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JOHN OF THE CROSS

A Brief Introduction

When I read John of the Cross now after decades of struggle in the spiritual journey, I look back to my seminary days. I wonder what, if anything, I understood from my class on John of the Cross. Today, I can understand the common idiom: “You don’t begin with the classics. You slowly grow into that wisdom.”

Early on, it was easy to experience John as a negative force far removed from the ordinary human experience. Now, John sparkles with a gospel intensity and a gifted intelligence that brings clarity and wisdom to the pilgrimage to God. In the end, John makes clear that it is all about love.

If you wanted to grasp a central theme of John’s work, the idea of conversion away from self and towards God would be an excellent place to start. His writings and message are movement away from sinfulness to the furthest limit of love. He delves into the complexities of the human person as he exposes the growing withdrawal from self-absorption to the final stages of union with God. It is a simple journey from self to God. On the other hand, it is an incredibly complex journey brilliantly described by John. The gospel reality and all its simplicity and lucidity lays out the call to walk with Jesus with extraordinary force and escalating beauty. John is all gospel in his teachings.

John showed how the theological virtues play a critical role in the purifying process of contemplation. The role of dark faith is foundational to all his work. Likewise, he shows how the interaction between faith and love draw the human effort into one action seeking God. John sees faith and love as virtues that either grow in the quest for God or they stagnate and die. The road to God demands continuous effort both in times of darkness and in times of light.

John’s teachings demand an unremitting process of destroying idols. This is the road to freedom in Christ. This road brings us to intimacy with Christ. This is the consequence of the many purgations and the growing wisdom that comes from contemplation. This liberation from all the obstacles that have kept us from God now open up endless new horizons of love.

Now we understand the depth and wonder of Christ’s command to love our neighbor as Jesus as loved us. Now we have new ears to hear the cry of the poor at home and in the distant lands. Now we can hear the cry of the earth in a way that God invites us to encounter the divine presence in all of God’s creation both animate and inanimate.

The true thrust of John’s message is a purgation and enlightenment through the powerful and prayerful experience of contemplation. This personal liberation leads to the ability to truly embrace Jesus’ gospel call to life and love.

The vast majority of honest seekers of God do not achieve a very deep Experience of contemplation, if any. There are two reasons. It is a complex topic that requires a good dose of guidance. Much more significantly, contemplation involves an increasing and costly level of self-sacrifice. Contemplation is the consequence of a generous response from God over a long period of time. Most importantly, this rare spiritual event is a total gift from God. Contemplation is an enhanced presence and enriched experience of God. In the normal flow of spiritual struggle, we encounter a dimension of resistance in our surrender to God. Only contemplation, a totally new and different presence of God, can make this spiritual advance possible. Here is the heart of the matter. In letting go and letting God act more than us who are entangled in many excessive attachments. In the experience of contemplation, the newly enriched presence of God makes clear what we have to give up to advance the process of personal transformation. We are in a situation where we are beginning to understand that we cannot make these changes on our own. The new encounter with God in the contemplative state frees the paralyzing slavery of our selfishness. God's new presence creates a new freedom for us. Now we can let go and let God in His ability act in a way beyond all of the above.

This is the heart of the struggle that every human being faces as we come face to face with the overwhelming love of God. Is it me or is it God? Understanding contemplation can be a very helpful support as we face this repetitive choice of self-sacrifice on our journey. We are trying to secure the deepest hunger of our hearts, which is to be enveloped in the wonder of God's love. In the search for life-giving love, it helps to understand what contemplation is. Today there are many answers to that fundamental question. I am going to stick with my Carmelite tradition to present a very respected and accepted description of contemplation.

Contemplation is the irruption of God into the human soul. It is a silent, imageless and loving communion with God, which transcends all reflection and mental activity. According to Saint John of the Cross: "Contemplation is nothing other than a secret, peaceful and loving infusion of God, which if the soul allows it, inflames it with the spirit of love." (Dark Night I.10.6)

"Secret contemplation is a science of love that is a loving knowledge that illuminates and enamors the soul, elevating it step by step to God its Creator." (Dark Night II.18.5) It is clear that contemplation is infused, that is, it comes from God and cannot be calmed by us. Contemplation is a type of being and making a conversation without an intermediary and without the possibility of misinterpreting the communication. In contemplation, God does not come through the senses, the normal pattern of the astute. God comes from an unknown path directly infusing our being with a loving knowledge of God.

A distinguished Carmelite author, Marc Foley, OCD, has a Description of Contemplation that helps us begin to understand this truly difficult reality. He describes the first stage of spiritual life as follows. It is like the soft waves in the ocean sparkling with the different reflections of the sun. It is a beautiful sight to behold. This is the beginner's blessing with God's spiritual consolations that keep us from a life of absorption. Then gradually deepening clouds lead to increasing darkness. In this darkness, God resides in the deepest depths of the ocean, inviting the beginner to a new opportunity for spiritual growth. There is a call to embrace this striking dimension of God's presence. In this way, The original element is contemplation.

On this journey from the sparkling beauty of the sun-kissed waves to the silent darkness in the depths where contemplation is the new path of purification and transformative presence, several, almost shocking, changes take place. This total reversal is completely contrary to the common sense that anticipated the result of spiritual progress. Normally one would expect greater solace and expansion, a sense of peace and a sense of transcendental achievement. Reality is in complete contrast to this final Hollywood happiness. The new experience is more in tune with the Gospel version of reality with the passage to the new life that springs from the Passion and Death.

First, there is a constant retreat from the comfort of consolations. The individual finds himself in a situation developing and consuming darkness. There is a feeling of being abandoned by God. There is also a conviction of failure in the search for God. The anticipated feeling of comfort and accomplishment gives a feeling of anxiety and confusion. What had been a sense of achievement in all types of personal success gave way to a growing awareness that patterns of success were wrapped up in a personal agenda far removed from a gospel. Regardless, there is a shift away from a sense of personal control in the daily schedule to a slow openness of surrender to God's call in life's events. We are no longer in charge of the clock and the schedule opens up to life in a radically innovative way.

With the gift of contemplation there is a new movement in one's life. We no longer see God as part of our daily agenda. Now, God becomes our schedule. Two of the main consequences of contemplation are purging and enlightenment. These actions of God in the soul lead to personal transformation, preparing for union with God. This experience of God is more in tune with the success of the crucified Christ than the victory of the political messiah. In this contemplative process, any sense of success quickly gives way to a growing awareness of the depth of our personal sinfulness and brokenness. Prayer begins to go through a time of darkness and pain. A sense of strength and progress gives way to a new awareness of weakness and dependence on God's mercy. Basically, the beginning stages of contemplation are not a fun journey.

Why the dark side of contemplation?

John of the Cross has a simple and clear explanation of the importance of darkness, anxiety and pain at the beginning of the stages of contemplation. At the very beginning of the Ascension (Bk I.2.1) John offers three reasons for calling the new encounter with God in contemplation a dark night.

The individual needs to deprive himself of his appetites and worldly possessions. This loss is a movement into darkness.
The path of union, our final destiny, is only possible through a dark Faith that obscures the intellect.
The arrival point on the path is God and this is darkness.

John explains that darkness is not from God. It is our weakness. We must experience the purifying power of contemplation to prepare God as the final goal of our existence, union with God. John also uses the powerful example of the sun as a source of darkness. If we look directly at the sun, our eyes go blind. Darkness is the result of the concentration of overwhelming Light. The same thing happens with our experience of God. In our weakness and brokenness, we are unprepared for the all-consuming radiance of God's presence. Only contemplation has the ability to purify us so we can receive the full wonder of God's beauty and love.

In The Joy of the Gospel, Francis touches on these points. “The best incentive for sharing the Gospel comes from contemplating it with love, lingering over its pages and reading it with the heart. If we approach it in this way, its beauty will amaze and constantly excite us.” (The Joy of the Gospel, #264) We need to enter into our true destiny, to be one with God. Being open to others and their needs is our surest path into God’s loving plan for us. Deep personal prayer is a sure way to facilitate this process.

