Retreat Belmont Abbey 3. The Signs and the Analogy brought to Completion

The Signs and the Analogy brought to Completion

Let me now continue by trying to explain; maybe you are all totally in the dark, at least a little more clearly, precisely what I’m trying to say in the context of the analogy that I’ve developed.

When a person in religious life or outside religious life goes through their first fervour, of course, they do tend to have a rather accentuated idea of their spiritual development.

They feel that God is especially choosing and working through them and leading them to guide others.

If you want to see all the faults and failings you see in the beginner, read the first nine chapters of St John of the Cross in his book, The Dark Night of the Soul.

He does not begin with first fervour. He assumes that people have gone through that. He is writing for Carmelites, most particularly, and he’s trying to tell them what happens when first fervour ends, and why it has to end.

The reason is that behind all the fizz and the pop of first fervour was still the selfish old me underneath.

That’s not changed at all. Just as in the marital analogy with the romantic love and the wonderful feelings, the emotions, and the passions which were generated there, didn’t change the partners.

That comes later, if they are prepared to go on giving when they do not receive in return.  If they’re prepared to learn pure self-sacrificial love, they learn to become selfless.  

Let me give you a principle, and the principle is this. Unlike things cannot be united together, it is impossible.

Now look at my open palm. Let that represent the love of God, which is at all times being poured out.

Look at my other hand. Look at my clenched fist. See? That’s how we begin. We’re all locked up in ourselves.

That’s what the traditional doctrine of original sin is telling us that we are thoroughly self-centred through and through.

Now, our journey is to union with God. But unlike things cannot be united. God’s love has been sent. God’s love, whom we call the Holy spirit, has been sent to open us, to create a likeness within us to God so that union can take place. In a nutshell, Well, that is the whole of the spiritual life.

It is a journey from selflessness into the selfless one in and through Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy spirit.

Hence, the spiritual life. So though we happen to have wonderful feelings in prayer, and everything has come to a relative high when we feel close to God, we have been deceived by our feelings.

Because we feel the presence of God does not mean the presence of God is there any more than when we’re in darkness. Feelings can be deceptive. So as I explained in the analogy, through my parents, thanks to the advice given by Dom Aidan, they learned selfless loving by going on giving when they didn’t feel, again and again.

They came through in the end, mutually supporting one another. Now, as I suggested today, it is commonplace for our contemporaries when this happens to say, “Well, love has come to an end, hasn’t it?”

Because love has been merely associated with the sexual with feelings, and therefore they go from one wife to another, or if they don’t even bother to get married, one body, looks for another body to turn them on, to give them good feelings, because that is the nature of love?

They do not know the nature of true love, nor can we teach them the nature of true love, nor have we any right to point the finger if, when in prayer beyond first beginnings, we are led into this spiritual limbo land, we immediately cut and run and pack up prayer.

This is the time now when we must go on giving selflessly as best we can. If for instance, many of you may have been or are marriage counsellors and if you’re counselling somebody in marriage, you’ve got to know where they are, haven’t you?

You’ve got to know whether they’re just married. Is it the beginning? Have they had children, seven-year-itch?

Are they at the empty nest syndrome stage or whatever. You’ve got to talk and discuss this with them. You’ve got to make a diagnosis.

Is any doctor to make a diagnosis before you can offer the help that is appropriate? Now, exactly the same thing happens in the spiritual life. If a person, therefore, comes to you and says,

Oh, I need help with my prayer life, you’ve got to examine them, you’ve got to talk to them. You’ve got to make a diagnosis in order to offer the correct means of going forward for them at this particular point in their spiritual life.

You go to the doctor, “Morning, doctor. I’ve got awful pain in my eyes”.

“Sit down. I happen to have these pink pills this morning. They’re wonderful. Take them three times a day and come back to see me in a fortnight”. The next person limps in.

“Oh, doctor, I’ve got this arthritis in my knee”. “Sit down, I’ve got these pink pills. They arrived this morning. Take these pink pills three times a day and you’ll be feeling as right as rain”.

What do you know about that doctor? That doctor is a quack. Why? Because they’ve not spoken to you. They’ve not made a diagnosis.

They’ve not examined you. They’re handing out pink pills. Now, you’re all laughing, but people are doing this in the spiritual life all the time. People who have their own particular method of prayer or way, “Say this word and repeat it over and over again, and you’ll have contemplation”.

