What happens to the muscles of our bodies can happen to the muscles of our hearts too. This can happen with ever greater intensity when spiritual weightlifting is practised in prayer, in the mystic way.
The difference between conversion and repentance is so important that it needs further explanation. I hope to do this by putt ing the microscope on one of the greatest of all saints from the moment of his conversion to the moment when he was perfectly identified with Christ, at least as far as this is possible in this world. The saint to whom I am referring is St Paul. His conversion on the Damascus road when he heard Christ asking why he had been persecuting him, was instant. It was an instant conversion, but it was only the beginning. Before he was baptised a few days later, he was convinced that Jesus Christ was indeed the Messiah and had risen from the dead, and the very people he was persecuting had been taken up into his risen life. Here they lived and moved in a new world that was constituted within Christ’s Risen Body that would come to be called his Mystical Body, the Kingdom of God or the Kingdom of Love on earth. Paul came to realize that the same love that was released on the fi rst Pentecost had drawn him up too and into Christ’s mystical body. As a well-educated Jew the significance of what was happening would not have been lost on him.
For a devout Jew, the feast of Pentecost was the celebration of God’s law that had been given to his people through Moses many hundreds of years ago. It was on this feast day that God had aptly chosen to give his new people the new law – the law of love. This new law was not inscribed on stone tablets as before, but embodied in a person, the person of Jesus Christ, now Risen and Glorified. When St Paul turned and opened himself to receive this love at his Baptism, this love drew him up, not just into Christ’s mystical body, but into Christ’s mystical loving of his Father. Although love is the greatest power for good in heaven and on earth, it differs from all other sorts of power because it cannot be forced on anyone. It has to be freely received, not once but over and over again. However, the human heart is so fickle that, what is chosen one minute can be taken back the next, what is accepted one day can be rejected the next and what has been possessed for years can be lost after many years too. This is sadly the salary of original sin. Thankfully, the fountain of love to which new Christians are exposed at Baptism, continues to pour out and into them for the rest of their lives and at every moment of their lives.
Realizing this, St Paul like so many who followed him, sought out solitude to learn how to practise turning and opening himself to the fountain of Christ’s love, to receive it into him, and to be drawn by it into the community of all other Christians. Then, he would be drawn with them into the love that Christ offered to his father, and the love that he received from the father, to bring about the communion of all humankind in the love of the Three in One. I need to emphasize something that can be overlooked so easily. Paul went into solitude for at least three years. With his background, as a devote Jew, it should not surprise us that he went, not just into the desert, but into the Arabian desert. Then he spent seven more years in what Monsignor Philip Hughes calls his “noviciate”, learning to practise what he was going to preach to others.
We receive love in the secular world as well as in the spiritual life, by loving the one who loves us in return. In the spiritual world the One who loves us is God, whose love reaches out to possess us through Christ. When on the first Pentecost, everyone who heard about the new outpouring of God’s love asked what had to be done to receive it, the answer was simple, they had to repent. There is no word in Hebrew or Aramaic for someone who has repented but only for someone who is repenting. It is the word used to describe our ongoing and never-ending turning and opening to God to receive his loving of us. His love never stops, but when our love stops, when we stop turning and opening ourselves to receive his love, then his love stops, not loving us, but entering into us to draw us up and into himself. This loving has to be learned and all the great saints spent years learning to love God in what St Angela of Foligno called the school of Divine love which is prayer. That is what St Paul was doing in his “noviciate” as the other apostles were doing the same in their “noviciate” in Jerusalem.
The other Apostles had more than a head start for they came to know and love Christ personally. St Paul would have been introduced to the new form of meditation and the love generated there would lead him into contemplative prayer where like every serious searcher in mystical prayer, his love would be refined and purified for the union for which he yearned. After his conversion in AD 34 and after initial first fervour, he would have spent the majority of his time in solitude in what later came to be called the Dark Night of the Soul where in prayer he would have to learn to carry his daily cross as he underwent a profound spiritual purification, as would the other Apostles. This intensive period of purification when he also received the spiritual help and strength to share the wisdom in contemplation with others lasted until about AD 45. His first apostolic journey for which he had now been prepared began in AD 47.
What must have happened in those crucial formative years for St Paul, is confirmed by St Paul himself ten years later when he writes in his second letter to the Corinthians (2 Corinthians 12:2) of visions, revelations, and ecstasies that he received fourteen years before. He was referring to his purification in which God had been preparing him in his “noviciate” for the apostolic life upon which he had more recently embarked. The graces he referred to could not have been received, nor could he have received the wisdom that he imparted to others, without a long sojourn in the profound mystical purification that some people have wrongly thought was an invention of later medieval mystics. Because they do not speak in the language later developed by future mystics, they think that mystical theology was unknown to the first Christians, when in fact it reached its high point in the mystical body of Christ in whose contemplation they shared. This is the very essence of true mystical contemplation. Tragically it subsequently receded, never to rise to such heights again.
The wisdom contained in the New Testament could not have been imparted, except to those who had been purified to receive it by the Holy Spirit, like St Paul. The same could be said for the wisdom contained in the writings of the great Fathers of the Church, and for the exemplary lives and deaths of hundreds of thousands of the ordinary faithful who took up their daily cross to follow Christ. It was from Christ that they received in return a quality of supra human loving that first amazed and then awestruck their pagan contemporaries, especially in the way they lived and died. Read and reread the Acts of the Apostles and the Acts of the Martyrs to see what I mean. They converted hundreds of thousands from a pagan Roman world to the world over which Christ ruled.