Ernest Larkin, a Carmelite scholar of spirituality, saw great things in the practice of Christian Meditation, a contemplative form of prayer. He envisioned this method of prayer being the source of renewal of the Church in the 21 st century. At the same time, Pope Francis has laid out a beautiful pastoral plan for our time in The Joy of the Gospel. The message of the papal Exhortation demands a spiritual maturity that calls us into a new future as church members. The more we are in touch with the Spirit by prayer, the more open and more encouraged will we be to embrace the radical call of the gospel in our day. This is where contemplation becomes pastoral and practical. I do believe Larkin’s vision is closely related to Pope Francis’ call for a new day. The message of this blog is offered to individuals, parishioners and pastors. It is one concrete invitation into a future that sees our Christian vocation related to the faith community that goes beyond our personal needs and goals. This why I felt it urgent to begin the search for a pastoral theology of contemplation for our communal Pilgrimage to God.

Carmelite spirituality sees the Christian life as a process of purification, enlightenment and personal transformation. These changes move us steadily toward focusing the hungers in our heart to what God wants. This leads us to a journey away from shallow self-absorption into the center of our being where God dwells. These are truly radical changes. The vehicle of this journey is prayer evolving into contemplation. Contemplation, as a deeper and gifted expression of prayer, brings the love of God to a new and practical maturity in our life. We start to consistently eliminate the limited and selfish patterns of living. Our thinking, our believing, our trust and our actions are transformed. Now our desires are more and more in tune with God’s plans. We gradually live out the consequences in new patterns of behavior.

As this contemplative relationship with God matures, we pray more and we pray more quietly. Listening grows and words diminish. The biggest change, however, transpires in our daily lives. Love becomes the operative mode of action in things large and small. Most of all, we get more real which ultimately means being free in God’s love.

Passage of Purification
In this switch to contemplation, we experience a deep sense of being loved by God. This helps us to accept ourselves in both our brokenness and giftedness. We are more patient in our listening to God. We are more open to be taught by God. The desire to control God continues to lessen. Now our prayer grows in clarity. We petition God to set us free to love with a pure heart.

This experience of purification is both simple and intricate. Distractions and noises develop within the heart and disturb the quiet voice of God. All the events of one’s life, the valleys of darkness and the plains of sunshine, all lead into God’s liberating activity. The struggle is to diminish the interior noises and distractions and enter more deeply into our quiet zone. This is where we hear the voice of God in the sound of the gentle breeze of our personal silence.

To Want What God Wants
This journey is not easy because getting closer to God comes at a price. Teresa says the life of prayer and the comfortable life are in serious conflict. Our lifestyle, which had some previous challenges, now faces new demands of even deeper conversion. Large areas of negotiation in our personal, social and cultural life come into play. While we usually change only one step at a time, we never imagined the price tag on this new journey to God. This all means changes on the way to profound

Personal transformation.
When change does happen, we begin to see beyond the external, beyond our illusions. Our comfortable little world, held in place in good part by the power of our culture and prejudices, begins to crumble. The center of gravity switches. Our awareness begins to recognize and accept what has always been the reality. God is our center. Things get clearer and more real. Teresa is unambiguous. The purpose of prayer is to find and embrace God’s will. This is the driving force of our personal

Transformation.
As we progress on the pilgrimage to God, we grow in our desire to want what God wants. This changes how we live. We do not accomplish this by our own determination. God’s love frees us to gradually welcome the divine will. Progress on this journey helps us to see that our strength is in our weakness. We are losing control and God is taking over.

We must surrender. This submission holds true both in prayer and in our lived experience. The basic shift, to place God in the center of our awareness, leads to new level of perception never possible before. Situations that were locked into a rigid either/or choice now open to several reasonable options. Barriers of race, sexual orientation and culture melt into insignificance. A less self- centered focus lights up the world in all manner of ways that shatter the former darkness. The new mindfulness opens up both the grandeur of God and discloses the consequences of our dependence on God. God’s mercy engulfs our world.

Teresa says we have to get real. She means we need to recognize the only true goal is to be one with God, to have one singular, dominating love. We need to be purified to experience love in its truest expression. When it comes to love, only God can offer the real deal. All other authentic love is only a degree of participation in the divine love. We need to change a lot of things to accept the consequences of the call to transformation and union. Jesus is the fullness of God’s invitation for us. Teresa insists that we place our eyes on Jesus who is the symbol of God’s passionate love for each of us. He is God’s continuing invitation to loving intimacy. In this context, we learn that all of life is of concern for us. There is no separation of the holy and the ordinary. Everything that happens can help us or hurt us in the quest thatis union with God. Life, we learn, is the greatest grace.

Introduction

I was the pastor of St. Rafael's parish in South Central Los Angeles for twenty years. (1994-2014) In my retreat in my tenth year, I had a special experience with the Interior Castle of Saint Teresa of Avila. For the next ten years, I continued the study and prayer as an expression of Carmelite spirituality. I also began to invite my parishioners to join me on my journey. At the end of 2014, I finished my stay in San Rafael and went to help a friend, Father David Blanchard, in his parish in El Salvador. After a few months there, I explained to David my desire to continue sharing my experience with Teresa of Avila. He suggested that I start a blog on the topic. I didn't know what a blog was, but I started one in December 2015.

During the first few years, a certain clarity developed in my topic. It evolved into a reflection on deep personal prayer in the Carmelite Tradition of spirituality. I have been steadfast in my messaging, providing a blog every week for almost nine years. In the first four years, I had 117,000 visitors to the blog, Praying Alone Together. Last September 2024, I had more than 128,000 visitors in a month. At this moment, the blog has surpassed 4,000,000 visitors. So, obviously, there has been steady growth. Similarly, I am sure there has been steady growth among some of the faithful participants. Therefore, I am going to expand the nature of my presentation. I will offer material on contemplation, which is the result of a special gift from God on the path of spiritual growth in loyalty to Jesus Christ.

To better understand the contemplative experience, it will be useful to place it in the context of the three stages of growth in the traditional Catholic understanding of development. These periods are the Purgative, the Illuminative, and the Unitive. The Purgative stage begins with a basic conversion, one of the many on the journey. There is a new awareness of one's own sinfulness and the need for forgiveness. Prayer becomes a part of one's life. There is a growth in self-awareness. There is a turning away from sin and towards growth in virtue. This is the stage of beginning a commitment to life and deep, regular personal prayer.

Through this prayer, one begins to experience Jesus Christ as the source of new life and freedom. On the Illuminating Path, one begins to have the experience of contemplation. This new and special encounter with the enriched presence brings many special gifts. There are large areas of deeply rooted selfishness that completely resisted one's previous efforts, no matter how hard one tried. Now, with the special grace of God in the contemplative experience, a new purification takes place and removes the stubborn obstacles to God's call. The journey of the Illuminating Path manifests the enlightening powers of contemplation. From the fourth to the sixth, by Teresa The mansions in the inner castle are related to the process of purification and illumination that leads to transformation. Similarly, John of the Cross has an extensive in-depth description of the consequences of contemplation that leads to the Unitive Way in The Ascent of Mount Carmel and The Dark Night.

Finally, upon reaching the Unitive Way, one arrives at the true destiny of humanity, to be one with God. Here is Christian perfection through the elimination of selfishness to the extent that is possible in this life. The love of God flows through the person's life. seen in such a way that Jesus' commandment to love God and one's neighbor dominates the individual's reality.

The new goal of my blog:
I will continue presenting material on Deep Personal Prayer every two weeks. In the alternate week, I will add a new section on contemplation. This will address the movement and experience of the second stage of spiritual growth on the Illuminating Path. For the most part, readers will be able to: identify which level is most appropriate for their spiritual life.

Development I am writing all this as a pastor. Consequently, the material on the Unitive Path is well above my pay grade. I will always continue my weekly reflection on the Sunday Gospel. The vision of the blog "Praying Alone Together" What does it mean today to be a good Catholic? A good Christian? A good believer? People are seeking an answer with increasing intensity these days. They want to go beyond the conventional and predictable demands of church members. It is obvious that regular attendance at services has been unsatisfactory for a large number of people, including many individuals of true convictions. Church membership and church attendance have steadily declined in our churches.

