The more you keep trying to turn and open yourself to God in the darkness, then the more your love is being purified and perfected. The more your love is purified and perfected then the more it becomes like a spiritual pathway that enables the Holy Spirit to enter into you with ever greater energy and power.
When I was fifteen, I fell in love for the first time. When I heard those magic words “I love you”, I simply wanted to spend the rest of my life returning her love. It is the same when we first begin to realize that God loves us, and will continue to love us, not just here on earth but to eternity in heaven. Christ experienced this love enveloping him at every moment of his life on earth, so he alone has the answer to what we must do to receive and return this love.
Although God’s love is infinite and infallible we can nevertheless receive it as Christ is God’s go-between and our High Priest. He remained open at all times to the love that poured into him from the Father, and then he returned it in kind. The Morning Offering is the most important prayer that we can make because it commits us to making every action in the forthcoming day into an act of love. Whether we say our Morning Offering in bed, while kneeling at the bedside, while dressing or even on the way to work, it is actually being said in the New Temple which is Christ’s Mystical Body. Because it is offered in, with and through him, it has a power and potency that is infinitely beyond what we can offer alone.
Nevertheless, there is a clear difference between the way Christ loves his Father and the way we do. Because there is no sin or selfishness in Christ, there is nothing within him that can prevent him from contemplating and enjoying his Father’s love at all times. Because original sin has perverted our God-given impulses and drives, they are in a state of perpetual anarchy. While we try to raise our heart’s deepest desire to love and to be loved by God, they relentlessly endeavour to prevent the pure and unalloyed contemplative love that was Christ’s greatest
joy. Before our hearts can beat in union with his, we need to be purified through the repentance we practise each day, as we try to take up our daily cross to follow Christ, both inside and outside of prayer. It is therefore of utmost importance that we understand the meaning of the word repentance, which was as totally unnecessary for Christ as it is necessary for us.
Christ did not come primarily for everyone to meet him face-to-face like a supernatural celebrity, but for everyone to enter into him through “light inaccessible” transformed into love, making it possible for all to come to know and love him in every time and in every century. Before, God was seen as the all-holy and unutt erable Other who dwelt in light inaccessible, but Jesus taught that we have a Father who is accessible through love to those with hearts open to receive it. He used the word Abba, or Dad, with which to address God in the fi rst prayer he gave his followers and the prayer that we still use today. Opening our hearts to receive this love makes it possible for every man and woman in every age to the end of time, not just to be introduced to him but to enter into him, making him, as St Augustine put it, closer to us than we are to ourselves. This is not the end but the beginning of a mystical journey, in and with him. It will take us to the home where love without measure will fi ll us in an ever-greater measure, as the capacity of the heart to receive it expands to receive it to eternity. Ultimate happiness then is not a state, but an ongoing and ever-more joyous journey into the light inaccessible that we now know is accessible because it is love, the love of the One who wants to be known as our Divine Dad. This is the strong vibrant faith that we have all but forgotten, but which was given to the early Church by Christ. Yet, we can return to it now and without delay simply by doing daily what St Peter told us to do on the first Pentecost, when light inaccessible was unleashed as love, making it accessible to all.
Begin at once, and I promise you that as long as you persist in turning, opening and offering your heart to God you will receive his love no matter how many times you fall, so long as you have the humility to rise and start again immediately. Christ’s love, his Holy Spirit will bond you ever more deeply into him and will prepare and purify you ever more thoroughly to become perfect. You will be fitted into him, not for the journey of a lifetime, but to the end of time and beyond. The unending and ecstatic bliss of entering into love without measure to all eternity will therefore never end. If you have the humility to keep trying to practise the repentance that involves repeatedly turning, opening and offering your heart to God, he cannot fail you because he is God. His infinite loving will always triumph, even over our endless finite failures. It is only the pride and the pomposity of those who do not have the humility to keep getting up after falling, and getting up immediately, that can keep God out and prevent him leading them through the darkness of purification into the light of his love.
Although the Devil is the ultimate personification of Evil he cannot enter into the glorified body of Christ so those who enter into his mystical body are safe from direct confrontation with him. St John of the Cross is quite clear about this. Therefore, although we might be assailed by powerful temptations in the Dark Night we are safe from direct confrontation with the Evil One. When I speak of the “demons within” I am using the phrase metaphorically, as I have made clear before. I am therefore referring to the unruly passions and urges, the consequences of original sin that keep threatening to destroy us. I am not referring to demonic creatures, agents of the devil, that dwell within plotting to destroy us.
