Can God speak to me in my dreams?

Q:  I never had dreams like this before. Only now that I have grown closer to Him in recent months He has spoken to me in other ways like at prayer. And He often confirms what I heard in prayer by people, articles, etc. If these dreams bring me closer to Him then surely they are from Him right? They have been such wonderful sources of consolation for me! Oh please enlighten me!

A: Surely “if these dreams bring you closer to Him” then, absolutely, they can be welcomed as Providential gifts. So you can be at peace! In fact, God has often used dreams in the lives of his faithful. This appears in both the Old and the New Testaments, and also the lives of the saints (see for example the dreams of St. John Bosco). Nevertheless, two other thoughts may be of use to you. First, we should reflect on how you can determine whether or not they are truly bringing you “closer to Him.” It is easy to be misled. Second, we should mention some warning signs and things to avoid in this arena – after all, we fallen human beings have a penchant for turning good things to bad use.

Discerning Experiences

Coming closer to God is the essence of spiritual growth. But sometimes things that make us temporarily feel closer to God are not actually bringing us closer. Feelings of consolation or emotional tranquility, or even enthusiasm, can accompany spiritual growth, but the core of spiritual growth lies elsewhere. It consists of becoming more united to Christ. This entails becoming more like Christ in our attitudes and behaviors. We can grow in humility, wisdom, and love for neighbor, for example, even in the midst of great suffering and feelings of confusion and dryness in our souls. In fact, sometimes the periods of greatest spiritual growth occur precisely during the seasons of greatest emotional aridity.

And so, in reflecting on how these dreams are affecting your spiritual life, you need to periodically reflect on the same questions that we would use to evaluate spiritual growth in general. Do they encourage me to participate more frequently and more consciously in the sacraments? Do they motivate me to deny my own tendencies to self-indulgence and self-righteousness in favor of serving my neighbor mercifully and gracefully? Do they empower me to hold my tongue, control my anger, think well of my neighbor, and forgive the faults and offenses of my loved ones? Do they increase my thirst for prayer and for a deeper knowledge of Christ’s teachings as offered to me by his Church? Do they strengthen me to obey the moral law and the precepts of the Church?

If dreams, or any other powerful experiences, were to push you away from those objective reference points for spiritual maturity, then they would be suspect.

Some Warning Signs

Another warning sign would be if you find yourself actively seeking out those dreams, consciously trying to make them repeat themselves instead of receiving them as gifts of God’s Providence. This can happen even with consolation in prayer, or with the charismatic gifts of the Holy Spirit. God sends them in order to build us up spiritually. But we, weak as we are, can sometimes become attached to those gifts as ends in themselves. When that happens, we forget about the Giver of the gifts, and fall into a kind of mercenary spirituality, where we seek to reproduce certain states of soul through prayer and spiritual disciplines, instead of seeking to glorify God and receive his grace.

In this sense, fascination with dreams and dream-experiences can lead us very far astray indeed. Some strains of the New Age movement, for example, encourage the intentional development of techniques for “lucid dreaming.” This is often linked up with the invocation of some kind of spirit guide who can aid the person in astral traveling. At first, the experiences obtained through these practices seem thrilling and energizing. But they can easily become a kind of idolatry, and can even be coerced by demons. The person following these practices may continue to seek more and more intense experiences, regardless of whether or not they can bring the soul closer to Christ and contribute to moral and spiritual growth. This can make them more vulnerable to subtle and not-so-subtle spiritual attacks.

Avoiding Over-Emphasis

Finally, it is possible to give too much importance to what happens in a dream. Although God can speak through dreams, that doesn’t mean that everything that happens in our dreams comes from God. The psychology of dreams is complex and confusing. The interpretation of dreams is not an exact science, by any stretch. And although God can certainly speak to the soul through dreams, he will never contradict himself; he would never inspire someone in a dream to disobey his commandments or abandon the duties of their state in life, for example.

And so, just as we can be grateful for dreams that encourage us in our relationship with God, we should not allow ourselves to be overly distracted by dreams that cause turbulence in our souls. That being said, even good Catholic psychologists will admit that intense and repetitive dreams can sometimes give clues to minor or major psychological disturbances. But they are never sufficient for a complete diagnosis all on their own.

We are members of Christ’s Church, enlightened by grace and renewed by the New Covenant. As a result, we have been given God’s own self-revelation in Christ. This provides us with objective reference points of doctrine, of truth. We find these in the Bible, in the Tradition of the Church, and in the official teaching of the Magisterium (for example, the Catechism). These sources of knowledge should always be our primary guides when we are faced with decisions or dilemmas.

May God continue to bless you with his abundant love and grace, and draw you closer and closer to his Sacred Heart.

What is the essence of Catholic spirituality? – Part I of II

Q: Dear Father John, I still struggle with keeping things in perspective. Would you therefore kindly explain what is the essence of authentic catholic spirituality, i.e. irrespective of whatever tradition one follows (ignitian, carmelite, opus dei, etc.), and also what are the essential elements of the spirituality. Also what is the relationship between catholic morality and catholic spirituality.

A: This question is harder to answer than you might think! But we’ll give it a shot.