The new goal of my blog:
Most of the time, these new ventures emphasize personal needs rather than the more demanding pursuit of God. There are trends towards a fundamentalism and an approach to meditation that seek the satisfaction of indulgent self-analysis instead of the evangelical mandate of sacrificial self-transcendence. Many of these new religious entrepreneurs offer a Jesus free of any personal cost along with no concern for the poor and forgotten. Every search for God must seek God as God is, not as we want God to be. Jesus is our invitation to God, our call to the Mystery of Love. Every authentic religious experience needs to find the true God through the Way, the Life, and the Truth that is Jesus Christ crucified and resurrected. This is the Jesus who invites us to join him on the road to Jerusalem. In our days, all the most authentic spiritual movements, of which there are many, share a common characteristic: a deep personal prayer. This prayer leads to an encounter with Jesus and true self-knowledge. This is the path to a more experiential, insightful, and richer life with God. Our Catholic tradition has an abundance of resources on these practices. All of them lead to the practice of contemplative prayer.

The Carmelite tradition on prayer holds a prominent place among the many spiritualities that enrich and clarify our return to our original innocence. The message of this blog is to offer this movement towards a deeper spirituality as a challenge and opportunity in a pastoral context. We need to return to the call of Vatican II to universal holiness. This will lead us to: Raise expectations for everyone. Any effort that neglects our baptism, the responsibility to seek God with our whole being, is a guarantee of mediocrity. As parish priests and parishioners and those who seek God in any authentic way, we are all called to seek God as the center of our Christian vocation. Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross offer us a path, among many, that places contemplation as the most fruitful means to achieve this goal. As Doctors of the Church, they have the approval not only of the Vatican but also centuries of acceptance by the faithful. Their invitation for us on the pilgrimage to God offers a set of concrete and practical guidelines.

My invitation in this blog is for us to incorporate the following into our personal and pastoral programs. The importance of personal prayer is something that can be scheduled in any parish. Our parishes can and should be schools of prayer. People are hungry for something more. Our parishes must take advantage of this desire for a deeper spirituality. Our Catholic Church, which is heritage, has the potential to satisfy this growing hunger for a meaningful experience of God in the most reliable way.

The renewal of the liturgy has been one of the most special blessings of Vatican II. It has also been accompanied by the gift of a new appreciation of the Bible in our times. As a result of biblical studies becoming common in our parishes, people are much more comfortable with the Bible. Lectio Divina and Bible. Reading is constantly growing in the Catholic community. This is the result of a pastoral vision that has taken advantage of a hunger. This practice invites people to seek more, to delve deeper into the Mystery that burns in their hearts. We can continue expanding this pastoral vision by scaling up programs that present a call to a deeper personal prayer. This is the path to contemplation.

The Importance of Self-knowledge in Prayer

I

When we pray regularly, we develop the habit of deep personal prayer. This sets us on the road to serious personal change. This personal transformation, however, comes at a price. God always wants more. This is the why we come up with so many reasons we cannot pray. At the top of the list is time in one way or another: need to work, need to relax, need to be present to loved ones, need to…. And also watch TV, football, shopping, politics etc. There are other reasons like being just too tired, sick and other heavy responsibilities. It all comes down to a question of determining what is important for us.

Since God is so insistent, regular prayer will always bring us to the challenge of changing our lives. Prayer points out what God wants in a way that confronts our blind spots. The nature of deep personal prayer is to draw us out of comfortable deceptions. The journey to the center and its encounter with our loving God in prayer is not the easy way. The issue of time and the other excuses hindering our prayer are rooted in a fear of moving away from our comfort zone, a personal space rooted in the selfishness inherited from or original parents. True self-knowledge is the necessary and demanding path rescuing us from these hidden and disruptive undercurrents within us. In the normal flow of events, blindness is the norm when it comes to self-awareness. Prayer is the path to enlightenment.

II

Merton’s definition of prayer is yearning to be aware of the presence of God, knowledge of God’s Word and personal understanding of God’s will and the capacity to hear and obey. It is that last phrase “to hear and obey” that invites us out of our self-satisfaction in a movement from our head to our heart to our life. Authentic prayer is always necessary in the quest for honest pursuit of God. Self-knowledge is a decisive component in this development.

Here are a few examples of this inward transformation. Many families are caught in the trap of a destructively addicted member. Everyone suffers. AL ANON offers relief but it comes at a price of self-knowledge. One needs to lose the illusion of control, a mindset that assumes one can alter the addictive person’s behavior. It also challenges the pattern of denial or being a victim. The simple acceptance that one cannot change another person comes slowly and with personal sacrifice. The change in attitude, however, is life-giving. This is the sort of thing that God is always surfacing in our prayer: movement from death to life, from illusion to reality. It is an invitation to accept the gospel values and go beyond the superficial allegiance.

In the early 80’s, already a priest for twenty years, I was confronted about my blatant prejudice against homosexuals. I fought it. I rejected it. I became angry but I prayed and eventually began a journey to acceptance and repentance.

What is common in both of these issues, one personal and the other social or cultural, is that often in prayer a matter is brought to our awareness but we resist it. However, it is now in play in our consciousness and if we pray regularly we have to work hard to avoid it. The change evolving from our “hearing and obeying” sometimes is a matter of days or often months or even years. God is patient but never stops calling us out of the darkness to the light. This always involves in a growth in self-knowledge.

The “hear and obey” of Merton’s definition of prayer is the encounter of our total being with God’s word and will. This openness and acceptance of God’s call leads to personal transformation. The message of the gospel is sown in our heart. These seeds of new life are always looking for the opportunity to blossom.

This is the goal of prayer: to slowly but surely to create a new heart in the image of Jesus Christ. It is a gradual passage from self-absorption to self-giving that enriches self-knowledge.

III

Any serious commitment to deep personal prayer begins a movement assaulting our inherited disorder that make us fragile and damaged. This prayer, when consistent and faithful, attacks the limiting boundaries of our self-knowledge. We are slowly challenged with a steady stream of new insights about ourselves. Compassion and gentleness, flowing from regular prayer, begin to replace a harsh and judgmental attitude. We gradually pull away from the hunger to “look good”. Now it is easier to accept our faults and limits. Prayer generates a sense of trust that begins to identify and diminish our hidden fears. With regular prayer, we begin to see the true importance of forgiving. Even more, we start to open new horizons to expand our call to love our neighbor. There are many other healing factors, all directed to our original brokenness, all expanding our self-awareness. This new self-knowledge is an influential part of prayer that brings us back to the road toward original innocence leading to God.

This the fourth of a series of blogs on the Christian life prayer and self-knowledge.

I

Prayer plays a vital role on the Christian journey. This is especially true as we come face to face with the demands of gospel integrity. However, in the end, prayer only identifies and clarifies God’s presence in our life. Life is where we encounter God. Life is the greatest grace. Prayer enlightens, enables and draws us into this true mystery and goal of our existence, to be one with God.

One of the primary tasks of prayer is to enlighten us through the Word of God. This process slowly lets us see that our grasp of Jesus’ message in the Gospels is quite shallow. A few personal examples will help make this concrete. As a young teenager I thought it was an outrageous sacrilege for girls to play sports. Likewise, I believed that the African Americans were perfectly happy in their neighborhood. There was absolutely no understanding of the intensity of the overcrowding, the poor and decrepit housing stock, the underfunding of the segregated schools, the lack of medical services and a multitude of other expressions of racial injustice.

Faithfulness to prayer slowly expanded my awareness of my captivity to a culture that was intensely sexist and racist. That journey continues full speed into the present. This is one of numerous ways prayer enhances our self-knowledge by attacking our false consciousness.

II

Most often when people pray, they have a plan. They want God to respond to their strategy for happiness. But God also has a plan. God wants us to respond to that plan. Here is the conflict: the two plans, God’s and ours. This is a significant problem with prayer. Growth in self-knowledge is a major factor in resolving this apparent discord.

