T. S. Eliot has described the experience in one of my favorite poetic passages:
With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this
Calling We shall not cease from exploration, And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.
Four Quartets Little Gidding, V
The love of God is a magnet drawing us ever beyond our
4 Boase explains this paradox of knowing and not knowing, seeing and not seeing, by saying that we have a strong experiential certainty that God is and loves us even though we are totally in the dark as to who or what he is for us. (Prayer of Faith, pp. 86ff. in the 1950 edition; cf. pp. 88ff. in the 1976 edition.)
To Know the Place for the First Time
present situation. He is always just out of reach, far enough away so we can never settle down in comfortable complacency, and yet never so far that we give up the quest as hopeless — once we can abandon our own expectations and let him truly be the Lord of the dance, the Master of the hunt. As we explore further and further we gradually begin to discover that the Lord is leading us, not into some strange angelic world but deeper and deeper into the heart of our very concrete existence. For the Zen Buddhist, the Buddha-divinity is ordinary life, "three pounds of flax," three kilos of rice. While this cannot mean for us Christians that God is simply identical with his creation, there is something profoundly and paradoxically true about the Zen insight. The interior life is not so much a flight to the stars as a journey deeper and deeper into the very center of ourselves, to the core of our being where God alone dwells and where we have never been. It seems to me that this is one of the central insights of St. John's Gospel: The interior life is not a question of seeing extraordinary things but rather of seeing the ordinary things with the eyes of God.
Thus it is true, as Eliot said, that the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. This has been beautifully confirmed many times in my life as a director. How often good souls have exclaimed to me, when once they began to realize how God was really working in their lives, "How blind I have been! How foolish! I thought all was lost, and I never realized what the Lord was doing. Only now do I begin to see that he has been closer to me than I to myself." They have discovered, to their chagrin, that God has not been absent as they thought all along. He has been present, and it is they who have been absent from him. They have been blinded by his light, and now they realize that darkness is light, that death is life, that failure is success and success failure.
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Like the disciples on the road to Emmaus they had been hoping, and all their hopes seemed shattered by the Lord's disastrous death. When he came up and walked along the road, their eyes were blinded and they could not recognize him. They even told him of all their broken dreams, without ever realizing that he, about whom they were speaking with such sadness, was the very one they were speaking to! He finally said to them: "What little sense you have! How slow you are to believe all that the prophets have announced! Did not the Messiah have to undergo all this so as to enter into his glory?" (Lk 24:25-26). Even then, as he went on to interpret for them the things in the Old Testament concerning himself, they still did not recognize him. Their healing was very gradual, as God's ways always seem to be. But something was kindled in their hearts as he spoke. It was a faint flame of hope which led them to urge him, still unrecognized, to stay with them for supper when they reached Emmaus. Of course, he accepted. Their invitation, freely and insistently offered, was the one thing he greatly desired, and the only thing they could contribute to the miracle of his return to them. He would never force himself on them, just as he will never force himself on us. But after they had listened "while their hearts were burning within them," he was more eager to stay with them than they were to have him. At long last they could recognize him, in the simplest and most human of gestures, a gesture they had seen so many times before, a gesture which he had used just three days previously as a dramatic symbol of his love for them: When he had seated himself with them to eat, he took bread, pronounced the blessing, then broke the bread and began to distribute it to them. With that their eyes were opened and they recognized him (Lk 24:30-31).
What a moment that must have been! It is difficult even to imagine how they felt unless we have known both their sense of loss and the wonder of the Lord's return. Shortly after this incident Jesus appeared to the 11 apostles and
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their companions in the upper room in Jerusalem. He showed them his hands and feet, to prove to them that it was really he. St. Luke, in a phrase of which only he was capable, tells us that they "disbelieved for sheer joy" (Lk 24:41). It is an extraordinary statement: for me. one of the most beautiful in all scripture. What kind of unbelief is this? Certainly not the kind to be censured, regretted. It is the unbelief of a wife when she learns that her beloved husband, who she had been told had died in battle, suddenly turns up alive and returns to her. It is the unbelief I saw on the face of my father when I. whom he had never expected to see again, stood suddenly by his deathbed in the hospital. "I can't believe it!" We do believe of course, but the joy is so far beyond all our hopes and expectations that we are struck dumb with wonder.
Can we ever feel that way about the Lord? Only if we. too, have loved and apparently lost him as they did. This is precisely the deeper meaning of the dark night. Absence does make the heart grow fonder, for those who have truly come to share a loving presence. It is. in fact, in absence that we come to realize how completely the Lord has come to be at the very center of our lives, and how totally we have come to depend on him. When he returns to us. when we "return where we started and know the place for the first time." it is a totally new experience. "I never realized! I never knew! How blind I was!" He is. mysteriously, the same Lord we have long known, and yet he is totally different. Our experience is much like that of the disciples at Easter who did not dare to ask him who he was. because "they knew it was the Lord" (Jn 21:12). We. too. when at last the anguished absence of the dark night comes to an end in our personal Easter experience, are face to face with the beauty, ever ancient yet ever new. of which St. Augustine spoke so wonderingly. In my experience as a director, this happens suddenly and without warning: In fact, it seems that it happens only when we have all but given up hope
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of ever knowing the Lord's loving touch again.