This process of endlessly repenting is firstly learned by practising it in prayer. No matter what form of prayer we may find helpful, you can be sure there will always be distractions and temptations preventing us from turning, opening and offering our hearts to God. Remember St Teresa of Ávila said that you cannot really pray without distractions. Far from preventing us from practising repentance, these temptations and distractions are where repentance is learnt. If God gives you experiences of his pure love that so lift you out of yourself so that you no longer experience any temptations or distractions, then that is his gift of pure unalloyed mystical contemplation that you cannot attain by yourself. However, you can keep trying to prepare yourself to receive the love that leads to union, by continually trying to turn away from distractions and temptations. The more you do this, most especially when you are in the darkest moments of the Dark Night, then the love is learned that does not merit, but enables you to receive the gift of contemplation.
I want to let you into a secret about the spiritual life that for some reason many people fail to see. They think they would progress in leaps and bounds if only they did not have so many distractions in prayer. The truth of the matter is you could not possibly progress in prayer without distractions. My brothers and I used to laugh at an old Victorian painting that our aunt used to hang on her kitchen wall. It depicted a brook flowing down from the mountains. The left-hand side of the brook was in all but darkness, the right-hand side was bathed in light. In the foreground there were stepping stones and under the picture written in bold Gothic script was, “Make all your stumbling blocks into stepping stones”. I do not know why we found it so funny. I suppose the combination of the Victorian picture and the Gothic script made it all seem a little too twee, at least to us. But the truth of the matter is that the little epigram was true, and it still is true, especially in prayer where our stumbling blocks are in fact the stepping stones to sanctity.
It is interesting that St Teresa of Ávila said that you cannot pray without distractions. As I think I have said before but it is worth saying again – if you go to pray and fall asleep you are not praying, nor are you praying if you are swept up into an ecstasy. When you are asleep you are doing nothing and when you are in an ecstasy then God is doing everything. Prayer takes place in between the sleep and the ecstasy. In that place there are always distractions, so you are forever engaged in turning away from them in order to turn back to God, by continually raising your heart and mind to him, by making acts of love. So if you have a hundred and one distractions in half an hour, you have chosen to turn back to God a hundred and one times. In other words, you have been doing what St Peter asked his listeners to do on the first Pentecost day to receive the Holy Spirit. You have been repenting, repeatedly trying to turn back to God, continually raising your heart and mind to him, to give your love to him, so that he can give his love to you. Prayer is the place where in concentrated periods of time you practise what God wants you to do all the time, as you turn to him in all you say and do each day, and as you turn to him in the neighbour in need. That is why all the saints and all the great Christians who are held up to us as examples of how to live the Christian life, are men and women of prayer. They all knew and practised the art of what I have called spiritual weight-lifting in prayer. It was this daily spiritual exercise that, not only taught them the art of how to keep turning to God outside of prayer through all they said and did each day, but gave them the power to do it too, as their weak human powers were surcharged by the divine. As they gave, so they received, and in ever greater measure.
The more you keep trying to turn and open yourself to God in the darkness, then the more your love is being purified and perfected. The more your love is purified and perfected then the more it becomes like a spiritual pathway that enables the Holy Spirit to enter into you with ever greater energy and power. You may not feel his presence in these darkest moments but this dark and dry contemplation which is experienced is the consequence of the inner emptying that finally enables us to surrender our true self, freed from the “demons” within. It is this utter and complete surrendering of ourselves that finally enables the Holy Spirit, who has been guiding us throughout, to draw us up ever more fully into the Mystical Body of Christ. The more we are purified, the more deeply we are fitted into Christ’s Mystical Body, and into his mystical action with which he at all times contemplates the Glory of God. This is the contemplation to which we are all called, our final destiny. It is here, and only here, in, with and through Christ our Risen Lord, that we first begin to glimpse something of the infinite glory of God.
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This essay is chapter sixty-six of The Primacy of Loving and is published here by gracious permission of the author.
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The featured image is “Stepping Stones” (1887), by Hugh Cameron, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