For most people, a good part of their spiritual journey involves this transition from one’s personal plan for happiness to God’s plan for our happiness. We are clear with what we want and what we think we need. Most often it is dominated by the deceitful values of the false self. However, through the experience of life’s many trials, we gradually see the need to ease off of our agenda and let go. We gradually come to see and embrace the need to let God! Our growth in a more righteous self-knowledge is a major contributor to this positive experience.

In the Catechism of the Catholic Church there are several definitions of prayer. One from St. John Damascene states: Prayer is the raising of one’s mind and heart to God or the requesting of good things from God.”

Our “good things” often conflict with God’s “good things”. A significant part of the Christian life is learning to discern the difference and importance of our self-perceived “good things” and the “good things” of God. More often than not, our “good things” are rooted in the false values of our materialistic and consumer driven culture rather than the values of the gospel. As we begin to break loose of the restraints

of the false self, the light of gospel shines more brightly in our heart. This is always a shift towards a more genuine self-knowledge.

In the early stages of Christian growth, we are praying for the “good things” we feel are necessary for us. Authentic prayer demands that we change rather than God change. We grasp this very slowly, if at all. The irony often is that, in the very troubles and burdens that we want God to remove, we eventually will find the hidden blessing of life on the way to the “good things” of God’s Kingdom.

The growth in Christian maturity demands that we change our ideas of God and continue to deepen our self-knowledge. In maturing prayer, we move from asking God for our “good things”, the blessings that we think we need to bring peace and order into our own created kingdom. On the contrary, when we repent and seek Jesus’ Kingdom, our heart moves to seek what God desires. We gently become aware that God is the Creator and we are the creature. God’s better plan calls us to change, to grow in self-knowledge. That change is personal conversion, a gradual and life-long process transitioning from ourselves as the center to God as the center. The eyes of our heart slowly begin to see the beauty of God’s “good things”.

III

Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk who was one of the great spiritual teachers in the 20th Century North America, spoke eloquently about a deep personal prayer. Merton defined it this way: “Prayer then means yearning for the simple presence of God, for a personal understanding of God’s word, for knowledge of God’s will, and for the capacity to hear and obey God.”

In Merton’s definition of prayer, God is at the center. We search for understanding and direction in our lives that need to open us to God. We find five helpful points for this goal in Merton’s definition of prayer:

1) All prayer must raise our awareness of God’s presence.

2) We need to encounter God’s Word. The most privileged way of this engagement is with the Bible but it also is in the experiences of life.

3) The encounter with God’s Word leads us to God’s will, a call out of selfishness to generosity toward God and others.

4) In this prayer, listening is the key.

5) New insight into the reality of God’s word and will guides our way of life.

Conclusion

It is clear that here is an interdependence between self-knowledge and prayer. In this mutual dependence, we discover one of the many contradictions in the spiritual life. As self-knowledge increases, there is a startling awareness that we just are not able to fix all that is broken. The consequences of original sin run very deep. This opens us to God’s mercy which, in time, moves us to a greater dependence on prayer.

The importance of Self-Knowledge on the Christian journey

II

Self-Knowledge and the Pursuit of God

Our normal mind-set is filled with deep prejudices, false values, illusions, and a grandiose sense of self-importance. They all join together to blind us to God’s presence in the depths of our heart. Clearing this passage is the task of an authentic spiritual life. Self-knowledge, an appreciation and awareness of what is taking place within us, is a crucial element on this path.

The journey of self-knowledge is often described as moving from the false self to the true self. It is a new way of looking at ourselves, at others, and at the world. It is a transformation of consciousness.

The false self is entrenched in our exaggerated sense of self-importance, our illusions of grandiosity, the blindness of our prejudices and addictions, and, most of all, the unreality of our idols. Our heart creates many false centers in our attachments, the distorted use of God’s creatures. The heart becomes fragmented and flawed.

We tend to become blinded to our faults and failures. We emphasize the shortcomings of others. Jesus put it ever so clearly when he pointed out our blindness to the log in our eye rather than our stress on the splinter in our neighbor’s eye (Matthew 7:4–5). Self-righteousness rises to the front and center. As we become aware of the false values flowing from our fragmented heart, we come to a fork in the road.

We have a choice of life or death. We choose death when we double down on the clamoring of the false self. We choose life when we open ourselves to the mercy of God, which leads to the true self. At the heart of this encounter is the perennial challenge of knowing ourselves.

Self-knowledge Opens to God’s Mercy

Even the simplest things in life are often misled by the false self. Having the right kind of clothes, a nice home, the lifestyle of our proper state, and a good reputation are all potentially innocent choices. The false self has a field day refocusing these items to contribute to a deceitful vision of self-importance. People spend billions of dollars on advertising to encourage us to feed the exaggerated demands of the false self. The unending pulls of a consumer society are a singular and horrendous obstacle on the road to the true self. All these deviations work together to weaken, and even hide, the longing of the true self calling us to move on to the center for a more authentic life.

Here again, self-knowledge, an awareness of what is going on within us, is critical in the necessary conversion that comes when we hear God’s word and obey God’s will in prayer.

Teresa of Avila and the Mercy of God

For Teresa of Avila, the long search for self-knowledge led to two important facts that became the foundation of all her spirituality. First, she had a clear encounter with the false self, a distracted heart pulled in many directions leading away from God. In this fragmented heart she identified her sinfulness. More importantly, she slowly accepted her helplessness to change.

The second reality Teresa welcomed was this: she was loved and forgiven. She lived in a sea of mercy. This led Teresa to accept life rooted in her helpless sinfulness. At the same time, she experienced life immersed in the loving mercy of God. She was the creature caught in sin but a loved and forgiven child of God. God was the creator revealing his power in love and mercy.

Self-knowledge, Prayer, and Life

Teresa of Ávila was relentless in declaring the importance of self-knowledge for the spiritual journey, the journey to God in the center of our being.

Well now, it is foolish to think that we will enter heaven without entering ourselves, reflecting on our misery and what we owe God and begging Him often for mercy. (THE INTERIOR CASTLE, 2.1.11)

For Teresa, prayer was the answer to almost all problems. Her notion of prayer was unrestrained. It takes place in the context of the relationship between God at the center and our life experience. In the interaction of these elements in prayer, self-knowledge has a pivotal role. The mystery of God unfolds in the dynamic of the person’s prayer and life experience. Self-understanding brings this process together. When we accept the reality of God’s place and our place, God’s mercy is the dominant issue. As she grew in self-knowledge, Teresa grew steadily more compelling in her oft-repeated conviction: “My life is the story of God’s mercy.”

As we grow in self-knowledge, we will celebrate our lives as immersed in the sea of God’s mercy. Self-knowledge will gradually bring us to embrace the wonder of this gift.

There is no better way to understand and enter into this relationship between God and ourselves than opening our hearts to Jesus and his call. Deep personal prayer will follow.

The Importance of Self-Knowledge on the Christian Journey

In the Exsultet, the most glorious Easter proclamation, we read:
That sanctifying power of this night
Dispels the brokenness, washes faults away,
Restores innocence to the fallen, and joy to the mourners,
Drives out hatred, fosters concord and brings down the mighty.

The Christian Life aims to make that beautiful vision of the Exsultet an overwhelming certainty in the life of each follower of Christ. One factor in this necessary personal transformation is self-knowledge.

The brokenness acknowledged in the Exsultet is our heritage, the consequence of the sin of our original parents, Adam and Eve. Every human being is caught in this Alienation that drives them away from God. This is the product of personal, social, economic and cultural factors. We are all caught in the grasp of a false consciousness that leads us to see things for our personal benefit. From these most fundamental desires flow the division, the isolation, the conflict and hatred so inherent in our common human experience. Likewise, culture creates further false values to support hostility and separation. The economic system adds to the pattern of lies that defines us as consumers with needs that supposedly only further acquisition can bring the happiness we long for.

The following five observations help clarify the intensity of this false consciousness that engulfs us.

1) We are locked into a false consciousness.

2) This false consciousness creates a world view that is a gross distortion of reality but a world view, nevertheless, that we embrace as true.

3) Part of this perspective. fostered by society and culture, and driven by our innate egoism, defines us primarily as a consumer.