This giving up of hope, though, is a profoundly mysterious reality. To the soul it seems very close to despair, but in truth it is also very far — infinitely far — from despair. Very close in the sense that the soul does have the feeling, as John of the Cross puts it, "that all is now over for it (i.e. that its situation is hopeless and God has abandoned it) and that it will never again be happy as in the past." 5 At the same time, though, the soul, without realizing it or even being able to believe it, is very far from despair. Despair means giving up: giving up hope, giving up the search for God, giving up, if possible, the desire for God. Yet, the very darkness which seems so hopeless has been working precisely the opposite effects in the soul, without the soul's ever guessing it. When John of the Cross enumerates the benefits which this dark night is accomplishing in the soul whom the Lord leads into it, he mentions especially the following: the knowledge of oneself and one's misery; a greater respect and courtesy in communing with God; a knowledge of the greatness and excellence of God; spiritual humility; the love of its neighbors ("for it no longer esteems them and judges them as it was accustomed to do before, when it felt that it itself had great fervor and others did not"!); submission and obedience to direction. 6 If the only effects were a deep realization of my own misery and of God's incomprehensible grandeur, the result might well be
Ti Dark Night of the Soul, Book II, chapter VII, #6; Peers, p. 113. John is talking here about the second dark night, that of the spirit. But the soul feels much the same way in the first night of the senses. John begins the very sentence I have quoted above: "Although (the soul) had thought during its first trial that there were no more afflictions which it could suffer, and yet after the trial was over, it enjoyed great blessings, this experience is not sufficient to take away its belief, during this second trial, that all is now over for it. . . ." See chapter 5, footnote 7 (page 132) on the distinction and purpose of these two dark nights, and the Epilogue on this alternation of light and darkness as the pattern of a mature and deep spirituality.
G Dark Night of the Soul, Book I, chapter XII; Peers, pp. 76-82.
To Know the Place for the First Time
despair. But despair is really a perverse form of vanity — an unwillingness to accept and to live with my misery, a refusal to hope, born of wounded pride. Humility, submission to direction, an esteem of others as better than myself — all these fruits of the genuine dark night are directly opposed to the wounded pride which gives birth to despair. It is true the dark night is a dangerous time. The devil will be working overtime to play on our vanity and self-pity. Sometimes, unfortunately, he will succeed. But if we hang on blindly in the face of his onslaughts, we will find that the Lord is far stronger than Satan, and that the humility, docility and love which he is implanting in us, precisely by means of darkness, will make despair a more and more impossible option for us.
Thus it is that I have said that the soul living in authentic darkness is really infinitely far from despair. Its darkest moments will be just before the dawn, and when the dawn suddenly breaks upon the heart that has been desiring it with its whole being, the whole long night which has passed will seem a small enough price to pay for the wondrous joy of the new day.
There is another striking feature of the resurrection narratives which is equally important to the one who prays. We have been speaking of the Easter experience which seems to herald the end of the long dark night of the soul. And yet we said earlier that this darkness will normally be the lifetime experience of the mature prayer. Is there not a contradiction, or at least a paradox, here? Paradox, yes; contradiction, no. If we look back at the events of the first Easter day, we notice a common pattern to all of the Lord's appearances. Once he had convinced the disciples that it was really he, once their doubts had been transformed into that beautiful "disbelief for sheer joy," he quickly disappeared from their sight.
By a happy coincidence, I am writing these lines on the feast of Mary Magdalen, the very first witness to the
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Lord's resurrection. In the Gospel reading for her feast (Jn 20:1-18), we find the pattern of all subsequent resurrection experiences, in the apostles' lives and in our own. When at last she recognized him, Magdalen could not contain her joy. She must have thrown herself at his feet — this woman from whom he had driven seven devils, who could not imagine a life without him now — and clung to his ankles. She had lost him once and now she would never let him go again! But Jesus had other ideas. The meaning of the resurrection, once Mary truly grasped it, was that she no longer had to cling to him out of fear of losing him. If he is truly risen as he said, then he is Lord. Death and darkness have been conquered, and we need never fear losing him again.
Here is the last, and perhaps the greatest, inversion of all natural ways of seeing. To truly possess the Lord is to be so secure in his love that we need not cling to him ever again. The experience of the resurrection means that we need never again fear the darkness or even death. " 'Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?' The sting of death is sin, and sin gets its power from the law" (I Cor 15:54-56). Paul is speaking here of the last day, when our corruptible frame takes on incorruptibility. Only then will we possess fully the fruits, the security of our resurrection faith. Long before that, for those who have experienced the purgatory of the dark night, there comes a peace — rooted not in ourselves, who always "carry our treasure in fragile vessels," but in the Lord who has loved us unto death and has risen in glory for us — a peace which the world cannot take away. Paul reflects this in the verse which immediately follows his triumphant interrogation of death: "But thanks be to God who has given us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ." "Has given" — the victory is already won! Only if we forget what he has been for us could we ever lose our Easter peace.
