One
of the least advertised parts of the spiritual journey is desolation or spiritual "dryness".
Most people want to sell the consolation at the beginning of the trip or the
mystical union down the road yet I think, for most of us, it is 90%
desolation and 10% other. So why bother? Why not avoid it all, have a party at the beginning and then spend the rest of our lives trying to recreate the "dawn" by staying out of the desert through simulating the "ardent desire for things of the spirit" that seems so real at the start? Merton speaks to the positive side of desolation, implicitly acknowledging the redemptive option in suffering that Cassian discusses here in Conference IV, the path of freedom to love as God loves, a path that is made clear only in the suffering that comes in desolation.
Desolation
in the spiritual life. And God gives us this desolation, God sends us
desolation for a purpose. What causes desolation in our life in the way
he just explained it? Why does this question of being dragged in both
directions cause us desolation? Well, it's because we want to be
carried away in the spiritual direction, we want to be going up to these
beautiful things and we feel ourselves dragged down. Now in the world,
with all due respect, with the world being taken out in sort of a bad
sense, is the people outside [the monastery] it's not necessarily
desolation for them if they are dragged towards pleasures and things
like that. On the contrary, that's consolation to them. If a person
has no particular desire to be dragged in the direction of divine
things, he doesn't mind being dragged in the other direction. But it
causes desolation to us because we want to go to God and we find
ourselves being dragged in the other direction. Well, you can work that
both ways. The desolation is lessened, and in a legitimate way, if you
have a more realistic conception of your desire of divine things. I
would say this is a basic truth of the spiritual life for everybody here
[in the monastery] is that, be careful, of intense desires for divine
things, which come especially to novices and not so often to the
professed but which are familiar to the novitiate. That's alright, it's
good to have those, but don't think that that is beginning and the end
of everything. These intense desires have their purpose but they're not
spiritual perfection and the thing you have to be a little careful of,
is don't let yourself because carried away by those and don't push
yourself too hard. The devil can pull you in that direction. This is
one of the points that Cassian makes, that if the devil doesn't get you
by giving you an ardent desire for the things of the flesh, he can get
you with an excessive desire for the things of the spirit. And the
thing we have to desire is neither one nor the other but the disposition
of freedom and enlightenment in the middle, which God gives us. That's
the one thing that the Devil won't give us because that's where we
ought to be; he'll give us everything else but that. If the Devil were
to give us the desire for this middle position, there is no point in him
doing that, and if he does, accept it, he's giving you something good.
I assure that he won't, according to tradition.
Why
does God allow us to suffer this desolation? Why does he allow us to
have a great desire to have spiritual things and to feel ourselves
pulled in the other direction? What good does that do us? What does
that teach us? . . . It gives us purity of intention, and it gives us
humility, and it gives us self-knowledge. The purpose of trial,
definitely, is giving us self-knowledge, trust in God, understanding of
God's way with us, self-distrust, realization of our total dependence on
grace, all those things. So, if you happen to get into some kind of a
trial, remember what it's supposed to do for you. And, start working on
these things a little bit, work in the direction of self-knowledge and
self-distrust and trust in God and reliance on grace and total
dependence on God. And, then, the other things that these trials do . .
. is to test our perseverance and to test how serious we are about the
spiritual life, to test the seriousness of our will, the seriousness of
our desire to serve God. And, especially, not the seriousness of our
desire for these concupiscentias spiritus , but it's the seriousness of
our desire to stand in the middle and to exercise our freedom for the
love of God. That's what we have to be serious about, that is the thing
that we have to be most serious about, because that is the talent that
God has given us to develop. He doesn't ask us to develop
concupiscentias spiritus, that's what we think he asks us but it isn't.
He doesn't ask us to develop all kinds of ardor and fire and sensible
fervor and that sort of thing. One has no obligation whatever in the
spiritual life to have or develop sensible fervor. Sensible fervor is
there if it comes and you use it if you got it and so forth. You have
no obligation to have it and you are not supposed necessarily to have
it. What you are supposed to have is good will and a certain amount of
intelligence and a certain amount of an enlightened of your freedom
which makes use of both these things. (24:36)
Transcript from "Ways of Prayer: A Desert Father's Wisdom", lectures by Thomas Merton, Chapter 2.
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