4) We are constrained by the deep and hidden prejudices aimed at protecting our economic, political, cultural, gender, social and racial privileges to the exclusion and deprivation of others.

5) The power of the ego is in a relentless struggle to avoid any diminishment of its control of our false consciousness.

The interplay of all these forces, generating a false consciousness, deeply influences our quest for happiness. It is a never-failing way to ultimate disappointment and grief. These are patterns of deceit and distortion. They create a mindset that pursues goals that, in the end, can never achieve lasting happiness. Authentic self-knowledge is the only way out. Jesus has told us, “The truth will set you free.” (John8:32) The first step on the road to freedom is moving out of the captivity of the destructive lies. We need to move into the truth of God’s call to our original innocence. This is the work of the Christian life. Self-knowledge is a critical feature of the venture.

Here is a short personal example of false consciousness. As a child, I was told the “colored people” would never come past 47th St. Gay and lesbian people just did not exist. The glass ceiling for women, which was never mentioned, was more like a combination steel and titanium. All of these were wrapped up in a religious message of my beloved parish.

My spiritual journey has been an on-going struggle to break free of this racism, prejudice against the LGBTQ community and sexism. All of these destructive lies have festered deep within my false consciousness over a lifetime. Like a cancer, they have quietly been eating away at my spiritual well-being. The search for true self-knowledge has led to a fierce battle against my ingrained captivity. Eventually, a growth in self-knowledge, has been generated by seeking a true Christian life. This has been possible only with an encounter with Jesus in the Gospels and deep personal prayer. The struggle continues.

The Way of Prayer: A Guide to the Footsteps of Jesus

I

The Easter Vigil is the most sacred of all liturgical celebrations. The Liturgy of the Light is the first of four parts. It centers on the proclaiming of the Exsultet, the Easter hymn of singular beauty and sovereignty. This song celebrates the Easter victory of life over death, grace over sin, love over hatred. There is a crescendoing announcement expressed ten times in a description that begins “This is the Night…” In this story of salvation there are two stunning statements between the fourth and fifth declarations of “This is the Night…”. They challenge us to address the wonderful glory of the Easter reality.

O truly necessary sin of Adam,
Destroyed completely by the Death of Christ!
O Happy fault that earned so glorious a Redeemer!

Some verses later, the song continues:

That sanctifying power of this night
Dispels the brokenness, washes faults away,
Restores innocence to the fallen, and joy to the mourners,
Drives out hatred, fosters concord and brings down the mighty.

Part of the great mystery of Christ Crucified and Christ Risen that we celebrate in the three holy days of the Triduum is this. We see Christ as the New Adam. He is offering us a way out of the sinful state we were born into. Because of the sin of Adam and Eve, every human being comes into the world with a deep brokenness, a disoriented heart and blinded mind. Our natural state makes us the victims of ignorance and pulled toward division, isolation and hatred. This state of Alienation leads away from God in every possible way.

The clear message of the Exsultet is that God is calling us back to the original innocence. The vocation of every person is to forsake the Alienation, the inheritance of our first parents, and direct our whole being to the pursuit of God. Our true destiny is to restore ourselves and all persons and all creation as one in God. This is the goal of the true and authentic Christian life.

Jesus has given us an invitation and an opportunity for personal transformation. This is how the message of the Exsultet becomes reality in our life. Jesus calls: “Come and see.” (John 1:39) Jesus reveals: “I am the way and the truth and the life.” (John 14:6) Jesus gives us the path to freedom and life: “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”(Mk 8:34)

Along with the sacraments, prayer becomes a central issue in refocusing our life in harmony with the beautiful message of the Exsultet. This is the message and the call of the gospel. This is walking in the footsteps of Jesus. A common name for this search for personal transformation is the spiritual life.

II

Here is a description of the spiritual life that I have found very helpful. It is the quest for self-transcendence. This is a long, painful process. It involves moving from ourselves as the center to making God the center of our reality. This is the Christian journey in the footsteps of Jesus. Every part of our life is involved in the personal transformation from selfishness to service and love. Deep and personal prayer is critical along with our relationships, responsibilities and commitments. This mature prayer integrates and authenticates all of our life in the pursuit of God.

III

Here is a simple description of the spiritual journey. There is the beginning. In this initial state the consequences of our sinful condition holds sway along with the superficiality resulting from a consumer culture. We take that first step away from our original sinfulness and selfishness. Then there is the actual journey which involves a conversion process. We begin the long road to freedom from our self-centered ways. Self-knowledge is a tedious but healing and redemptive element of this process. Eventually we have a sense of arrival. We gain an awareness of movement away from the dominance of the ego. These three steps of beginning, journey and arrival are the advancement of the spiritual life. There is true experience of progress. We have begun to transform the deep distortions of our heart with gospel values. Though we do not realize it at the moment, this is just the first step of a long, wearisome journey. The process will repeat itself over and over and over again. It is a spiraling passage to our center where God resides.

At each stage we see things with a more acute perspective but never with total clarity. The repeating conversions create a depth of purification and transformation. These new insights are far beyond our power to envision at the beginning of the journey. Each stage offers new horizons, new inclusiveness, new openness to reconciliation. Once we thought it was progress to see two sides to every story. Eventually we begin to see that often there may be several sides to the story. The same is true with our racism and our attitudes to different states of sexuality. Many other prejudices have held sway with no challenge. Each new level of awareness invites us to face turmoil and new choices. Slowly we begin to see the great chasm between what we want and what we need.

While we move forward by faithfulness to the struggle, each stage along the way enlightens us to see God’s goodness and our sinfulness more clearly. Humility becomes more important with each step of growth. The irony is that we recognize our personal limits and weakness and sinfulness much more clearly as we make progress in our pursuit of God. We see our sinful state with always more transparency with each step forward!

Another paradox of the spiritual journey is this. At each stage, we make significant progress from the previous stage. Yet we are more or less blind to the upcoming progress. That only happens when we do the necessary steps for the next conversion along the way. We are regularly tempted with the distortion that we have finally arrived.

The many phases of the spiritual journey always involve a deeper degree of prayer, more detachment, and especially confronting our addictions, that often cripple us from any further progress. Along the way, self-knowledge and humility shine the light in the darkness.

IV

The spiritual life seeks to transform us into that person described in the Exsultet:
That sanctifying power of this night
Dispels the brokenness, washes faults away,
Restores innocence to the fallen, and joy to the mourners,
Drives out hatred, fosters concord and brings down the mighty.

To accomplish this goal, to be a new person in the image of Christ, we will continue with some helpful material in the coming weeks. We will offer reflections on the Journey of self-knowledge, the Journey of Prayer, the Journey of Lectio Divina, the Journey of Christian Meditation and finally, some considerations on Teresa of Avila’s Program of Humility, Detachment and Charity. All of these reflections aim to help us to walk in the footsteps of Jesus.

Question #5: “The most difficult thing about the teachings on addictions is this: How can actions that we previously thought were not sinful, make us idolatrous and unloving? This is a real stretch for me!”

Of all May’s marvelous teachings on addiction, none is more important than this: we cannot overcome addiction by ourself. Naked willpower is a sure source of defeat. Only openness to God’s grace offers the possibility of eliminating addiction. There is no escaping this hard and fast reality. The combination of our generous cooperation with God’s grace is the only way to freedom from the addiction.

Here are a few helpful statements from May on the difficult topic of grace:

Grace is God’s love in the concrete.
Grace is God’s love that fills our total being.
We live in a sea of God’s loving mercy that is God’s grace.
Even when our choices are destructive such as our addictions, God’s love and grace never stop. God always pursues us without conditions or limits.
God’s grace always is embracing us in a way that is absolute, permanent and victorious.

The fact that withdrawal from addiction is only possible with God’s grace does not mean we simply wait for it to happen. It means that our action comes with recognition that God is in control. We are an active participant but God’s grace will determine the consequences. Both May and Teresa have helpful guidance on how we cooperate with God’s grace in breaking free of the bondage of addiction.