Bing in five minutes.. Now, believe me, this is nonsense. Perhaps in saying this, and the way I’m saying it is not quite right because I could hurt people who have come across means and methods of using words and mantras and so on and so forth, which they have found helpful and useful.

By all means, they can be very helpful and useful as a form of countdown, as a form of mental yoga, to create inner states of peace and tranquilly.

In the National health, they’re using similar sorts of methods to help people with anxiety and tension, to help them to quiet down.

Now, by all means, by using certain methods and techniques, it is quite possible, certainly possible, to help people to attain relatively peaceful states of mind by using what the Eastern mystics called mantras.

The point I yet again reiterate is that there are no man-made methods and techniques, St Teresa of Ávila is adamant about this.

There are no manmade methods and techniques that lead to contemplation. It is God’s gift.

You can’t say, I’m going to have contemplation today. We’ll see how the misunderstanding of East and West comes when later I begin to talk about methods of prayer at this particular point, used by the Desert Fathers and in the Cloud of Unknowing, for instance, to help a person to journey on at this particular state.

It seems very similar to the mantras used by Eastern mystics, but there’s a very important difference. One of them should be quite evident from the word go.

We are not Buddhists, we are Christians. We believe in Christ. Our first way in which you teach a person to pray is to lead them to the person of Christ, to the humanity of Christ, not to bypass it by methods and techniques that will give inner peace of mind. You begin by going to the person of Christ, getting to know him, getting to love him.

That’s where it all begins. This first fervour and first enthusiasm is as important in the spiritual life as it is in the marital life.

Those emotions, those feelings, those passions are important to cement each other together to begin with.

It is in the memory of that, in the strength of what one gives and receives at these moments that helps people like my mum and dad to continue giving selflessly in those dark times by what has gone before.

Exactly the same happens in the spiritual life. But I’ve not completed that.

I’ll come back to this theme again. For the moment, I want to continue by reminding you, therefore, what has happened.

That now, precisely because early prayer has been successful, our hearts have become sensitive to the action of God.

We experience the pull of God because God’s love is here now. It is around us, it surrounds us, it is in us at all times.

It is just we that are not sensitive to it. So prayer is making us sensitive. Once we become sensitive, we feel the pull.

It begins to draw us. But to begin with, that pull is so delicate that we experience hardly anything.

If a person perseveres now and does not run away, they will probably say that although they don’t get anything out of prayer anymore, which is dark and full of distractions, they know that without it, they would be diminished.

“I know that I need it in some way. I know that something is being given me. I know some strength is there”.

If they persevere further, gradually, they begin to experience the love of God, again, very delicately, to begin with, so that it does become experiential. But for the moment, it all seems to be dark and dry, dry limbo land.

Now, let me now give you the traditional signs given by the great Christian mystics. The traditional signs are to be found in St John of the Cross.

There are three there or a four. But in his works as a whole, there are further signs that are implicit.

The first I mentioned would be in The Ascent of Mount Carmel, Book 1, Chapter 13, and The Dark Night of the Soul, Book 1, Chapter 9.

Those signs are preceded by the faults and failings that St John said, you find in beginners, the feeling that they’ve attained the heights. Pride and arrogance seeps in.

They think they’re the great gurus, and they have to guide other people. Therefore, he keeps saying, whenever he enumerates these signs, that they must be led into the night to be purified. Why?

Because yet again, the principle, unlike things cannot be united together. It cannot be. We are beginning, this is the beginning, to use another word, of purgatory on Earth, because that’s what purgatory is.

It is the place when we are purified for union with God. A saint is somebody who has completed this purification on Earth, so that the moment they die, union with God takes place immediately.

There’s nothing to prevent it. Those of us who have not yet passed through purification by the time we die, have to go to purgatory to be purified in preparation for union with God.

To me, this seems utter common sense. I can understand people having problems about hell and Hellfire but I can’t see problems about purification: unlike things cannot be united.

How can we have the arrogance to believe that we can be united with God unless a likeness is created within us to facilitate that union?

We are created in the image of God, and the Holy spirit has been sent to recreate us in his likeness.

That’s what the spiritual life is about, creating that likeness so that union can take place between us and between God.

That purification now begins at the onset of the mystic way. Those of you who think that the mystic way begins with ecstasies and bilocations and all sorts of wonderful phenomena, I’ve got good news for you.