This certainty and security, however, is not for our-
To Know the Place for the First Time
selves alone. It is not a treasure to be hoarded and gloated over. That would be to cling to the Lord. Instead, we must, like Magdalen and the Emmaus disciples, return to the brethren, to the persons and places of our ordinary lives, to share the good news that the Lord is risen. The gift of the resurrection is never a gift to be hoarded to our bosoms like a miser's money (the image which St. Paul probably has in mind in describing Jesus' self-emptying in Philippians 2:6: "He did not deem equality with God something to be grasped at"); it is a gift which we can only keep by giving it away. Jesus was "greatly exalted" by the Father precisely because he "emptied himself" (Ph 2:5-11). It must be the same with Magdalen, with the disciples, with us. The test of the genuineness of our experience of the Risen Lord is precisely our need, even at the cost of not clinging to him, to share the good news with those who have not yet seen him. This is true of all genuine prayer, as we have seen in chapter 2. The water is for the flowers; prayer is for the virtues, and a crucial virtue in the garden of the Lord is our zeal for the spread of his kingdom and the glorification of his name. What we are saying now, in discussing the situation of those who have lived through the dark night and seen the first flush of the dawn of the resurrection, is that this need to share, to "freely give what we have freely received," becomes even more urgent and compelling. When we arrive at the "high places" in the company of Sorrow and Suffering, we find ourselves, like Much-Afraid, impelled to return to the Valley of Humiliation to share with our "Fearing" relatives all we have discovered. 7 Our zeal now, however, is quite different from the earlier stages of our prayer life. In the first place it is much purer, more "God-centered," because of the purifying darkness through which
7 The reference is to Hannah Hurnard's Hind's Feet on High Places, which we discussed towards the end of chapter 2.
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we have been living. Perhaps without our realizing it, the living flame of love has been burning out of us all the vanity and self-seeking which mar even our most generous human acts. If we have persevered in prayer even without the reward of consolation, even when prayer seemed to offer us not bliss but misery, it is a clear sign that something very important has been happening to our hierarchy of values. We have learned to seek "the God of consolations and not the consolations of God." We have moved, imperceptibly, from loving (for the fulfillment it gives us) to truly loving (simply because God is God). And such a tremendous change in our prayer cannot but effect a comparable change in our lives. Our apostolate, our ministry, our service of others also becomes more other-centered and less self-centered. We begin to realize how all our generous and apostolic actions have been tainted by seeking for recognition, by a need to prove our own worth, and perhaps our superiority to others (how hard it is to say and really mean with Paul that "I planted the seed and Apollos watered it, but God made it grow. This means that neither he who plants nor he who waters is of any special account, only God, who gives the growth" (I Cor 3:6-7); by a desire to find our fulfillment in others' dependence on us. The very fire which illumines our own darkness also gradually burns out of us all of these impurities, in our prayer and in our work for the Lord.
I realize now that this is the reason why my own experience at the Naga Carmel — a genuine resurrection experience — left me with the strong sense that I was much more secure in the dark. I saw then that there was much self-seeking in my prayer, and I think I had long realized that there was much vanity in my work for others. It was a constant and exasperating refrain in my daily examination of conscience! What I realize now is that the darkness of prayer was the way — the only way, since my own efforts seemed to effect very little change — in which this "rapine
To Know the Place for the First Time
in the holocaust" would gradually be removed. As I look back over the years now, I can see the healing which the darkness has already effected in me, and I thank the Lord for it. But I can also guess (may the reader find things different in himself!) that much darkness still lies ahead, because this weed of vanity seems to have incredibly deep roots. The difference between now and the pre-Naga days is that I can now bless the darkness and desire that the Lord continue with his healing surgery. Only when it is accomplished will my work, and not only my prayer, be wholly for him as it should be.
We have implied that we can only realize what the dark night is working in us when the darkness lifts and the dawn returns. When the darkness is deep we will have very little sense that anything good is happening. But from time to time the Lord will lift the veil. He will remove the log from the fire, and then it will be possible to see and to rejoice in what is being done in the searing darkness of contemplation. It is then that I will be able to see in myself the growing humility, fraternal love, obedience of which John speaks — and this will be a source of great joy, particularly because it will be clear that this growth is not at all due to my own efforts but has happened, as it were, while I slept, while nothing at all seemed to be happening. 8
These times of tranquillity may seem to mark the end of our purification, a definitive emergence "from darkness into his marvelous light" (I Pt 2:9). But, as the foregoing lines suggest, what we experience is really more of a false dawn — a premature foretaste of what will be when God has truly become the all-encompassing Light of our souls. Yet, the false dawn is, in itself, quite true. What we see is real and the light by which we see is truly the Lord. The
8 John of the Cross discusses this mysterious fact, that we only see our growth when the Lord withdraws his purifying hand. See, for example, The Dark Night, II, VII, #4-6; Peers, pp. 111-113.
