Some of this is repetitive, but necessary to emphasize. Like a good teacher, I review and revisit the hard parts until the students understand the passages.
The passive purgation leaves on completely in the dark, literally, the soul cannot see anything.
The ordinary "lights", such as meditations or devotions, prayers, or even the Hours, leave one dry and empty.
God is calling the soul to Himself and takes her out into the desert in order for her to see Him as He is and to love Him for Himself and not for what He can do for her.
This is real free love, the love with is not attached to anything else but God Himself.
St. John of the Cross: "God now denudes the faculties, the affections, and feelings, spiritual and sensual, interior and exterior, leaving the understanding in darkness, the will dry, the memory empty, the affections of the soul in the deepest affliction, bitterness, and distress; withholding from it the former sweetness it had in spiritual things." (2)
So many Catholics flee from this state, seeking the cookies and cake of consolations, and thereby slide back into sin and self-love. Those who follow this blog have many examples of this sliding back.
In the midst of all of this dryness, one must love in the will. One must will love. Love here is not a feeling or a sensation, but a decision. I think of Ruth, following Naomi into a new land, where she had no relatives, no status, no life. She only loved and followed love.
The sadness then experienced is very different from that which has its origin in neurasthenia, disillusions, or the contradictions of life. The chief difference is that the sadness of the passive purification of the spirit is accompanied by an ardent desire for God and perfection, by a persistent seeking after Him who alone can nourish the soul and vivify it. No longer only a sensible aridity, it is a dryness of the spiritual order, which springs, not from the deprivation of sensible consolations, but from the loss of the lights to which the soul was accustomed.
One must persist and beg God, if He is not giving the graces without this humility of begging. Seeking perfection must lead us to focus on Christ.
The soul should then walk "in the dark, in pure .faith, which is the dark night of the natural faculties." (3) It can no longer easily apply itself to the consideration of our Savior's humanity; on the contrary, it is deprived of such consideration, as were the apostles immediately after Christ's ascension into heaven. During the months preceding the Ascension, their intimacy with Him had grown daily; it had become their life, and then one day He took final leave of them on this earth, thus depriving them of the sight of Him and of His encouraging words. They must have felt very much alone, as it were, isolated, especially while thinking of the difficulties of the mission our Savior had entrusted to them: the evangelization of an impious world, plunged in all the errors of paganism.
The apostles were too attached in a human way.
On the evening of Ascension Day, the apostles must have experienced the impression of profound solitude, similar to that of the desert and of death. We can get a slight idea of this solitude, when, after living in a higher plane during a fervent retreat under the direction of a priest who is closely united to God, we return to ordinary everyday life, which seems suddenly to deprive us of this plenitude. The same thing is true, and indeed much more so, after the death of a father, of a founder of an order, for those whom he leaves and who must continue his work. Thus after Christ's ascension, the apostles remained gazing toward heaven; their beloved Master had been taken from their gaze, and they felt alone in the face of all the sufferings to come.
Even the apostles had to give up the physical presence of Christ in order to live in the Spirit.
They must then have recalled Christ's words: "I tell you the truth: it is expedient to you that I go. For if I go not, the Paraclete will not come to you; but if I go, I will send Him to you." (4) "It is expedient to you that I go," that I deprive you of My sensible presence. In his commentary on St. John (loc. cit.), St. Thomas says: "The apostles were attached to the humanity of Christ, they did not rise sufficiently to the spiritual love of His divinity, and were not yet prepared to receive the Holy Ghost. . . who was to be given to them to console them and strengthen them in the midst of their tribulations."
This deprivation of the sensible presence of Christ's humanity which preceded the transformation of the apostles, effected on Pentecost, throws light on the state of darkness and desolation that we are discussing. It seems to the soul in this state that it enters a spiritual night, for it is deprived of the lights which hitherto illumined it; darkness descends as when the sun goes down.
To be continued...