This is why many people are put off, thinking they’re on the wrong path to begin with. It doesn’t begin that way at all. It begins by being placed in the strange limbo land, Saint John of the Cross calls the  Night of the Senses because the senses, the imaginations and the feelings, the emotions which were alive before are dead now.

It’s dark night to what was bright light to the senses in first fervour. Now it’s dark night of the senses. Other people call it the wilderness, the darkness, the desert, because now we’re pitched into a spiritual desert.

Cardinal, Hume, in his book Searching for God, called it the prayer of incompetence, because the person who thought they were competent at prayer before suddenly discovers they’re not competent at all.

Saint Catherine of Siena calls it the House of Self-knowledge, because as we shall see, as a person journeys on, you begin to see yourself as you really are.

The perfect psychiatrist to whom we must all go is the Holy spirit. He is the perfect psychiatrist. Why?

Because he is both truth and love at the same time. There used to be a psychological theory of analysis which went something like this, that a person’s problems that are preventing their normal behaviour are to be found deep down in the unconscious.

If we can only get down to the unconscious, bring them to the conscience and show them the truth, that will facilitate their therapeutic cure.

Not so. I think it was Rogers who showed that  truth alone is not enough. Love is necessary. His studies revealed that where the therapist showed a love and a care and compassion, it was in the process of doing this that made the person feel worthwhile or worthy or lovable that affected the clinical cure.

This is why I say the Holy spirit is the perfect psychiatrist, not just to cure us of the psychiatric abnormalities, but of sin and selfishness and greed and the seven deadly sins, the whole lot that are down there that will gradually be brought up and purified. He will show us ourselves as we really are and make us into what he wants us to become. That is beginning now.

The house of self-knowledge. The author of,  The Cloud of Unknowing, says it is as if there is a cloud ‘placed betwixt thee and thy creator’.

In other words, when we go to prayer now, we seem unable to picture God as before. It is as if God is behind a cloud. We know by naked faith, to quote St John of the Cross again, that He is there, but we don’t feel anything, nor do we see anything.

If you’ve ever read the prayer of St Thérèse of Lisieux, when she was asked to describe what her prayer was like, she said, “I know God is there behind the clouds. I know that the sun is there as I know God is there, but I do not see or feel or experience him”.

This is the greatness of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. Her big sister had ecstasies and raptures. No doubt about it, and we’ll come to that, and I’ll explain the meaning and the importance of these later. But in her short life, there’s no evidence that Saint Thérèse of Lisieux had anything of that sort at all.

That’s why she’s such a good example to us, that she now was in the process of journeying on now in that house of self-knowledge, looking up only at the cloud of unknowing.

And yet this prayer in itself, without going any further, was sufficient not only to change her, but to make the Church canonise her and set her up as the patroness of the missions, because that prayer went outward.

The prayer of pure selfless loving is itself terribly powerful. Why is there this tradition of praying to the Holy souls in purgatory.

Why? Because in their suffering, their prayer, we believe, is powerful. And so our prayer at this moment, though we are getting nothing out of it, can be not only powerful as It is changing us, making us selfless, but it can change other people, too, and reach out to other people.

God’s love reaches out to other people through us more potently and more powerfully than ever before.

Now, what are the signs that we should look for? Because let’s face it, the best of us at any particular point in our spiritual journey,  have distractions and dryness and aridity.

Does this mean we’re in the Dark Night and mystic way or whatever? No, not necessarily at all. Therefore, let me return then to these signs. I give 10 of them.

If this is a doctor making a diagnosis, a spiritual doctor or a spiritual director, the First Sign would be. Has this person already been through some form of first fervour?

This will differ because with the best will in the world, some are more imaginative, some are more emotional, some are more phlegmatic than others. But a decision has to be made.

This could have happened, incidentally, 30 years ago. And since then, they’ve been rather floundering, not knowing where to go on the edge of the night.

But as nobody told them this and helped them to go forward, they’ve been left in this limbo land.

And there’s no going back because they can’t. So it’s important to verify whether or not they have  been through first fervour. Many religious, when I was giving retreats, went through it in their noviciate or immediately afterwards.

Then it was out learning to be teachers, to be nurses and qualifications, so forth, and then out on the apostolate. Unfortunately, the time wasn’t there.

As somebody once said to me, your teaching on prayer is, ‘for the birds’. We haven’t got time for all this. We’re too busy doing our work.

