In this book I am not just trying to view God’s Plan, but our personal and unique part in it. God can only enable us to participate in his plan to the degree to which we are prepared to respond to his call as the Apostles did, and those who radically chose to follow him later. If we are prepared to give our all, so is God. Just as I had no idea what God’s plan was for me at the beginning of my journey, nor have you. All you must do is to love him in such a way that your love becomes so purified as you journey on in the mystic way, that it is able to rise to him and his love descend into you. Then the rest will be history, your history, that you could never have envisaged at the beginning of your journey. If you are prepared to go onward in an adventure of a lifetime and are not only prepared to read on but give your total attention to what is the wisdom of the great saints and mystics who have gone before you, then the future is yours. You will come to know and experience what it means and even what it feels like, when divine loving and human loving meet and mingle together as one. Only then will you be able to att ain the destiny of which you have never even dreamt. As this journey deepens to admit the love of God ever more fully, you will continually rise to become your true self, the real self that only God’s love can make of you. Then, what you never thought possible will become possible, because with God all things are possible, even the impossible. Begin your journey now by learning from the Apostles.
The first apostles were converted almost immediately when they met Jesus, but that was but the beginning of a lifetime of repentance that would redeem them permanently from the world of sin and from the self-centredness that had made sinners out of them. Re-read the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles and you will see that even the privilege of encountering the love of God in Jesus did not instantly sanctify them or absolve them from a commitment to a permanent and ongoing life of repentance. It is this ongoing and daily repentance that would gradually make them into saints. If we do not learn this then we can condemn ourselves to a life of superficiality, of nominal Catholics nodding our head to every article of the creed but never entering deeply into the One who has inspired it. I believe in everything from instant coffee to instant resurrection, instant emotions, instant miracles, instant ecstasies if you like, but instant sanctity – never. It is a long journey as it was for the first apostles despite their privileged calling. They were called by Christ and called personally just as many of us have been called, but the call and the instant conversion that we may experience does not make instant saints of us.
All committed Catholics are brought up to say their morning and evening prayers, to make their Morning Offering, to use the prayers handed down like the Lord’s own prayer, and many other prayers and devotional practices, and above all to take part in the Mass with all our hearts and minds. However, the time always comes when Christ reaches out to us personally and calls us to a deep personal relationship with him that can change our lives. It may be through a book that is read, a Christ-like person who is met, a sermon that is heard, or even through a direct spiritual touch that is felt. Then, a new and personal relationship with Christ can begin. But beware, these special moments when God “touches” us are a call to deepen our own spiritual lives, so that one day he can use us. They are not a reward because we have been living a holy life but a call to holiness. They are not a prize for living a virtuous life but a call to live a virtuous life.
Pride can wrongly convince believers that his or her call to deepen their own personal spiritual lives is a call to start leading, guiding, and lecturing others, when they are in fact only beginners themselves. It is sad to see such people who have had an authentic conversion experience but misunderstand it. They tell the world of their privileged calling, as if they were called because of their perfect life, rather than that they have been called to live a perfect life. There are all too many self- serving self-appointed prophets today and not enough God serving sinners who seek forgiveness through repentance, in solitude and in the purification in prayer where true prophets are made. They can misguide others with the Pelagianism that is always the favoured heresy of those who think and act as if they can do for themselves, and for others what only the Holy Spirit can do. In his famous history of the early Church, Monsignor Philip Hughes shows how the first apostles continued to live in Jerusalem to deepen their spiritual lives as a preparation for the apostolic life that was to come. He further tells us that the new apostle St Paul, spent ten years, that he used as his “noviciate”, learning to practise for himself the repentance that he was going to preach to others. The time was spent in Arabia, Cilicia and his hometown of Tarsus before he set out as the apostle to the Gentiles, and even then, it was only on the insistence of Barnabas that his ten-year “noviciate” came to an end abruptly.
There are two main types of conversion. The first is the conversion of an outsider who for one reason or another, although reason may have little to do with it, feels impelled to join the Church. It is the love of Christ that calls them. These are the conversions that were naturally commonest in the early Church. Such people were therefore shown by both word and example, how to come to know and love the Christ who called them by being introduced to a new aid to prayer that came to be called meditation. As the years passed by a second type of conversion became common, the conversion of insiders, who although they were born into the Church of Catholic parents, had no deep personal relationship with Christ, but rather a general allegiance to and love for the teachings and practices of the Church. Some, however, may even have lapsed from this when a call to conversion came. They too feel called to a deeper personal relationship with Christ and if they are fortunate enough to find the spiritual help they need, they too are taught the same aid to prayer, meditation.