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falseness comes from our expectations: We hunger for the real dawn, and in our eagerness we say, "This is it!" When it turns out to be but the first rosy finger of what is still to come, our expectations are frustrated and disappointed. This simply means (if we may be allowed to mix our metaphors) that we have not really learned yet to float free in the sea of the Lord.
When we are able to accept the humbling fact that this is so (usually because the darkness returns again), we begin to see the real meaning of the light of the false dawn. While our growth in humility, fraternal love, obedience is not all that we expect or would like, it is very real. There is another change which we discover in ourselves which is equally real and equally wonderful, a change which makes our understanding of our mission in the world quite different. We begin to discover that in floating free we are going somewhere, somewhere we cannot predict or control, but a place far better than the destination and the route we have charted for ourselves. The only way I can express the experience is to say that we become spectators at the unfolding of our own lives. We realize that, not only in prayer but in external events, we are not the ones writing the script of our lives. What happens to us becomes a matter of wonder even to ourselves! We begin to discover, to discern (for this is the deepest meaning of discernment) the shape of the vessel which the potter is fashioning. Since our lives are inevitably interwoven with the lives of those we love and serve, this discovery gradually extends to the whole of our world. We begin to realize that the more we are totally surrendered to the Lord's will in us (and this, as we have seen, is the whole purpose and fruit of the dark night), the more wondrous are the works we see him do through us in others. Compare this discussion of the advantages of the dark night with what Boase has to say. 9 As he notes, we now begin to discover
"Prayer of Faith, pp. 90ff. in the 1950 edition; pp. 92ff. of the 1976 edition.
To Know the Place for the First Time
what it means to pray always. When praying meant "thinking" for us, we could scarcely be apostles and prayers (i.e., think of two distinct things) at one and the same time. But now that our prayer has moved to a much deeper level of our being, we realize, albeit obscurely, that it is indeed possible to pray even in the midst of intense apostolic involvement. In this sense all our service becomes prayer, and all our work play!
As I mentioned in chapter 1, I am the son of a man who wore both a belt and suspenders. True to my heritage and perhaps my genes, I, too, am a planner, an organizer, not one to leave things to chance. That is the reason, perhaps, why the experience of letting go, and of being happy to let go, seems so extraordinary and grace-filled to me. Sometimes I ask, "Is this really me?" and then some touch of the old belt-and-suspender mentality surfaces to assure me it really is!
Since I am also the spiritual son of a man, Ignatius Loyola, who must rank as one of the most active and organized of the saints — it is not surprising that I find myself a take-charge sort of person. It is in my genes, both biological and spiritual! But that just makes all the more remarkable the change that I have seen in myself over the years, as I discover that I do float, I do listen; I am a spectator at my own life's unfolding — far more than I would ever have imagined possible. Best of all, I find I like and value the experience! It is very hard to explain to those who "have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep," especially to those seized by a divine restlessness to do great things for God. But somehow I feel sure it is the right way for me — the way of the clay in the potter's hands.
Moreover, I am becoming convinced that it is really the only way. This is a dangerous claim to make in this activist age in which we live, when the church is in ferment with a great desire to change structures, to change persons, to provide an ideology and a praxis for the active reform of
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every ill. This ferment is clearly one of the signs of the times which we must observe and reflect upon in seeking to discern the way the Spirit is working in the church. To ignore it would certainly be the height of unconcern. Yet, that very fact raises the crucial question: what form should our concern take? Is our activist spirit a contemporary and very subtle way of manipulating God? Or is it a discerning response to the word of the Lord being spoken in our midst? Does our activism come from our own ideas of what should be, which we then conclude are — have to be — the Lord's ideas, too, or does it come from the Spirit stirring the waters among us? 10 For years I myself resisted this letting go of everything into the hands of God. It seemed too passive, too fatalistic — particularly for a Jesuit committed to a continual quest for the "greater glory of God." Did that not mean to do great things myself? That is what I wanted it to mean, but the Lord had other ideas! And so, with all due respect for the convictions of those who discern differently, I can only say now that the Lord seems to tell me that "the way of the clay" is the only Christian way, that the command to "turn the other cheek" (Lk 6:29; Mt 5:29) is not a culturally conditioned command which the Lord would revise if he lived today, but a permanent part of the life, the prayer and the work, of the follower of Christ.
Why the only way? Because, as I read the Gospels, it seems clearly the way of Jesus, who asserts emphatically: "The Son cannot do anything by himself — he can only do what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise" (Jn 5:19). In the discourse on
10 This is precisely the dilemma we posed for the beginner in prayer in chapters 2 ("The Irrelevance of Prayer") and 3 ("The Relevance of Prayer'") of Opening to God. The dilemma of the mature prayer is very much the same, but the discernment involved becomes far more subtle. As St. Ignatius says, the devil always enters as an angel of light, tempting us, at every stage of our growth, in ways that then appear good and holy.