The reason why this has happened to religious life is because they had no time for prayer. Sorry, that’s the reason. Don’t tell me if there was time for prayer. closeness to God, what has happened would have happened. It would not have happened. It’s quite simple. That is the one sole reason.

The historical reasons why this has happened, particularly since the Renaissance, was because of heresies that swept the Church, like Quietism. And what Quietism said was that all you have to do is to place yourself before God, gently and quietly, and do nothing at all.

If and when God wants to give you contemplation, he will. Your job is to wait doing absolutely nothing. And by absolutely nothing, they meant not even fighting against distractions or temptations that came.

They didn’t come from you, so let them wander. Molinos was condemned on over 80 counts of gross indecency by Rome. So you could imagine now how everyone came down on anything that seemed like Quietism.

It began to spread again in France with Madame Guyon, and  La Combe. Again, the church comes down on it.

Quite rightly after someone like Molinos had been deceiving people, with a heinous heresy. And so what happens is St. Teresa of Avila  and St. John of the Cross immediately come under suspicion. Don’t read them. They’re dangerous.

She talks about the prayer of Recollection, prayer of Quiet, stillness.

No, no, no. Get busy. Do a job. Go and sweep the corridor. Do something. Keep busy. At all counts, keep busy. But you mustn’t be still and quiet.

It can lead to Quietism. And so this terrible heresy has affected the church ever since, most particularly in religious life, where it’s had a devastating effect.

In my opinion,  the single most reason for the demise of religious life is the lack of prayer. Why? Because a human being cannot live without love.

You may be ordained, you may take vows, but you can’t live without love and the experience of being loved. And as you’re saying no to the sacrament of love, if you’re not taught how to journey on and experience the love of God through prayer, I’m sorry, your humanity will be diminished.

Psychological effects will begin to take place, and you will begin to look for the counterfeit of love. Look what we’ve been reading in the newspapers over the last 10, 20 years and been scandalised by.

This is because people, religious priests, have not been taught how to pray, to experience the love of God.

If you’re not doing that, if you don’t have that fulfilment and that completion in your religious life, you’re going to look for the counterfeit. All this is coming from this heinous heresy of Quietism.

Now, St John of the Cross and St Teresa of Avila are, of course, doctors of the Church.  But they were only made so in the last century, in the 1930s.

No one dared do that before. It could be seen as sanctioning Quietism. If you go to St John of the Cross and you go backwards to St Benedict, the great mystics are legion.

Go from them to the present day, and there are hardly any. There are some, but there are very few. Because the emphasis has not been on ‘being’.

St. Thomas Aquinas said, Primo Esse, firstly be, day in day out, and we reversed it, first act, and then you become.

Do you see? It’s about being. It’s about experiencing the love of God that must come first. St. Thomas Aquinas summed up the whole first great apostolic movement in the Church, which was the Mendicant movement, by Francis and Dominic.

People said, Well, what are you doing? We’ve never seen this before. People dress like monks, and you’re going in the streets and the highways and the byways. What are you about?

They came under great criticism from William of Saint Amour in Paris, who said, Get back to your monasteries. What are you about?

St. Thomas Aquinas, coined that famous phrase, Contemplare et contemplata aliis tradere Our first job is to contemplate and then share the fruits of contemplation with other people.

In other words, our job is firstly to come to know and experience the love of God, then to share it with other people.

This is why if you go this day to Franciscan Italy and you walk up the Holy Valley from, let’s say, Rieti, and you walk to Assisi, you see the friar is there amongst the town people.

But cast your eyes upwards and you’ll see dotted all along the mountain sides, Franciscan hermitages, Fonte Columbo, Greccio, La Foresta, Poggio Bustoni, further up La Verna, Carceri, Celle.

These were the hermitages, where the Friars would first go to pray, and then communicate what they had received. I was talking about San Bernardino of Siena, one of the greatest preachers the church has ever met.

What people do not know is that he spent 17 years in solitude in the hermitages before he had the cheek to come down and preach to other people. Now, this is what we need today in the religious life, in the lay life, because I’ll tell you, it all begins in families.

One thing every saint has in common is a mum and dad from whom they first receive the love of God.

Francis may have later rejected some of the standards of his parents, but he did not reject the love he first received there, the pure selfless love, because wherever there is love, there is God.

