I started this year thinking I was going on a long spiritual quest, only to be greeted very quickly by a deeply healing and transformative grace that was down there, beyond words. The long quest had been God's; I merely positioned myself with some quietness and openness and He did the work in an instant. In a word, He gave freedom. I wrote all about this in January.
Writing is often so vital to my interior self-honesty, and to presenting the depths of my heart to God. And sometimes it flows so deeply and easily -- despite the hard work it often is -- that I can feel guilty about it. That sounds stupid, but it is true. I have a commitment as a Secular Carmelite to a certain amount of time each day spent in prayer. I often feel like my time would be best spent in writing, but I find I struggle with scrupulosity about "doing prayer right," and if it is too easy somehow I figure it must not be right. I suppose I remember times when I have written and struck those interior wells and unpleasantness (ok, trauma) arose because of it. Still, the process is not at fault. Dental drills don't cause periodontal disease; they find it. I guess that just confirms that writing is a powerful tool, and we need to be prepared -- I need to be prepared -- when wielding powerful tools.
And on that exact note, I have been discerning the last many weeks undertaking a two year course of study in Carmelite spiritual direction. When I first saw this being offered, I was interested in a "well, probably not" kind of way. But the longer I sit with it, the more often feel a gentle desire building for it, and a sense that this really would be a fitting investment of my time, money, and effort.
Concurrently, I have been very slowly making my way through the book The Life of Union With God by Auguste Sandreau, written in 1926 and translated from the French. I started it actually months ago, having really gotten bogged down in the early chapters. But now that I'm nearly finished, I am struck by how this historical walk through the Catholic experience of mysticism helps me make sense of my own personal formation. I had never quite understood the roles and historical fallout of Quietism, the Protestant Reformation, and Jansenism all injured an authentic understanding of Catholic mysticism. If I understand it correctly, the Quietist movement basically preached "Contemplation for all" in the sense of 'Just sit down with Jesus and He'll pour into you mysterious and miraculous graces just as you are." I can't help but feel that this was very much akin to my own experience in the Charismatic movement beginning in the late 1980s. An authentic encounter with Jesus, to be sure, but here's the kicker: no one, no one, no one ever specifically taught us about discipleship into a life of virtue. Cooperating with God was all about reading the Bible, praise and worship, and sending up your spiritual antenna to catch whatever was floating through the spiritual airwaves at the time. Virtue was just supposed to appear along the way after the altar calls, without much teaching, effort, or cultivation. I think mostly we substituted church peer culture for this lack.
I remember an evangelization team meeting where we were going to be "discerning." We sat in silent prayer for like five minutes, and then the leader said, "Ok, what did God tell you?" A man replied, "God's telling me I need to stay home and think more about sharing the gospel with my family." (This was a verbatim exchange, which lead to the group being disbanded.)
Even though I had not been able to put words on it, I knew when I entered the Catholic Church that this life had more protection from our own human lunacy than this tacit belief that we waited on divine download (or worse yet, actually received divine download) for every decision we ever made throughout the day. There is a gross misunderstanding of the human person (not to mention the role of grace, nature, reason, and virtue) in this spiritualistic Christianity.
This is not Christian mysticism; this is not contemplation. This is NOT what union with God is all about.
I believe that God communicates with people. St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross presumed this to be true in their teaching (despite what some Catholic squelchers have to say about it). But I also believe the phrase "God told me..." is one of the most dangerous things a Christian can utter, and it needs to be well discerned. I have personally been deeply burned by too readily believing, and also by too scrupulously "testing" these types of things.
In the middle of this post, I related a story of how I ended up researching mysticism while in a Lutheran college. I feel like I now have enough life experience under my belt to delve back into this as a way of understanding my own experience and of making it intelligible to myself to be able to help other people not have to make some of the same mistakes I have.
I think this is the fruit of freedom.