May and the saintly and motherly Carmelite agree that one of the great difficulties we all face is this. God wants everything. The only way we can approach that gift of self is one step at a time. Therefore, we need to address the addiction that has risen to the forefront of our consciousness. We must set up a plan to attack the number one addiction, the one whose behavior is most troublesome. Most likely, we have been trying to avoid the issue for a long time. Now is the moment of grace. It demands action. Down deep, we know we need to change. Equally down deep, we absolutely do not want to change. The struggle is on.

May’s Insight

May is emphatic that, in the end, freedom from addiction is the result of God’s grace and our cooperation. His teaching on willingness and willfulness brings some clarity to this process.

Willingness, for May, means advancing toward the deeper Mystery of life. We acknowledge that there is a reality beyond our self, a surrender that moves outside of ourselves. We accept that we seem separate yet are called to union with the Mystery that is the foundation of reality. Willingness calls us to participate in the reality that is beyond our control. On the other hand, willfulness centers on self-mastery. It seeks to put the focus on controlling and influencing reality to preserve the attention and control on oneself.

For May, willingness alone is the pathway that can free us from addiction. Willfulness is a guaranteed loser that prolongs the drudgery of addiction’s captivity.

Like the three virtues of Teresa’s Program, willingness seeks to make space for God in our heart. God is always seeking to awaken our hearts to his loving presence. Our major problem is our addictions. They keep the heart full with God’s creatures, not God. This draws the passion of the heart away from God. Willingness engages us in the unending struggle to choose God over God’s creatures with a maturing conviction and commitment. The relentless call of the Spirit implores us to empty our heart for God. This demands willingness over the self-centered approach of willfulness.

It is clear. God’s grace is in this struggle between our egoism and God’s loving call. By ourselves, we are not capable of the necessary total surrender. Yet, in the faithfulness to the struggle to create space for God, there is a wonderous gift. We gradually grow in our awareness of our absolute dependence on God. Therefore, in the end, the grace is found in true faithfulness to the struggle. The struggle keeps us alive as we await the gift of the abundance of God’s love that is contemplation.

Teresa’s Plan of Attack

Teresa points out that the demands on our generosity are being stretched beyond our limits. The struggle seems endless and hopeless. On God’s part, it is a gentle, consistent and determined invitation to love and freedom. This gift is found in Teresa’s Program, centering on the three virtues of charity, detachment and humility. It offers a twofold outlet. First, it gives us a way out of the paralysis of seeming helplessness. Secondly, it presents an encounter with God’s invitation to love and freedom. This is God’s love in the concrete which is grace.

There is indeed a struggle. It is a search for the passage way to the deepest recesses of our heart. Here we encounter a singular hunger, the hunger for God. Here we will find the only source for peace and true happiness. This is why our addictions are so destructive. They keep us from the true peace and happiness which is God.

This process of substituting the creature for the Creator is totally and undeniably contrary to everything our heart was made for. It makes us lapse into the deceptive lie of the addiction. This lie of the addiction truly draws us away from God. It makes us idolatrous and unloving. This produces the crippling bondage of our addiction. Teresa tells us a life committed to becoming more loving, a life of placing all creatures in their proper place by detachment and a life of accepting, in humility, the truth about God and ourselves, is what is necessary. It alone will free us from idolatry and the demise of love. It opens the way to freedom, peace and happiness now, and eternal life and love, in the future.

Tereasa expressed it in these words: “Everything I have advised you about in this book is directed toward the complete gift of ourselves to the Creator, the surrender of our will to his and the detachment from creatures …Unless we give our wills entirely to the Lord so that in everything pertaining to us, he might do what conforms to his will, we will never be allowed to drink from this fount. Drinking from it is perfect contemplation.” (Way pf Perfection.32.9)

St. Paul’s statement is never more appropriate than in the battle against addiction. “My grace is sufficient for you for power is made perfect in weakness.” (2 Cor 12:9)

As we approach that surrender generated by God’s grace, we need to recognize two things. The first is a growing awareness of how feeble our love is for both God and our neighbor. Secondly, we need to stay in the struggle seeking to be more humble, more detached, and more loving by our faithfulness to prayer. Both of these items are expressions of the approach to life that is rooted in willingness. This way of behaving leads to our liberation from our addictions. This will prepare us for God’s purifying and transforming gift of contemplation.

Teresa’s Program and Addiction

Question #4: “Given the deep scientific basis for May’s insights on addictions. How can your favorite author, Teresa of Avila, have anything relevant to say about addictions?”

Teresa of Avila had none of the benefits of Gerald May’s gifted and exceptional scientific background. She had no awareness of the intricate connection of body, mind and psyche in today’s understanding of addiction. Yet, she had a profound experience of God in her life of prayer. In fact, it was brilliant enough that she was named the first woman Doctor of the Church.

In what has become known as Teresa’s Program, we have some truly helpful insights that supplement May’s teachings about addiction and the spiritual life. Teresa saw prayer as the central component of the individual’s purification and transformation on the journey to becoming one with God. She describes clearly the deep personal changes involved in a faithful prayer life. These changes are similar to eliminating the consequences of addiction in our day.

Teresa understood that the source of true prayer was the heart. The Bible mentions this more than a thousand times. Her genius let her see the chaos in the heart as the product of what we call today addictions. The heart was a battlefield where good and evil struggled mightily to gain control. One of Teresa’s gifts to Christian spirituality was to identify the interaction of prayer and the three virtues of humility, detachment and charity as a source of peace and order producing purity of heart. All of this takes place in a gradual journey demanding constant faithfulness to the struggle. The internal order and peace resulting from purity of heart, is the great treasure of the gospel parable.

The necessary interaction of the virtues and prayer helps the prayer grow in intensity and the virtues increase in their integrity and influence. This shared support gradually increases the peace and order flowing from purity of heart. This is the beginning of liberation from the chaos of the unchallenged addictions.

May describes the elimination of addictions as the outcome of freedom that opens to love. Teresa envisions energizing prayer by bringing an internal order that joins the virtues and prayer in shared growth. This, in turn, leads to a deeper, clearer and more free movement to be one with God.

The language, and even some points of emphasis, offered by Teresa and May are different. The reality of internal transformation, however, is truly the same.

The Three Virtues

Humility: Teresa repeats regularly that humility is the truth. The bottom line of our reality is that God is the Creator and we are the creature. Humility lets us embrace this certain truth.

For Teresa, humility is not about a loss of self-esteem. This is a dishonest and damaging misuse of humility. Such a state is disturbing and conflicted. Teresa, on the contrary, says, “Humility does not disturb or disquiet however great it may be; it comes with peace, delight, and calm…this humility expands the soul and enables it to serve God more.” (Way of Perfection 10.2)

To know and embrace the humble truth about ourselves is a source of our freedom. This is the same freedom that comes with withdrawal from addiction. We slowly begin to see more clearly who God is. This realization is the essential source of our humility. We also see the truth about ourselves with the gift of this virtue. Humility opens us up to the necessary personal conversion that leads to constant growth in self-understanding. It lets us grasp the wonder of God calling us into the Mystery of Love even in our broken and sinful state with all of our addictions.

Detachment: By detachment Teresa implies that we must put all things in their proper perspective. We need to relate to everything so they bring us closer to God. This particular relationship, that hobby, our cell phone, our favorite entertainments and all of our other possessions and relationships will either bring us closer to God or be a barrier in this search. The effects of original sin, often displayed in our addictions, drive us to make certain creatures our idols. In our culture, one of the great forces pulling us away from God is in the hunger for security. The three false gods in this deceit are possessions, power and relationships. Detachment attacks this perversion of reality so entrenched in our deceiving hearts.

True detachment unleashes our fundamental longing for God and sets our heart free. Jesus’ gospel teachings about detachment are about learning to love. Only when things are seen in the right light, with a detached heart, do they open the way to God. Otherwise, things are used only to prop up our selfish agenda, contrary to our goal, to seek God.

Charity: Charity is the proper acceptance of others. Love expressed in charity for our sisters and brothers is the index of our spiritual growth. For Teresa, the authenticity of our spiritual journey is measured by the quality of our interpersonal relations. This neighborly love moves us towards the center where God awaits.