This is St. John, isn’t it? Wherever there is love, pure selfless love, then there is God. This is why marital love is so important, where they learn selfless Loving because that overflows onto the children and makes them what God wants them to become.

That’s the creche in which saints are formed. The physical, flesh-to-flesh love that is experienced in the family.

That gives them the inner security to go on and journey on. And believe me, this is a time in the spiritual life when you need that background of love to enable you to journey on in this strange limbo land.

So therefore, the first sign is that a person has been through their first fervour, maybe many, many years ago.

Then, secondly, whenever they go to prayer, there is a deep desire for God. The desire is for God now, not for Jesus Christ, who is the centre of their meditation, their reading of the scripture, just for God.

Not because the humanity has disappeared, but once again, remember the analogy I gave you, because now they have been taken up into Christ.

It’s rather like looking at a crucifix on the wall. We gaze at the crucifix to begin with, and we pray to Christ on the cross.

Then all of a sudden, we are taken up into him and into his offering. And you say, Well, where’s Jesus now? You are in him.

You are being taken up not only into his life, but into his self-sacrificial action. You are being asked that your heart beats with His and you become as one in this strange new prayer, which is mystical.

The word mystic means mystery, and it means hidden. Don’t be afraid of it.

It just means interior and hidden. So if you were really put on the spot now at the beginning of the mystic way and asked, “Who is it you really desire more than anything else”? You will say, “I just desire God”.

Perhaps you can’t picture God in any way or it doesn’t mean anything to you. You just say God, God alone.

The third  sign is that it is impossible to concentrate in prayer as you could before. Why? Because your heart is drawn elsewhere and you can’t concentrate.

So you lose the power that your will had over your reason, your intelligence, your memory, which it marshalled before in the process of early prayer.

Does that make sense to you? It has lost its power because it’s drawn Godward.

Then the fourth sign is that the sensual faculties can’t function as they could before. They can’t picture Jesus, who was the centre of their adolescent prayer. The desire then is only directed to God and to God alone.

The fifth sign is that the lack of concentration inside of prayer begins to affect a person outside of prayer, too. You begin to moon around and become rather scatty and forgetful, not knowing what’s happening.

It’s like when you fall in love with somebody, all you can do is to think of that person, can’t you? You’re just drawn to that person and you forget other things. Is he in love, mooning around, is he in love? A similar thing happens now.

That lack of concentration experienced inside of prayer begins to affect a person outside of prayer. So they become  dreamy and forgetful.

Even the meditations and the scriptures that moved them, those poems that were so exciting and used to stimulate their prayer before, don’t seem to touch them. They leave them dry now.

The sixth sign is that they seem to be suffering from a moral decline. So that this makes you say, Well, what’s the point of going on now? I’m not going forward. I’m morally going backwards.

“I’m becoming worse than I was before. How can you tell me this is the spiritual life? This doesn’t make sense at all”

It’s not that you’re going backwards at all. It’s just that you’re seeing what you always were but laid bare. That’s all that is happening.

The seventh sign is that temptations now begin to rise. This is only if you persevere in prayer. If you’re running away, you won’t experience any of this. But if you persevere, temptations will rise.

Now, the first of the temptations is always the same. It’s, I am wasting my time. It is pointless. I could be doing something far more valuable, doing the garden, shopping.

But there’s nothing more important than learning to love, remember. And this is what you’re doing now. Nothing more important.

Then, of course, you experience  sensual feelings, a bigger glass or a larger helping.

Particularly for the young, strong sexual temptations can become very, very powerful now. Because you see, you’re not getting feelings anywhere.

You’re not getting any fulfilment anywhere. And so you begin to look at it in the sensual and the sexual and so on. This is what St John of the Cross means when he talks about the Night of the Senses. The senses are in a dark night now.

Now, the eighth sign, surprise, surprise, is depression. I mean, who wouldn’t get depressed? Not necessarily acute or chronic depression.

That’ll come later. Just common garden depression. We are  human beings. We like to achieve and get there. Now, all of a sudden, we begin to get depressed. Now you’re following all the directives when you were praying well before; you’re pushing on, and all you’re getting is distractions and temptations.

It’s dark, you’re getting nowhere, except for that pull for God. You seem to be going morally backwards, so what is the point of it all?

And so depression, therefore, begins to set in because the old man or the old woman is dying and being put to death in you.

Have you ever come across the five stages of dying by the Psychiatrist, Dr Kübler-Ross? 