In order to practise this new aid to prayer which leads to mystical contemplation, the need is felt for some sort of solitude in their own homes, inside their local church or elsewhere. St Francis of Assisi spent years living as a hermit practising the repentance that he then began to preach to others whilst endlessly retiring into solitude to allow the Holy Spirit to guide him. St Catherine of Siena too, retired into a room in her own home for years until Christ summoned her. St Bernadine of Siena spent seventeen years in his hermitage before his preaching was to have a decisive effect on the world of fifteenth-century Italy and beyond. The hermitage of Fonte Colombo was but one of many built by him for his disciples.
When God called St Antony into the Desert it was to spend twenty years allowing God to change him, before he was fi t to lead and guide others. Even then he did not set himself up to teach others, it was others who sought him out to teach them. The wisdom contained in the New Testament could not have been imparted, except to those like St Paul who were purifi ed by the Holy Spirit to receive it. 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 have taken up their daily cross to follow Christ, as seen in the way they lived and died, as read in the Acts of the Apostles and the Acts of the Martyrs.
In what follows in the final part of my book I will explain in more detail what is happening when you are being led into the crèche where saints are made, and how to continue in prayer when, as St Teresa of Ávila says, “the well runs dry”. If you put your faith in the Holy Spirit and continue, come hell or high water, then you will eventually arrive at planet Paradise. But, as this planet comes ever nearer, the gravitational pull that draws you to itself, simultaneously draws out of you all the evil that can prevent you “walking and talking with God in the cool of the evening” like Adam before you. The analogy of the spaceship that was raised off the ground through the earth’s atmosphere and out of its powerful gravitational force by powerful surges of energy from its supercharged engines, represents the first part of the journey. Sometimes called first fervour or first enthusiasm, it is hardly five per cent of the journey to planet Paradise. Once the beginning of the journey is over, then the real and longest part of the journey begins. Once the fuel tanks that supplied the engines for the initial thrust have been cast away, the journey suddenly become smoother, quieter, less exciting, even monotonous.
When this goes on for weeks, months or years that are still given to prayer as before, travellers are tempted to pack up prayer because they do not seem to be going anywhere. Further to this, distractions and temptations seem more powerful and more frustrating. The temptations to give up the journey become all but irresistible, most particularly because no one to whom they turn seems to know what is happening. It is for this reason that St John of the Cross said that ninety per cent of those who have come this far give up, and myriad saints, prophets and mystics are lost to the Church. What follows is a travel guide drawn from the experiences of many thousands of Catholic mystics and saints who have preceded you. It is not my guide, but I have spent a lifetime putting it together to help you come to the place and to the person whose love, like the gravitational pull of an infinite planet, is relentlessly drawing you to your final destiny.
Most readers will have understood what I have written so far but may have difficulty understanding what I am now writing about – the practice of mystical contemplation. The reason for this is the deplorable lack of teaching on this subject in the last few centuries, for the reasons I have explained and will explain further. However, I beg those who have tried to put into practice what I have already written to press on regardless. The truth of the matter is that after initial success, what seems to be a dead end in your prayer life will tempt you to give up serious mental prayer permanently, like so many others before you.
What follows will explain why this happens and will give the traditional Catholic teaching, so long neglected, that will lead to the heights of mystical contemplation, in, with and through Christ, and to a deep experience of happiness you did not believe possible on this earth. But what is even more important is that it will prepare you to become one of the prophets, the saints and the mystics that the Church so desperately needs to bring about the radical reform that is long overdue.
It would be a terrible mistake to wait for such reform to come from the top down when history shows that it usually comes from the bottom up. It will only come about, as in the past, through ordinary lay people who give their lives over to doing extraordinary things for God. This will infallibly happen in your life, if you decide to develop an ever-deepening prayer life that will enable his love, the Holy Spirit, to renew the world through you, by renewing the Church first. This is the challenge for the reader for what follows.
Is this journey to and through contemplation absolutely necessary for our salvation in this life? To answer this question let me quote from an article by Father Alexander Rozwadowski SJ, in La Vie Spirituelle (January 1936), shortly after St John of the Cross was made a Doctor of the Church:
We do not affirm that mystical contemplation in this life is necessary for salvation, but the question is, is it necessary for sanctity. By sanctity we mean a great love of God and neighbour. The sanctity in question here is the normal prelude to life in heaven; a prelude which is either realized here on earth or in purgatory which pre-supposes that the soul is fully purified and so capable of receiving the beatific vision immediately. Finally, we say that according to St John of the Cross, infused contemplation is indeed necessary for sanctity and we even add that the perfection of the Christian life will not be possible without it, because it implies the eminent exercise of the theological virtues and the gifts of the Holy Spirit which accompany them.
Now it is time to learn how, after meditation, we are to journey on in the mystical contemplation that will enable us to receive the love of Christ more deeply than ever before, together with the infused virtues and the gifts of the Holy Spirit. May they blossom in us as they blossomed in Christ to the glory of God and for the glorification of his Church on earth “that seeing they may come to believe”.
This essay is chapter thirty-one of The Primacy of Loving and is published here by gracious permission of the author.
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The featured image is “Prayer” (1878), by William Powell Frith, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.