This call to communal love is an exceptionally difficult barrier and challenge on our spiritual journey. Our selfishness most often is an expression of our addictions. Our addictions deepen our self-centeredness. We easily fall into a pattern of self-righteousness. Teresa understood this, saying, “Beg our Lord to give you this perfect love of neighbor. Let his Majesty have a free hand, for He will give you more than you know how to desire because you are striving and making every effort to do what you can about this love.” (Interior Castle.5.3.12)

Teresa has a simple example of how profound this practice is in ordinary life. She says if there is a person that we find difficult, we should go out of our way to support and help that person. If that individual receives praise, we ought to rejoice as if the praise is for us.

The Ultimate Goal

The journey to God is an interaction between these three virtues and prayer. We need to pray to be humble, detached, and loving. They open us to grace, the only way to escape of our addictions. This process will continue throughout our life.

Teresa saw our freedom from all creatures as decisive to the spiritual journey to God. This freedom happens by reducing the dominance of self-interest and by diminishing possessiveness and worldly honor. May describes the same process as breaking loose from the dominion of addictions.

The pursuit of God is a slow, steady development with little leapfrogging ahead. A necessary, incessant determination is at the heart of Teresa’s program, integrating prayer and a lifestyle guided by the three virtues. This is walking with Jesus in the way of freedom and love.

Question #4: “Given the deep scientific basis for May’s insights on addictions. How can your favorite author, Teresa of Avila, have anything relevant to say about addictions?”

Question #3: “While the material on addictions is fascinating and both frightening and helpful, how is it connected to my spiritual life?”

In almost all authentic spiritual traditions, even centuries before Christianity, the individual’s relationship to creatures has had a fundamental role. Creatures need to lead to God. When this role is perverted, the result is idolatry. This distortion starts with attachment which nails the heart to the object of affection. In explaining addiction, May highlights the long tradition on attachment and builds upon it. As an attachment escalates, it grows into addiction. May shows how the body, the mind and one’s feelings all work together to both create and maintain the path from an initial attachment to addiction. We are wired in the direction of addiction.

Some deeper considerations about addictions will be helpful in displaying the connection of addictions to our spiritual life. While defining addiction as any compulsive, habitual behavior that limits freedom and human desire, May stresses it is the action that is truly important in addiction. Desire for alcohol does not define an alcoholic. Regular over-indulgence in drinking does.

Here are five important characteristics of any addiction:

Tolerance: We always want more of the product of the addictive activity. In the end, whatever is the goal of the addictive conduct, it becomes consistently more difficult to achieve. This exposes a deeper but unsatisfied hunger. This is a truly ugly dimension of addiction. There never is enough.

Withdrawal symptoms: There are two. They are stress reaction and backlash reaction. In the stress reaction, the body reacts to the loss of addictive behavior in varying degrees of intensity. In the backlash, the person feels the opposite of the desired goal of the addiction.

Self-deception: The mind is fighting against itself to avoid loss of its “fix.” It creates “mind games” to distort and deceive anything that might deprive it of it of satisfaction. The mind loathes the possibility of the change built-in with withdrawal. The mind is ingenious in creating excuses to maintain full support for the addiction.

Loss of willpower: A fundamental deception or “mind trick” of addiction is focusing attention on willpower. The intention to stop addiction by saying, “I can handle it” is the sure path to preserving the addiction. The movement away from willpower to surrender and openness to grace is one of the great insights of May’s teachings. Willingness, leading to the surrender to grace, and not willfulness with its dependence on willpower, is the path to freedom.

Distortion of attention: Addiction absorbs our attention to distract our mind and heart from love. Attention and love are intimate partners. This is at the heart of the addiction’s destructive powers. It keeps us from the path of love for others and especially for God.

We need to work to identify our addictions. This is not so easy. Many addictions operate in a totally hidden manner. This invisibility can take place over a period of years. Other addictions are astute in creating deceptive mind games to minimize concern. How could being enthused about my team’s quest the championship be harmful? How could working extra to support my family be in conflict with being a responsible parent? Could being concerned about one’s health hinder my spiritual life? These, and a thousand other questions about ordinary activities and attitudes, can lead to uncovering of addictions in our life.

Addictions thrive in anonymity. It is self-knowledge, often driven by deep personal prayer, that unveils their destructive patterns. When a person brings the addiction out in the open, there is a choice: maintain the bondage or seek freedom. It is the question of Elijah to the people in the conflict with the false prophets: “How long will you straddle the issue? If the Lord is God, follow him; if Baal, follow him?” (I Kings 18:21)

When May states that addiction leads to idolatry, it sounds shocking. The same teaching has been part of our Christian spirituality since the earliest days of the Desert Mothers and Fathers as they entered more deeply into the depth and beauty of the gospel message.

At a personal level, the struggle is to let things, relationships and activities lead us to God. However, we are deeply inclined to twist and distort these items to direct them for our selfish needs. Rather than God as the center, we become the center. This struggle started in the Garden and will go until the end. Addictions are not centered in things or experiences. Addictions are all about the heart. Am I moving out of myself toward God or not?

Another helpful insight of May points out the difference between addiction, which often seems quite good, and areas of authentic commitment in our life. To determine the difference, we need simply ask ourselves, can we quit it? If not, it is an addiction no matter how good it may appear. Freedom is the source of all the good we do. For freedom gives us the capacity for love. Addiction is the enemy of both freedom and love.

One truly difficult part of May’s teaching on addiction is this: the most mundane activities lead to critical choices in our life. Listening to or reading the news, our cell phone, a few drinks, dents in our new car, a little extra work, planning for retirement – they all are possible addictions. They all can lead one on a destructive path. Will we choose the true God or a false god? This is the stuff of the gospel.

Here are just a few quotes from Matthew that challenge us on the topic of addiction and our spiritual life. “To save one’s life, one must lose it.” (Mt 10:39), “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth…” (Mt 6:19), “Ask and it will be given to you.” (Mt 7:7), “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.” Mt 10:37), “Go sell what you have and give it to the poor.” (Mt 19:21).

I
Willingness and Willfulness

One of the most immediate difficulties in reading Gerald May’s classic, Addiction and Grace is this. He attributes real spiritual damage to indulgence in some of the most ordinary things in life: drinking a soda, watching a favorite TV show, commitment to your favorite team, using your cell phone and a seemingly endless list of other activities. For May, the pathology happens when these activities slide into an addictive behavior. May sees a deeper reality. Any addiction is filling a space in the heart that should be reserved for our pursuit of God. Most people find this hard to understand. They see their spiritual life primarily as a series of religious practices and moral behavior. The more personal connection with God comes later.

An example of the physical pathology of a stroke can be helpful here. Before a person has a stroke, there are a series of destructive events that are moving steadily toward the catastrophe that is a stroke. The events leading to the inevitability of the stroke are real. If they are observed with the proper medical knowledge, whether of a professional or the individual, they are a cry for medical intervention so the stroke can be avoided. Ignorance of their presence leads to silence and the devastation of the stroke.

In the spiritual life, addictions are those kinds of spiritual maladies leading to the spiritual equivalent of a stroke. They present a major blockage in the pursuit of God.

May’s teaching on willingness and willfulness is the healthy advice of true spiritual mentor who will protect us from the destructive possibilities of a misguided spiritual life. A true mentor will open a clear path for our heart to pursue our fundamental purpose to be one in God. For May, who is indeed a true spiritual mentor, willingness and willfulness are about one’s basic approach to life. They are tools of clarity or distortion in the wilderness of our spiritual quest. We are going to accept life as a mystery opening to God or as task to master reality for our own personal benefit and control. The proper understanding of willingness and willfulness and the choice they lay before us will be a great help as we try to grapple with the interplay of grace and addiction.

Surrender or Control

In willingness one accepts an openness and dependency leading to the search for union with God. This reduces independence and control. It is a choice of growing surrender to the mystery of life. It is the opening to see oneself, all people and all creation as being one in God. It is a losing of self to find a new self in God.

Willfulness is a movement to independence and control. It pursues self-mastery. It is the rugged individualism that is so exalted in a consumer society and so operative in countless personal, economic and political agendas.