To Know the Place for the First Time
the bread of life, when the crowd asks him to "give us this bread always," he replies: "All that the Father gives me shall come to me; no one who comes will I ever reject, because it is not to do my own will that I have come down from heaven, but to do the will of him who sent me" (Jn 6:37-38). His disciples are given him by the Father (6:44, 65), as is his doctrine (7:16; 8:40); it is the Father who attests to the authenticity of his mission (8:18). Even his glory, his vindication, is not his own proper concern but the Father's: "I seek no glory for myself; there is one who seeks it, and it is he who judges" (8:50; see 8:54). The picture, which could be confirmed by numerous other statements of Jesus himself in the Gospels, is of a man totally given to the Father's will, a man who — by the mysterious union of the divine with the human in him which we call the hypostatic union — has discovered fully the lesson of the dark night.
For us the process is much more painful, since he was like us in every way "except only sin" (Heb 4:15), and it is the sinfulness in us which makes the process of divinization slow and difficult. But the goal is the same: to abide in him, to keep his commandments, to be his friends "since I have made known to you all that I heard from my Father" (Jn 15:15). It is this total identification which the dark cloud of unknowing is effecting in us — an identification which is not only interior and mystical but which extends to the most active moments of our lives. "The life I live now is not my own; Christ is living in me" (Gal 2:20). The older translation, which is more literal in rendering the Greek original, is even more powerful: "I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me." Paul is talking here not merely of his interior life but of his ministry, his doctrine, his mission.
We see the same thing in St. Ignatius, that restless caballero for Christ, who spent the last 15 years of his life chained to a desk in Rome. It must have seemed like a real prison to him: all his dreams of conquering the world for Christ were to be realized only vicariously, through Francis
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Xavier in the Far East, through Peter Fabre and James Laynez and through thousands of his sons down the centuries. This was not the crusade Ignatius had envisioned for himself, but it was what "pleased the Father." We can safely guess that a real dark night was involved as Ignatius came to see things the Lord's way. Ignatius (and Ignatius' ideas of what would glorify God) had to die so that Christ might truly be born in him. He wrote his Spiritual Exercises in the early years of his conversion as a means "to help the re-treatant to conquer himself, and to regulate his life so that he will not be influenced in his decisions by any inordinate attachment." 11 At first he must have been thinking of the attachments to our honor, our families, our material possessions (the type of inordinate desires which John of the Cross discusses in the Ascent of Mount Carmel, which are the object of the active purification of the soul). But there are deeper attachments, more subtle and harder to root out, which we begin to discover only when we are already committed to the Lord: the attachment of my own ideas of how God should be working in me and through me, the deeper vanity which is disguised as zeal. These are the inordinate desires which the active purification alone (our own asceti-cal efforts) cannot root out; John discusses them in the first seven chapters of the Dark Night of the Soul, because only the dark night, the experience of the dry well which has been the subject of this book, can burn them out of us.
When there are hints of the dawn in this dark night — even of that false dawn which heralds the true — we discover that the dry darkness is indeed doing its work. It is painfully slow, and we feel perhaps that we are drifting farther away from Jesus' own "passion for God." But we are not; we are actually closer to our goal, but much more
^Spiritual Exercises, #21; p. 47 in Mottola's Image Books edition.
To Know the Place for the First Time
aware of the immense distance to be traversed. This would be discouraging except for one beautiful realization: Even the distance and the traversing of the distance are the Lord's responsibility! We cannot worry about it because it is not ours to remedy. Everything, literally everything, is in his hands.
When we realize this — realize it experientially — we have truly learned to float. Deep down we know, and are happy in the knowledge, that the life of floating which has begun will last for eternity. Floaters in the sea of God never swim again — nor do they have any desire to. The wonders of floating fill their every desire. If only those around them, the brethren they love — some swimming strenuously, some clinging to rafts of their own making, some building huts to settle on the shore — could realize that floating is the only answer! But that is the Lord's concern; what he has done for the floaters he will surely do for the others, if only they let him. Since he waited so long for us, he will surely wait for them. In the meantime our floating may be a sign, a sacrament, of what can be. After all, it was just such a sign, from others floating ahead of us, which first drew us to the water!
When we begin to realize that the darkness is light, and that ever so slowly the Lord of love is fashioning in us the eyes to see, the dominant motif of our prayer becomes gratitude — gratitude even, and perhaps especially, for the trials which have previously caused us misery, since we now realize that it is precisely through these trials that the Lord is fashioning in us the resurrection man. And our greatest joy, our greatest expression of gratitude, is to be able to share with others the good news which we have learned: "Our purpose in writing you this is that our joy may be complete!" (I Jn 1:4).