The first stage, which an individual may undergo when they’re told  they are dying, or if a friend dies is Denial. “I’m very sorry, we can only give you two more months”. You don’t want to know. You’re in denial for a long time.

Then after denial comes Anger. Why has God done this to me? The so-called God of love? I’ve done my best. I’ve lived a decent Christian life. Why has this happened to me? Why to my mum? Why to my brother and sister? Why?

 The next stage is Bargaining. You begin to bargain with God. If I get better, I’ll serve you. I’ll be a better person, so forth. If, if, please. This doesn’t actually happen in the spiritual life. Because you can run away.

I’m using the analogy for spiritual dying. First of all, you don’t believe it. This is not me. I don’t believe it.

If you really keep giving time for prayer, regularly, come hell or high water, you’ll get very angry because you seem to be getting nowhere at all and you think you should be getting somewhere.

So anger takes over. But bargaining doesn’t because you can run away. At any moment, you can run away and everything stops. Everything I’m talking about stops.

To complete what Kübler-Ross says happens next is; if you were not to run away and continue, gradually comes Depression.

That’s the next stage. You’re depressed because you’ve been angry, you can’t get rid of it, you’ve bargained, you can’t get rid of it. And so depression.

 And then gradually, if you persevere, becomes Acceptance and with it peace. The Same thing happens in the spiritual life. And now this is the beginning. You’ve accepted your death and you want to persevere.

I just want to emphasise the dark side of things before light. Because God purifies a person by darkness and by light.

But the first experience is darkness, to see if you really love God. Has your prayer been all about cupboard loving so far?

In some way, you have to demonstrate to God, by the way you persevere when you get nothing, that you are in it for God and not for what you get out of him.

The ninth sign, therefore, is that despite everything, if a person perseveres, come what may, all these negative features will get progressively worse.

Finally, the tenth sign is that you’re convinced you are on the wrong path. You try to tell your spiritual director that they’re wrong too.

Now, let me throw a little light before I complete this morning’s talk, else half of you won’t be here for this evening’s talk.

Now, I’m fortifying you with the truth, because one of the reasons why people give up, is they do not know that this is going to happen. When it happens, they’re convinced they’re on the wrong way and they run for away.  

Now, if we’re going to have saints for the future, there will be the people who persevere at this particular point by learning selflessness, repentance, and learning to offer themselves.

This is your sacrificial priesthood now when you are sharing in the sacrificial priesthood of Christ in his death, in his dying.

You must enter into his kenosis, his self-emptying, if you want to experience the Pleroma. Read The Imitation of Christ. All the great spiritual books tell you the same.

But when it comes to the reality, we don’t want to know. We put crucifixes on our wall  to remind us of this great truth. And yet we are scandalised by it.

The Greeks want wisdom. The Jews want signs. “I preach you Christ and Him crucified”. And yet when we hear it, we’re scandalised by it.

If a person perseveres in God’s good time and not ours, the first time we begin to become aware that God is in this in some way is that we know without this strange prayer where we seem to get nowhere, we’d be diminished, we’d be the lesser for it. Now, gradually, all of a sudden, as time goes on, we become aware of a deep recollectedness in God that comes to envelop a person.

If St John of the Cross is the doctor of the Night, St Therese of Avila is the doctor of the Light, particularly in her masterwork, Interior Castle.

Now, the first phase is what she calls the Prayer of Recollection. Do you remember me saying my father used the words height and depth?

Well, this is rather what he meant by depth now. Gradually, there’s a very subtle experience of the presence of God that draws us more deeply into prayer.

Now we become aware that there is someone there who didn’t seem to be there before.

Now this can come and go. So that at one day this presence is there, the next day it may not be.. We’ve got to go to prayer, whether it’s there or not.

If you only go to prayer looking at your watch and saying, “What time is the resurrection due”? You will get nowhere.

Because the whole point of it is that you are going for the love of God, not for what you get out of him. And this must be physically demonstrated by the time you give.

That prayer is valuable for you and for the world and for others you pray for. Hence the example of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux that I gave you earlier. How can I describe this experience?

Many of you have already had it. Many years ago, because it is one with the experience of the natural mystics. If you read, for instance, the great romantic poets, for instance, Wordsworth, Coleridge, they are trying to describe the numinous they experience through creation.

Maybe we can’t write poetry like them, but we’ve had that experience ourselves in the past, possibly by the seaside, gazing at the sun setting behind the hills.

