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The most usual entrance to contemplation is through a desert of aridity in which, although you see nothing and feel nothing and apprehend nothing and are conscious only of a certain interior suffering and anxiety,yet you are drawn and held in this darkness and dryness because it is the only place in which you can find any kind of stability and peace. As you progress, you learn to rest in this arid quietude, and the assurance of a comforting and mighty presence at the heart of this experience grows on you more and more, until you gradually realize that it is God revealing Himself to you in a light that is painful to your nature and to all its faculties, because it is infinitely above them and because its purity is at war with your own selfishness and darkness and imperfection.
(Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island)
The Christian contemplative Jean de Caussade (d. 1751) lived in a time wherein many spiritual writers warned about persons thinking they might be worthy of contemplative prayer. Indeed, this extreme caution existed into the 20th Century. De Caussade held this warning as suspect.
Carl Arico, in A Taste of Silence, describes de Caussade’s position on “conventional piety”: But against this allegation that it was dangerous to go beyond the discipline of the routine of conventional piety, with all its works and exercises, Jean de Caussade indicated that it might be dangerous not to abandon it.
De Caussade wrote, in a letter to a nun, a warning against Christians being attached to interior or bodily devotional practices:
Believe me, you have too many practices already. What is needed is rather a progressive inner simplification. Too many people identify spiritual prowess with being perpetually busy heaping meditation upon meditation, prayer upon prayer, reading upon reading instead of learning from the simple souls the great secret of knowing how, from time to time, to hold yourself back a little in peace and silence, attentive before God. (Letters)
Arico refers to a “crisis of limitation” as that point when we encounter the insufficiency of everything we have known and practiced as central to our faith Journey. This crisis prompts us to a more whole experience of God, as a child accepts the limitations of crawling and learns to walk. If a child did not become aware of the insufficiency of crawling and desire to walk, she would never put forth the effort to walk. Likewise, in the progress of the spiritual Life, awareness of insufficiency of where we have been and are is wedded with desire to advance along the Way.
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The progressive inner simplification, referred to by de Caussade, is nothing other than a moving from reliance on devotional practices, religious ideas, and good intents to the sufficiency of God Himself, God Herself. Slowly, we experience the crisis of knowing and feeling that the religious practices and ideas that filled us with delight no longer bring the same satisfaction. This opens us to turn more toward a naked, bare trust in God and allows us to learn the blessed poverty of spirit taught by Early Church Fathers and Mothers.
This does not mean devotional practices and external acts of service are abandoned in favor of passive contemplation. However, each time we enter contemplative prayer, we fast from the sweetest spiritual satisfactions procured by our actions. Over time, we learn what we first resisted: the ironical fullness of this blessed emptiness and aridity. Yes, we come to delight in release and relief from even spiritual sweetness. And, we learn that this initiation by the Inner Christ to the contemplative-being-within imbues our spiritual practices and service with a deep, loving detachment and allows us to be more the Presence of Christ for others. Therefore, the irony─the contemplative life is ironic through-and-through─is that the more we have emptied ourselves in the Presence, the more the Presence can give of Itself through us.
Likewise, as we release, in Pure Faith, the compulsion of even our sacred acts, rites, and prayers, to enter into Quietude, we find ourselves transformed to a living from and in the Spirit, whereby we are no longer driven by necessity. As the fifth century Church Father, St. Gregory of Nyssa taught, “And this is the spirit of every saint of God, not to be led by necessity” (Homilies on the Song of Songs).
Spiritual Exercise
1. What is meant by “progressive inner simplification” in the spiritual Journey?
2. Why do we tend to resist progressive inner simplification in regard to spiritual practices and ideas?
3. What is a “crisis of limitation”? Have you experienced a crisis of limitation in your spiritual Journey? Explain.
4. Do faith communities need to undergo progressive inner simplification or not as they grow together in Christ? Explain.
5. Why does contemplative prayer lead to living less driven by necessity?
Prayer
Dear Christ, guide me to your Father, my Mother, our Creator, through Grace. Calm our spirits and bodies, still our minds, now, that we might receive perfect peace and blessed rest in and with you. Amen.
Brian's book of mystical love poetry, An Ache for Union, can be ordered through major bookdealers.
Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors
The People of the
United Methodist Church
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