Epilogue: Blessed Are the Poor in Spirit
As we come to the end our exploration of that critical stage of the soul's journey to God which is the move from knowing to loving to truly loving, I ask myself: What one phrase or image can capture the whole reality which I have been trying, so inadequately, to describe in human words? Perhaps no single phrase or image can ever bear such a burden of meaning. But there are two, the first a Gospel phrase and the second an image from my own experience, which for me come close to capturing what the mature life of prayer is all about. The image might easily be the dark night, the cloud of unknowing, the dry well in the flowering garden; but for me it is none of these. Rather, it is the image of floating, which formed the leitmotif of chapter 6 and which, like the potter's clay, has continued to reveal new meaning to me as the years have passed.
The Gospel phrase is much less original or idiosyncratic. It is, in fact, the first of the beatitudes: "How blest are the poor in spirit: the reign of God is theirs" (Mt 5:3). Jesus began the Sermon on the Mount with this
Blessed Are the Poor in Spirit
blessing. It is one we are familiar with from childhood and, on the face of it, the meaning seems abundantly clear. Yet, for some years I have puzzled over its real meaning.
The poor are the anawim, the dispossessed of Israel, those whose wealth is not material but the love of the Lord. But material poverty is not the ideal Jesus is proposing. This seems clear from the contrast he himself draws between the life-style of John the Baptist and his own: "John appeared neither eating nor drinking and people say, 'He is mad!' The Son of Man appeared eating and drinking, and they say, 'This one is a glutton and drunkard, a love of tax collectors and those outside the law' " (Mt 11:18-19). His way of life must have appeared quite ordinary, even bourgeois, to his opponents. It is true that he asked some — Peter and John and James and the rich young man — to leave everything in order to follow him. But there were others whom he loved, and whose company he shared — Mary and Martha and Lazarus, Simon, Zacchaeus — of whom he seems to have made no comparable demand. Morever, his reaction to the criticism of the woman who anointed his head with costly ointment, which by implication was a criticism of himself for allowing her to do it, 1 is scarcely the reaction of one for whom material poverty is of the very essence of the kingdom. The objection was that the jar of perfume might have been sold for 300 silver pieces (10 times the amount for which Judas was to sell Jesus!) "and the money given to the poor." Jesus replies. "Why do you criticize the woman? It is a good deed she has done for me. The poor you will always have with you but you will not always have me. ... I assure you, wherever the good news is proclaimed throughout the world, what she did will
1 Matthew says it was the disciples who criticized them (26:8-9); Mark softens it to "some" (14:4); and John, writing last and perhaps wishing to set the record straight, tells us (12:4) that Judas Iscariot, "the one about to betray him," was the protester.
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be spoken of as her memorial" (Mt 26:10-11, 13).
His attitude towards material possessions is really paradoxical. He certainly possessed very little, especially considering what he might have chosen for himself as the incarnate Son of God. Yet, he does not seem to have placed much importance on this material dispossession in itself. It was John the Baptist who came "neither eating nor drinking," whose life symbolized a radical stripping off of the goods of this world. Jesus, by contrast, promised not only eternal life but also "a hundred times as many homes, brothers and sisters, mothers, children and property" to all those who left everything for his sake and the sake of the gospel (Mk 10:29-30).
Thus, the paradox which puzzled me for many years: Given these promises, and given the contrast which Jesus draws between himself and John, what is the poverty of spirit which claims first place in the beatitudes and whose reward is the kingdom of heaven? The surface answer is clear enough. Somehow the ideal Jesus is proposing, the demand he is making, is what we have come to call "detachment." It is not what we possess but what we are attached to — what possesses us — which makes us unfit for, incapable of inheriting the kingdom of God. This need for detachment is present from the very beginning of the interior life; that is why the active purification of the soul is a crucial element in laying a solid spiritual foundation. This much was clear enough to me long ago — very difficult to live but clear enough in principle. Morever, I could see quite well that actual material poverty, while not of the essence of the beatitude, could be a great help, both personally and apostol-ically, to its realization. Personally, because our possessions (persons as well as things) are the roots from which spring the vines of attachment which entangle our hearts. And apostolically, since we can scarcely preach detachment effectively unless it is concretely symbolized in the way we live. We may indeed possess much and yet be truly free, detached
Blessed Are the Poor in Spirit
inwardly (poor in spirit), but it is hard to see how flesh-and-blood men could really hear and be convinced by our witness to the need of detachment unless it is concretely embodied in our way of life, in our own flesh and blood. What we are speaks much louder than what we say, and what we are can only be revealed to other men by the way we live.
As I said above, this surface answer to our question about the meaning of poverty of spirit is clear enough. Difficult indeed to live but clear enough in principle. Still, the beatitude has puzzled me for many years. I felt there must be something more there, something deeper than what I had seen. It was only when I made that 30-day retreat in Antique in 1977 that the "something more" seemed to be revealed to me. Quite unexpectedly, the idea of poverty of spirit became the theme of the whole 30 days. Gradually I began to see what it really meant for me, and how it was connected with the long experience of the dry well which this book (and, if I am not mistaken, a substantial part of the interior life) is all about.