The importance of preparation to receive and to continually receive God’s love both before and after baptism, soon inspired the first apostles to insist that in future a period of at least two years “noviciate” for spiritual preparation should precede baptism. In this period of preparation for baptism and in its immediate aftermath, personal daily prayer would have pride of place. Converts and those responsible for receiving them into the Church, must realize that conversion involves, not just a change of minds or metanoia, as the Greek word suggests, but a change of minds and hearts and of one’s whole being by a continual and ongoing repentance. It was only here that the first converts could learn to practise the first commandment which was “to love God with your whole heart and mind and with your whole body and soul, and with your whole strength”. In doing this they would be given the help and strength, not just to love God in return, but to love others as Christ loves them. That is why this book is called The Primacy of Loving. And that is why it is subtitled The Spirituality of the Heart. The word asceticism is derived from the Greek word for an athlete. Athletes spend their whole time developing the muscles of their bodies to attain their deepest desire. Spiritual Athletes spend their whole time developing the muscles of their hearts to attain their deepest desire too.
In every athlete worth their salt there is a certain impatience that induces them to speed up the journey to achieve their objective by developing the requisite muscles of their bodies. For those spiritual athletes, who are also possessed by a certain holy impatience, the Holy Spirit leads them to the spiritual gymnasium which is to contemplative prayer where the spiritual muscles of their hearts are developed, enabling them to receive the only love that can lead them to the profound Transforming Union which they desire above all else.
As my dyslexia guaranteed that I would never be remembered at school as a scholar, I decided to be remembered as an athlete instead. The coach at the local gymnasium introduced me to an infallible method of training that would guarantee my objective. It was so simple because it only depended on performing one single action, continually raising weights above my head time and time again. This single action developed all the muscles in my body simultaneously. It was only later that I came to realize that what happens to the muscles of our bodies can happen to the muscles of our hearts too. This can happen with ever greater intensity when spiritual weightlifting is practised in prayer, in the mystic way. As distractions, and temptations become stronger, they act like spiritual weights that prevent us, or at least make it more and more difficult, to keep raising our hearts to God in what St John of the Cross calls the Dark Night of the Senses. Far from hindering a person’s progress toward spiritual perfection, what appears to a novice as spiritual encumbrances, are actually as necessary to spiritual advancement, as lifting weights is to physical advancement.
St John of the Cross goes on to describe the Dark Night of the Spirit, when an even deeper purification adds to the spiritual weights that conspire to prevent mystics trying to raise and open their heart to God. Before this particular testing purification begins, God usually fortifies spiritual searchers with profound experiences of his love, as described by St Teresa of Ávila in her masterwork Interior Castle. Love has a magnetic quality that draws us toward the one who is loving us. When that person is God, his love is so powerful that it not only fills the receiver with his magnetic love, but simultaneously draws out of the one who is loved, what are called in common parlance, the demons that lurk deep down within every flawed human being. Seeing what we have never seen before rising from within the nether regions of our personalities and having to face and come to terms with the truth of what we have tried to hide from before, is far more testing than the more superficial distractions and temptations that previously weighed us down. Gradually we begin to see the sinfulness that drags us down, rising from below the surface to prevent us from continually trying to raise our hearts to God. Although the journey becomes ever more difficult, it becomes ever more rewarding if we persevere. This spiritual weightlifting not only develops the muscles of the heart but enables them to open what was once a heart of stone to the heart of God. This is how our loving enables God’s loving that endlessly pours out of his heart, to enter into our hearts and through them to be disseminated to every part of our personality.
In his famous letter written less than eighty years after Christ died, the Bishop and Martyr St Ignatius was the first to use the expression, the “Catholic Church”. This expression does not just mean that our faith can be found universally in every country on earth, but that it is universal because it is for all. It is for all because all human beings have a heart and are capable of loving. Further, St Augustine insists that our loving ultimately desires union with the source of all love, which is God, and our hearts will be restless until they come to rest in him. This is fundamental to the whole Christian Spiritual tradition. If our hearts are full of selfishness and sin we can never receive the pure selfless loving of God, in this world or in the next. A purification or a purgatory has to take place, or the union for which every human being ultimately desires simply cannot take place. The good news is that the journey onward, into, and through the mystic way, is for all. It can be undertaken by all, because there are no intellectual qualifications that could restrict this journey to a few highly intelligent members of the intelligentsia. Love and the capacity to love is open to all human beings. Aristotle may well have defined human beings as rational animals, but he then describes a human being as having a capacity for love. It is this capacity for love that will determine our degree of happiness in this world and in the next. The place where this capacity for love is filled to overflowing is in the mystic way where everything that reduces that capacity is removed from the human heart, as rubble is removed from a bucket before it can be filled with spring water.
Although the ability to attain high intellectual achievement, or any form of secular achievement is not an obstacle to developing what Christ calls the “one thing necessary”, it can seriously divert the best of us. Enough has now been said to encourage the reader to press on beyond first enthusiasm into the way of purification. If the spiritual journey could be depicted in a graph, first enthusiasm would be but five per cent of the journey, while ninety-five per cent is taken up with the simple, I did not say easy, task of being purified in the Dark Night. This is the place where the great saints, the mystics and the prophets were formed in the past as they will be once again in the present. The Catholic metaphysical poet Francis Thompson said that we are all called to become geniuses, because spiritual geniuses are saints who are formed by the Holy Spirit in the mystic way. Here, their work, which is nothing other than the re-creation of themselves into the image and likeness of Christ, involves five per cent inspiration and ninety-five per cent perspiration.
This essay is chapter thirty-two of The Primacy of Loving and is published here by gracious permission of the author.
The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.
The featured image is “The Strength Test” (1898), by Franz Defregger, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.