journey continues, we sometimes grow weary. We begin to hanker after the “onions of Egypt,” as the Israelites did during their sojourn in the wilderness on their way to the Promised Land. We long for an easier life, for the pleasures of self-indulgence, for the seductive comforts and passing gratifications that thirty pieces of silver can purchase for us. Moments like these are crucial for spiritual growth. They give us a chance to mature our love for God, to grow up a little bit more. But the tug of our fallen nature, egged on by the glitter of popular culture and the twittering of the devil on our interior homepage, is strong. Getting Sloppy One reaction that we can have in these times is to begin simply going through the motions in our prayer life. On the surface, we are continuing with the same prayer commitments that we have always kept, commitments that have the blessing of our spiritual director. And yet, we start fulfilling them in a routine way, not making a concerted effort to concentrate on our vocal prayers, for instance, or not carefully following the method of our mental prayer. We get careless. We don’t prepare the material for our meditation ahead of time. We don’t guard our interior silence during the day. We cut off a couple of minutes now and then from our meditation, or toy with involuntary distractions instead of putting forth the necessary effort to deflect them… Sometimes this diminishing effort is extremely subtle, even subconscious. Sometimes it is glaringly obvious: we are avoiding looking into God’s eyes because of an un-repented and un-confessed sin (dishonesty, infidelity, impurity, disordered ambition, willful consent to self-righteous anger or envy…). Whether subtle or flagrant, slacking off in our reasonable efforts to pay attention to God when we pray will often inhibit us from hearing his voice. Not always, because God can make himself heard even when we’re not listening, but almost always. Sidestepping Along When our inbox is overly cluttered, we lose motivation to roll up our sleeves and get to work, so we procrastinate or look for busy-work to distract ourselves. This inhibits us from experiencing the satisfaction that comes from a job well done, from meeting goals and following objective priorities. Likewise in the spiritual life. When we hit a steep section of the road as we’re following Christ, we can stray off to the side, take a rest, or even go looking for a shortcut, though we know very well that our Lord is standing on the upgrade beckoning us forward. Until we get back on track, we won’t be able to experience the consolation God has for us, because we won’t be meeting God (the source of consolation) where he is waiting to meet us. Think of a gymnast who reaches a plateau in her training. Her coach knows that she needs to maintain the same effort that she was putting out while she was making visible, rapid progress. But she starts getting discouraged, precisely because her progress isn’t so rapid and visible at the moment. If she trusts her coach and perseveres, soon she will be beyond the plateau, achieving higher levels of excellence and experiencing the satisfaction that goes with it. The coach can encourage her, but in the end she has to decide if she will keep putting forth the effort, doing her part. The First Question So this is the first question we need to ask ourselves if we are experiencing dryness in prayer: Am I still doing my part? Or has some un-confessed sin or subtle self-pity – or just plain laziness (be humble) – drained my efforts? To find an objective answer to that question, it is often helpful to go over our prayer commitments with our spiritual director, to describe how we are praying the Rosary, the Mass, the meditation, the morning offering… It can also be useful to go over the basic guidelines of prayer again, e.g. reading The Fundamentals of Christian Meditation from the first section of The Better Part. (For your convenience, I have included a checklist below that can help remind you of what doing your part in the daily meditation entails.) If you discover that, indeed, you have been slacking off a bit. Don’t be afraid! Bring it up in confession, and then make some small adjustments to your commitments that will help motivate you to get back in the swing. For example, change the book you are using to help you meditate, or the place of your morning prayer, or the time of day, or buy yourself a new Rosary… A fresh start can be sparked without these kinds of external tricks, but they can sometimes help. If, on the other hand, after a calm and objective self-evaluation, you are convinced that you are still making a reasonable effort to do your part, then the dryness you are experiencing probably isn’t because of you, it’s probably because of God. Next time, we will talk about why God sometimes withholds his consolations. (By the way, I keep saying “reasonable effort” because that’s all God asks of us. Some people tend to think that if their effort isn’t perfect in every way, it isn’t reasonable. That’s not true. God knows we are not angels.) …[from "The Better Part: A Christ-Centered Resource for Personal Prayer"]… On any given day, then, measuring whether your meditation went well or badly is not so easy. Your meditation may have been quite pleasing to God and full of grace for your soul even when it was unpleasant and difficult from a strictly emotional perspective. An athlete may have a great practice session even though it was painful and frustrating – likewise with a daily meditation. The best we can do is to give some indicators below. The most important thing, though, is simply to keep striving to pray better. Speak about your prayer life in spiritual direction and confession, and trust that if you are sincerely doing all your best, the Holy Spirit will do the rest. My meditation went badly when I…
My meditation went well when I…
Yours in Christ, Father John Bartunek, LC |
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Q: Dear Father John, I have been praying (mental prayer) for a long time. But lately I seem to be experiencing dryness in my prayer – I just don’t seem to get as much out of it as I used to. Is this the “dark night of the soul”? If not, what’s going on, and what should I do?