The insight, like most of the turning-point insights of my life, can be put very simply: Poverty of spirit means to have no will of my own. At root it is not surrendering things, or my attachment to things, but surrendering my very will. As long as we can choose the things, the attachments, to surrender — even if we choose to surrender all of them — it is still we who are choosing; it is still our will which is in control. As long as it is we who are stripping ourselves, we are not truly poor in spirit. The beatitude which Jesus proclaims is only realized — made real — in us when we have let go of our own will, even our will to become holy!
This, as I say, was the insight which dominated my own 30-day retreat in Antique. Perhaps it was no accident that another striking experience was also quite common during that same period of my life: very often, when I was most at peace, I seemed to see my own life as a movie — a movie of which I was not the producer or director. I found myself
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a spectator even at the unfolding of my own destiny! It was a very strange experience, particularly for someone so temperamentally an activist as myself. Even though, with time, I have become more at home with the sensation, it is still a strange feeling. It is not natural for man to be a floater. Even when he does learn a bit about floating and acquires some skill at it, there still lurks in him a suspicion that he should be doing something, controlling events, working for the kingdom according to his own lights and his own God-given natural gifts. So he should, as long as he is guided by the light of his own God-given reason. Reason alone, even guided by grace, will never make us floaters. What we do under grace to dispose ourselves for God and to respond to God can never bring us to float. John of the Cross' "active purification," the subject of The Ascent of Mount Carmel, can bring us to the water and lead us to swim towards God, but it is only the passive purification, what God does in us when he takes over wholly the work of our transformation, which can make floaters out of swimmers.
Floaters are not drifters. To the outside observer they appear very much alike — both passive in the face of events. But I have learned from experience that floating is far more dynamic and responsive than it appears. If I just drift in the water, my legs inevitably tend to settle towards the bottom and soon my balance is lost. The drifter is not responsive to the current and the waves; he has a will of his own — the will to be lazy! and he is soon unended by the tide.
The floater, by contrast, has allowed the will of the water to become his own. He has no will of his own, and yet he is intensely active. The will of the water, the will of the sea which is God, has become the dynamic force of his life and all his energies are spent in responding fully to the ebb and flow of the tide. He is intensely active. What is lacking in his life is tension, the tension which the swimmer experiences between his own efforts and the contrary pull of
Blessed Are the Poor in Spirit
the water. The swimmer has two wills pulling him, his own and God's, and this is what makes swimming exhausting. For the ''sinner" who has not yet realized and accepted that God is the goal of his life, the tension can tear him apart. But even the one who has found God as the goal of his life will still be in tension, the tension which Paul describes so unforgettably in Romans 7. The tension lasts as long as he seeks to swim toward his goal, that is, as long as he seeks to control the journey. Even though he and God have the same goal (the salvation and sanctification of himself and of his world), they will still be in tension concerning the means. It is only the floater, who has allowed the will of the Lord to become his own will, who will be intensely active and yet tension-free.
Peace, as Augustine has said, is not the absence of activity or effort but the tranquillity of order. Where there is order there is peace, even in the midst of strenuous activity. Where there is one will — God's will — there is order. It is only where there are two wills — God's and mine — that tension and disorder prevail.
We have, then, a paradox: To have no will of my own, to be truly poor in spirit, is not to have no will but to have only one will. That is why the poor in spirit are not spineless, wishy-washy souls devoid of energy and initiative. They are, in fact, the real doers in the kingdom of God, precisely because they are totally and passionately surrendered to the will of God. Having no will of their own, all their energies can be harnessed to the work of God in the world; all their loves and talents, and limitations, too, can be animated totally by his will.
I said earlier that this insight into the meaning of poverty of spirit was the dominant theme of my 30-day retreat in 1977. There is, of course, a great difference between realizing what poverty of spirit is and actually living it. I am still very far from the latter, but that distance between ideal and reality is an indication of the whole point of
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this book. We cannot become truly poor in spirit in this deeper sense by virtue of any efforts of our own. It is only the dry well, the dark night, the cloud of unknowing which can effect this radical purification in us. Only the Lord can make us truly poor in spirit and thus rightful heirs of the kingdom of God. That, in fact, is precisely what he is doing in the process we have described in part II above. The long walk in darkness, with occasional, unpredictable, uncontrollable periods of light, is his way of emptying us of our own will so that we may be possessed by his will and thus made divine (see Mt 5:48; Gal 2:20). Boase, who calls this passive purification the "prayer of faith," expresses beautifully the goal of it all: "The Prayer of Faith, with its long drilling in emptiness and desolation, leads us slowly but surely to a state in which it is all one to us whether we are in sunlight or in cloud, provided only that on our part there is complete, unreserved, uncalculating, unrestricted yielding of our whole being into God's hands. It is this which is the never-ceasing activity which underlies even the apparently most paralytic inactivity in the desolations of this prayer." 2 For those of us who are called to live an active life "in the world," it is important to note that God works this transforming purification not only in the darkness of prayer but in all the ups and downs, the trials of our active life. This, at least, is the conviction I have come to after years of reflecting on the teaching of great contemplatives like St. John of the Cross. They focus on the inner purifying darkness of formal prayer, and for this reason their teaching can seem somewhat unrealistic for people called to live an active, apostolic life. But I am convinced it is not at all unrealistic, once we begin to see God working his purification equally in the darkness of prayer and in the frustrations of our life of service. Both are part of the same passive purification for