A clear example is how these two mindsets approach the environmental crisis. Willingness sees a sense of unity within all creation and the human venture. There is a call for respect and responsibility for all of nature. There is a painful dimension in recognizing the on-going destruction of the environment. On the other hand, willfulness approaches the environment in a totally utilitarian fashion. Creation is there to serve the needs of the individual. Willfulness sees the physical world as a resource for a program of profit, convenience and comfort.

Willingness sees a single ultimate power in the universe. It sees self-surrender and movement toward union as the final and absolute task in life, to let go and let God. On the other hand, willfulness sees many spiritual powers in the universe. For it, life’s task is to get the better of the ultimate spiritual powers to one’s personal benefit.

A major goal of the spiritual life is to create a vision that facilitates true surrender. This kind of submission is only possible when the heart is free of attachment, and particularly, addictions. Prayer and meditation, along with fasting and service, help produce the freedom necessary for the movement from willfulness to willingness. In this new spiritual maturity, there is an interesting development. There is an emptying out of spiritual images and ideas that we held in great esteem. There is a diminishment of what seemed important and necessary and a movement towards emptiness. Our prayer becomes much more a quiet presence than brilliant insights and images. In this surrender and emptiness, we are moving towards true freedom.

A Key to Understanding Addiction and Grace

The proper understanding of willingness and willfulness has much to tell us about addiction and our spiritual wellbeing. They are a key to unraveling May’s great wisdom that connects the human sciences, and especially psychology, to the spiritual journey. This is a central message in May’s text, Addiction and Grace. Making the right distinctions between willingness and willfulness is truly the work of a lifetime. Yet May guides us with great vision into the beauty and integrity of this search for God that is rooted in our ordinary experience. The daily events of our life, along with our relationships and our responsibilities. all benefit from the enlightenment that flows from our understanding what willingness and willfulness signify in our journey. These insights will help us immensely in the following reflections on May’s lessons about the power of God’s grace when we face our many addictions.

Preface

I have been writing this blog, Praying Alone Together for seven years. To my utter amazement, I will have my two millionth visitor in a month or two.

When I started writing, a few things were clear to me. I wanted to treat Carmelite spirituality and prayer, particularly from the perspective of Teresa of Avila. Secondly, I wanted to write from the viewpoint of a pastor. Over the years, some things have come into sharper focus. Now, my main effort is to invite people to a deeper personal prayer. My efforts have been to attempt to offer them the guidance of how to accomplish the goal of deep personal prayer. Likewise, I have become aware of both the gifts, and the very real limits, of writing from a pastor’s outlook. It is a struggle to stay simple without being simplistic in presenting a truly complex challenge to guide and enlighten people in their experience of God. This has made me more and more aware of the need of both deep personal prayer and the ever-expanding need for humility on my part. My fondest hope is that my efforts will be a simple invitation to an openness to God’s call to a deeper encounter of love.

A truly clear example of my gift of pastoral insight and the constraints of insufficient academic expertise was a series of reflections on Gerald May’s Addiction and Grace. The responses I received from most readers were twofold. The material was new and interesting. Likewise, it was both insightful and confusing. I have received a series of questions on the topic of addiction. I hope I will be able to offer some clarification. The most common concern was the deep surprise about one’s own addictions and the spiritual damage they can produce. The second area of concern was about the depth of the connection of addiction to spirituality and the magnitude of personal and spiritual harm that is the product of unchecked addictions in the ordinary events of life.

In this second series of reflections on Addiction and Grace, I hope to address these and other questions that I have received from the readers of my first effort.

I am going to begin with a reflection on May’s teaching on willingness and willfulness. May sees in these two contrary items a fundamental approach to life. They involve the never-ending question of meaning and the elusive search for happiness as we face the mystery of life. Properly understood, the true meaning of willingness and willfulness acts as a guide to spirituality and our pursuit of God. Willingness and willfulness are two basic moves towards life. May’s teaching is truly an invitation into life’s true destiny, union with God. We need to approach it with a great deal of wonder and an ever-greater degree of humility.

Teresa of Avila’s classic, The Interior Castle, is about purification and transformation on the pilgrimage to God. It has an uncanny similarity to the role of purgatory in our salvation. The following five reflections seek to flesh out some positive elements in this connection. In sum, it is our invitation to a deeper and more productive spiritual life.

Aging: A Decisive Part of God’s Plan
God Sees the Clock Differently

Donald Trump has no monopoly on the “big lie”. History has been filled with them. One of the more insidious “big lies” we live with is this: youth is a precious gift and aging is horrendous. God does not agree. Aging is very much part of God’s plan. In God’s eyes, a healthy middle age or a confused adolescence or a painful old age are all the same. God has no dread of the clock. God only sees life in its many manifestations moving toward the final purpose. We are all called to be one with God for eternity.

Many people who have not seen me in a while often say I look great. The unstated part of the greeting is ‘for a guy in his eighties.’ I know the compliment is offered in good will. However, I am happy to be in the twilight of life. This is where God wants me. Any appearance of youth, relative or otherwise, is a total illusion. I experience something similar with my many visits to the doctors. Whether it is good news or bad news, I leave with the same thought: I guess I am going to live until I die.

God does not buy into the “big lie” about youth. God only sees the gift of life moving toward the divine design for every person, which is union with the Mystery of Love revealed in Jesus.

There is a multibillion-dollar industry whose self-interest is to protect the myth that youth is both possible and preferable for everyone. Its propaganda permeates all levels of our society. It is propping up a lifestyle of deception and distortion. Eventually, the uncompromising demands of time demolish the lie. The myth of eternal youth gets shattered by the simple and relentless tic-toc of the clock. We are all getting older. For God, this is good. God asks us to go with the flow, get in touch with the program. Aging is good because death is very much a part of life as God sees it.

The Gold in the Debris of Life
The Tragic in Life

Trouble will be there until the end. We see this mixture of good and evil in all levels of reality: the family, our community, our parish, our society and most of all within ourselves. In the parable of the weeds and the wheat (Mt: 13:24-30) Jesus captures one of the deepest aspects of our human experience

Despite the evidence of evil that is so pervasive in our daily experience, Carmelite spirituality testifies that God’s love is always present even in the wreckage of life, the time of our deepest trials.

As we continue to ponderer Teresa’s wisdom on the necessity of purification and transformation, the issue of the tragic in life is an essential ingredient. It pervades all human experience.

In the early stages of prayer, we start out seeking an answer to life’s problems. This search is done with a beginner’s faith. However, as the faith increases, we learn that today’s answered prayers all too quickly give way to an avalanche of tomorrow’s new problems.

Eventually, it becomes clear that we must change our approach. We must accept God on God’s terms rather than trivializing our faith journey by thinking of God as someone who is only there to solve our problems. This change is no small task. A great recognition comes when we finally realize that the problems are not the problem. Our approach to life’s difficulties is what needs to change.

Teresa arrived at a point in her life where she accepted God on God’s terms. This acceptance led her to great wisdom seeing life in all its joys and most especially in the sorrows and difficulties as a divine love story.

Teresa came to recognize that the tragedies in our lives hold the possibility of being one of our surest ways to find God. She invites us to discover the God hidden in life’s troubles. This acceptance leads us to the reject the culture’s relentless cry for self-indulgence. Then there is also the distortion of much religious practice that seeks only a “make me feel good Jesus”. These distortions, joined to our ingrained sinfulness, draw us into ever deeper deceiving illusions.

Eventually many people come to the awareness that they need a spirituality that addresses the tragic and broken elements of life. Jesus was clear about this in his call to join him on the road to Jerusalem.

Our brokenness leads to critical choices in life. We hold the options of peace or conflict, reconciliation or division. Teresa’s teaching about this is clear. Prayer at the moment of our crisis is important. However, there is something more important than the prayerful response to the immediate predicament. It is the habitual and continual practice of deep and personal prayer. This creates a reservoir of patience, insight, and prudence to help us with the unplanned eruptions of the debris of life.

God’s mercy is always on the prowl, always seeking us. A mystic of the Middle Ages, Julian of Norwich, put it beautifully when she said, “First comes the fall and then the recovery from the fall. Both are the mercy of God.”