There’s the gentle lapping of the sea against the shingles, the sound of the curlew and the marsh behind us. And all of a sudden, we are drawn into a deep interior recollectedness.

It is an experience of God speaking to us through his creation. In the Old Testament, the word Dabar signifies that God creates by speaking, and his words become things.

So everything, whether it is a blade of grass or a tree or a river or a mountain, is a word of God, made mountain, made tree, made man, made woman. That’s why God speaks to us through creation.

This is the natural mystical experience that the poets have. Now, once again, they’re not superior to us in that they have the experience and we don’t. We have these experiences too, but they can put it into poetry far better than we can.

You can have the same experience through music. I remember years ago going to see Aida at Covent Garden, and after the scene when the Grand March, came to a dramatic climax, I was drawn into a profound oneness within myself, pulled into myself by the music.

I didn’t want to go out with everybody else into the crush bar and start talking about the relative prose and the cons of the tenor, or was he throaty, or was he miscast here, I wanted to be transported back into my own room to be still to savour what I had received, because  art, particularly music, mirrors creation.

Years ago, I was in Africa, and I was talking to something like 200 African sisters. I was explaining exactly what I was explaining to you, and nobody moved at all. I thought, “They don’t know what I’m talking about.”

I said, “Look, I’m sorry, you’re not with me”. And without looking right or left, they all nodded.  They knew exactly what I was talking about.

They wanted me to get on and explain what it meant. They’d all had this experience, the experience of God through creation. Now, remember that experience you had. It was fleeting.

It was passing. Why? Because it depended upon certain exterior stimuli with an inner state of mind for you to have experience, and therefore it tends to be fleeting.

But now in prayer beyond beginnings, when this prayer of recollection begins, it is exactly that experience. Except gradually, as you persevere in prayer, it remains and it sustains you. And this becomes your daily prayer.

And this is gift of God. It can come and can go, but if you persevere, it becomes regular.

It not only helps and sustains you inside of prayer, but outside of prayer too.

It does not mean that there are no distractions whatsoever, for there are still some distractions that are going on. But it doesn’t prevent this prayer from continuing and gives great strength.

That’s what Saint Teresa of Avila calls the Prayer of Recollection. Then after that, this leads on to what she calls the Prayer of Quiet.

As I’m going to develop this theme of how the experience becomes stronger and stronger and more and more vibrant, it is exactly the same experience, merely becoming more intense.

It’s not a different experience it’s the same becoming more intense. The time comes when that experience of Recollection becomes so strong that she calls it Prayer of Quiet.

You’re so enveloped now in the experience of the presence of God that it’s as if there were an upstairs and downstairs in your mind.

In the upstairs in your mind, on the first floor, you are riveted upon God and in the experience of God’s love now beginning to get in, because a preliminary purification has taken place through you cooperating with the Holy spirit in acting selflessly.

This is now the Prayer of Quiet. Downstairs, there can still be many distractions and movements going on but not as powerful as before.

Then the next experience  can become so powerful, usually with an inner lifting. You know what a lift is like when you feel that movement in your stomach when the lift suddenly shoots up.

Well, it’s rather like that, but inside your head, as you’re lifted up to a high degree now of intensity in the same experience to what Saint Teresa of Avila calls Full Union.

Now, for the first time, there are no distractions at all in your prayer because the engrossment in God is so profound and so intense that there are no distractions.

You can only, with the greatest difficulty, move from the spot, and you don’t want to anyway. Now, you know what the next stage is because you experience it at the time.

If this becomes any more intense, you crack up. And that’s what happens. Ecstasy takes place. This is why St. Teresa said, The next phase, when the experience becomes so intense that we can’t contain it.

It’s actually a sign of weakness, not of strength. We can’t yet contain the love of God without oblivion taking place.

This is not the ultimate in prayer. This is all part of the purification because all that I’m describing can be taken away one day and you’re back in distractions again in darkness aridity, and temptations.

It can come and go, not when you choose, but when God chooses. This is why you get tremendous humility with the saints, because from the strength that they receive, they’re capable of heroic acts of virtue, of compassion and kindness.

They know that take that experience of the love of God away, and they’re nothing and they know that.

Two years before he died, a banker from Milan was saying to Padre Pio, How are you, Padre? He said, “I’ll be dead in a couple of weeks, and I’m terrified.”.