2 Boase, The Prayer of Faith, pp. 106-107 in the 1950 edition. (See p. 108 in the 1976 edition.)
Blessed Are the Poor in Spirit
us apostles and laity; in fact, I believe it is part of our vocation that the inner darkness of prayer will most often have its roots in the external hardships of a life of service: the disappointments, misunderstandings, failures, "bad days" which are an inevitable part of raising a family or living in a community or proclaiming the gospel. Talk about contemplation, formal prayer, dark nights seems unreal to us only because we fail to realize that God works in all the events of our life, interior and external. For those who have begun to be contemplatives in action, everything is part of that passive purification of which we have been speaking. 3
Can I illustrate this more concretely? When I look at my own life, it is the accidents which reveal most clearly the hand of God at work purifying me of my own will. I think I first became aware of this in an apparently trivial series of incidents. As I have said, I am naturally a planner, an organizer, a "take charge" sort of person. In my earlier years in the seminary, I often had elaborate plans for holiday outings and seminary activities. Sometimes these plans were realized and sometimes not. Gradually I began to realize that the best-planned outings, where everything went as anticipated, left me somehow empty afterwards. By contrast, unplanned surprises — contrary to my temperament and my expectations — often left the happiest memories. The more I had anticipated the results in detail, the less satisfying the outcome proved to be. Even with friendships, the more consciously I cultivated them and sought to shape them to my expectations, the less likely they were to be deep and lasting. Now, 25 years later, I am ashamed to say that my most lasting friendships are the ones I once most took for granted.
3 The phrase "contemplative in action" is often used to describe the apostolic spirituality of St. Ignatius Loyola. For an excellent, brief description of his ideal, see George A. Lane, S.J., Christian Spirituality, pp. 62-68 ("Ignatian Prayer: Finding God in all things"), Argus Communications, 1968.
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In themselves, these incidents might seem merely indications of my own peculiar psychological makeup. But I have learned that the Lord was really at work even then. The subsequent pattern has confirmed this: I came to the Philippines "by accident," after spending three years preparing myself for Japan! I came to San Jose Seminary "by accident," when the man who was preferred for the job proved to be unavailable. So it has gone since, to the extent that the accidental has more and more come to seem normal. It is not that I don't plan. I do, since that seems a necessary evidence of my cooperation with the Lord; but I find I have learned to "hang loose" about the fulfillment of my plans — and to expect surprises as the best parts of the drama, despite the uncertainty and darkness, and even desolation, they entail. Somehow — and this is the point of burdening the reader with these personal details — my external life and my inner life are all one. The Lord is working in all areas to bring me — and, I am convinced, everyone who prays sincerely — to a genuine poverty of spirit. The inner and the outer are not in conflict once we realize this. In both areas the well runs dry, and by means of this passive purification the Lord accomplishes in us what Teilhard has called the "divinization of our passivities."
Once we realize what is happening, it makes more sense to say that the dark night, the dry well, will be the experience of most faithful prayers most of their lives. In fact, we never return to the light we knew before; we never do go to the well again for the water we seek. That light proves to be no light, and that water no water, once we pass the point of no return. When and how we will pass this point, though, must be left to the Lord. Even here, at this deepest level of our desire for God, we must have "no will of our own." When this is true of us, the kingdom of God will be ours, for we will be truly poor in spirit. Then the dry well will seem a small price, indeed, to pay: "Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again. But whoever
Blessed Are the Poor in Spirit
drinks the water I give him will never be thirsty; no, the water I give shall become a fountain within him, leaping up to provide eternal life" (Jn 4:13-14).
My Lord, my Love,
You have called me
To float blind down the dark river
which leads to the kingdom of light. May my journey be for the healing Of those to whom you send me Who walk in the shadow of death.
What remains for the floater is the wondrous discovery that the river on which he floats springs, as John says, from the very heart of God: "The angel then showed me the river of life-giving water, clear as crystal, which issued from the throne of God and of the Lamb and flowed down the middle of the streets. On either side of the river grow the trees of life which produce fruit twelve times a year, once each month; their leaves serve as medicine for the nations" (Rev 22:1-2). Now the tide is reversed and the river draws the floater back to its Source. But who can describe, or even imagine, what the floater will discover There?