What Do We Mean by Spirituality?

First, we will briefly define “spirituality.” Basically, this term signifies an itinerary for growth in our friendship with Christ. This itinerary has as its final destination what we call holiness, an individual’s firm, deep, integral, and dynamic communion with God. We call this itinerary “spirituality” because we achieve communion with God through the purifying our spiritual faculties (intelligence and will) and aligning them with the wisdom and will of God.

Our intelligence, our capacity to perceive and understand truth in a self-conscious manner, was severely darkened by original sin, and darkened even more by our personal sin and the sinful tendencies of the world around us. Growth in the spiritual life gradually increases the influence of God’s revelation and wisdom (a “light for our path and a lamp for our feet” as Psalm 119 puts it) in correcting, healing, and strengthening our minds. In this way we come to see and understand ourselves, God, and the world around us truthfully, i.e. as God does.

Our will, the capacity of self-determination which allows us to make self-aware choices, was also severely weakened by original sin, personal sin, and the evil tendencies of the world around us. Growth in the spiritual life gradually heals and strengthens our will, so that we emerge out of self-centered and self-indulgent habits into virtuous living. Virtues are those good habits of the will that enable us to choose what is truly good and right in any circumstance, even at great immediate cost to ourselves.

In our next post we will dig a little deeper into the nuts and bolts of the practical elements of a spirituality.

No spiritual director in sight – how can I keep growing spiritually in the mean time?

Q: Dear Father John, I cannot find a spiritual director in my area. I will keep looking and praying, but until I find someone, what do I need to do to ensure that I continue to grow spiritually?

A: As you patiently continue looking and praying for a good spiritual director, God will continue to guide you through the other means for spiritual growth that the Church recommends. These are the some of the same items and activities that you would discuss with a spiritual director. If you make a decent effort to keep these plates spinning, the Holy Spirit will have plenty of room to work in your heart until he gives you a good spiritual director. These are the plates I am referring to:

• Participation in the sacraments, especially the Eucharist and confession. It’s funny, but sometimes you run into people who claim to be enthusiastically pursuing spiritual growth, but who make little effort to receive frequent Holy Communion, spend some time regularly in adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, and go to confession (Although the Church only requires us to confess our mortal sins once a year, for someone like yourself, whom God is clearly drawing to a deeper intimacy, I would recommend at least a monthly confession – every 15 days is even better.).
• Daily prayer. A daily God-time is absolutely essential for spiritual growth. I would include both vocal and mental prayer. If you are not already doing this, I would start with a very realistic time commitment – 15 minutes of mental prayer in the morning would be plenty. If you can add a few minutes at night to prayerfully review how your day went, thanking God for his blessings, asking pardon for your sins, and renewing your desire to seek and serve Christ during the next day, that would be a big help.
• Spiritual reading. This is not the same as prayer. It consists in taking some time each day (or a few times a week) to read about the spiritual life. This is like fertilizer for the soul. If we are filling our minds with solid teaching about what it means to follow Christ and how to know, love, and imitate him better, our decisions and attitudes will gradually become more and more like his. What you are doing right now, for example, is spiritual reading. Some classic works that can be a good place to start include St Francis de Sales’ Introduction to the Devout Life and Eugene Boylan’s This Tremendous Lover. (If any of our readers have some favorite spiritual reading books, I would ask them to share their recommendation with the rest of us!)
• Fellowship with people seeking to follow Christ more closely. Christianity is not a self-help method; it is a family affair. We were not meant to pursue holiness on our own, but together with our brothers and sisters in Christ. Developing friendships with others who have the same priorities as you do and are trying to live them faithfully helps keep the fire burning in your own heart, and actually makes it burn better. If you take a burning coal out of the hearth, it will lose its heat. But if you keep it in the hearth, in contact with the rest of the burning wood and hot coals, it will stay warm. If you can plug in to a faith-sharing or Bible study group that is truly focused on transformation in Christ, it will give exponential help to your growth in holiness.
• Service to others. Christianity is about redeeming the world, showing forth God’s goodness, rolling back sin and evil, and leading others to friendship with Jesus Christ. If we aren’t engaged in this activity, consciously and purposefully, we will be like those stultifying ponds that receive water from a stream but have no outlet. They become rank, clogged, and swampy. We want to be like a spiritual reservoir, constantly receiving new floods of God’s grace through our means of spiritual growth, and just as constantly sharing what we have received with others – grace flowing in, grace flowing out. That keeps our souls fresh, and gives God a chance to work more freely in and through us. This service could be directly religious, or it could be humanitarian. If you have a profession, this too can be supernaturalized, simply by offering your work to God for the good of your neighbor. Not everyone is called to be an explicit missionary, but everyone is indeed called to be actively engaged in the mission of spreading Christ’s Kingdom.

If this seems like too much, don’t fret. Just take baby steps in each area, gradually. The important thing is to get started and to keep going, not to break speed records. I will say a prayer for the success of your search for a spiritual director.

Yours in Christ, Father John Bartunek, LC

Dryness in Prayer – Part III – God’s Part in the Struggle

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?

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