“You’re terrified of death? You’re frightened of death? You’ve built a big hospital, you’ve cured and healed, read people’s heart, all that you’ve done”.

He said, “I’m not a fool. I know these things have been done through me, but it’s God who’s been doing them. Take him away and I can do nothing. And I am nothing”.

So this is why you get this tremendous humility with sanctity. Humility does not come – Is my novice master listening? – Humility does not come by humiliating people.

That was the old idea in the noviciate. Sit on people, make them small, humiliate them, and they become humble.

I’m sorry. Might make them bitter and angry, but it does not make them humble. What makes you humble is experiencing the love of someone, possessing you, realising that you are lovable, realising without that love, you are nothing.

You can do nothing and achieve nothing. “Without me, you’ve no  power to do anything”. Now, that is realised in prayer beyond beginnings.

Now, the final penultimate stage. I’m really only doing this for your education.

Believe me, just so we see the overall journey, because it’s important for theological reasons that I do this.

The next stage is what are called Spiritual Betrothals.

In other words, the completion of the spiritual life is what St. Teresa calls the Mystical Marriage. After the purification, this oneness can take place.

Now, all these various phases in the spiritual journey that I’ve described, plus the Spiritual Betrothals, are all part of purification. One moment with light, one moment in darkness.

Now, when the Spiritual Marriage takes place, when all sin and selfishness is taken away, union can take place immediately. Those are the people who are the great saints, like a Padre Pio, who was one of the greatest saints that ever lived.

Now, he can do so much in such a short time, instantly, because he is filled with the love of God. It’s not so much what they say, it’s what they are.

Forty Thousand people a week were pouring into Ars in the middle of the nineteenth century  to hear St John Vianney, the Curé de Ars preach.

Now, if you’ve ever come across any of his sermons, they read like an anthology of pious clichés. “My little children, you have a loving father who loves you. You must love him in return”.

Simple to the point of being simplistic. But when he said it, he spoke with such power that people instantly changed their lives, because in him they met Christ.

In the Curé d’Ars, in Padre Pio, it is Christ they met  made flesh and blood again in them. They came to the transforming union or the mystical marriage.

Before that takes place, the Betrothals happen just for brief moments. It’s like the experience of a thaw taking place. You know when your hands have become numb and they begin to thaw out, a feeling begins to come back.

It’s rather like this because in the night, your emotions and your feelings have been as if dead. Many mystics, some of the Rheinlanders, in  particular Eckhart and others have a disembodied mysticism, which is all about ecstasy as being the ultimate stage. It is not the ultimate stage.  

This is neo-platonic. The ultimate stage in Christian spirituality is when we are possessed by the love of God, not just in our heads, in our minds, but in our bodies.

If you want to know where we’re going, our destination, you look at Jesus on Easter Day in his Glorification.

He’s come to penetrate every part of us with his love. This is what happens in the mystical marriage, therefore.

A person is totally penetrated by the love of God in their minds, in their hearts, and in their whole personalities.

The Greek fathers used to talk about theosis, or the Latin fathers divinisation which now takes place as the completion, the high point of the mystic way.

This is the point where I’m going to end now. I have only taken you thus far so that you see the whole picture, not because we are going to have problems with the spiritual betrothals or with ecstasy.

But I want to show you the overall journey, namely to show that our destination is to be fitted into the Christ of Easter day in our bodies as well as our souls, not just with our minds and hearts, but with every single part of us.

That is Christianity, and that is where we are going. He is our destination point to be fitted once again into Him in such a way that in Him we are open to receive the love of the Father.

This is when you see  authentic Christian mystics. When it comes to this point, it is always Trinitarian, always Trinitarian, because they actually experience the presence of God in their bodies, uniting them in Christ and lifting them up into this vortex of life that revolves between the Father and the Son.

So the ultimate experience, therefore, is a foretaste on this Earth of what is for all of us, namely to be taken up into the Trinitarian love that endlessly revolves between the Father and between the Son.

Everybody here, please don’t say, Well, this is all very interesting, but it is not for me. I tell you, it is for everyone because we are all called to union with God.

If we have not cooperated in this life in such a way that we’ve been purified here, it will have to happen after life in purgatory. For once again and for the last time, the principle is quite simple.

Unlike things cannot be united The prayer journey, the mystic way, is merely the way in which God prepares us for pure and perfect union with Him.