Dear Father John, I have been following your blog since the beginning, and I have noticed a pattern in your answers – a pattern that disturbs me. You seem consistently to counsel people against trusting in their experience of God. You seem to recommend instead a kind of abstract faith. But didn’t Jesus become man precisely in order to give us an experience, so that our faith wouldn’t have to be so abstract and dry? You have confused me.
This is one of the disadvantages of the blogosphere; you just can’t ever seem to explain yourself fully! I am pained at causing you confusion and internal turbulence. Let me see if I can clarify some things in order to start untying this knot.
Different Kinds of Experience
On the one hand, I fear that I am guilty as charged. I do council you against trusting too much in one particular kind of experience of God: emotional experience. As human beings, we have different levels of experience. We experience things on the level of our five senses, our instincts and passions (the drives and inclinations built in to our bodily nature), our emotions, our conscience, our intellect, and our will. These are different levels, but they are not entirely distinct; the human person is a wonderful harmony of physical and spiritual interaction. That’s how God designed us. But even though the different levels are not entirely distinct, not totally isolated from each other, there is a hierarchy of importance among them.
Ordering Experience for Maturity
To understand this, think about the term “maturity.” Infants are immature. They live only at the level of sense experience and instinct. They cry when they are hungry, cold, or uncomfortable. Children are a bit more mature. They are learning to govern their senses and their instincts, so they ask mom for a snack when they’re hungry, instead of crying. But they are still emotionally and spiritually immature. This is one of the reasons they can be so endearing, and so infuriating. They don’t know how to think and judge for themselves – they still need dad to hold their hands when they go out for a walk. Nor do they know what they are supposed to do with their emotions – they don’t understand why mom won’t let them watch a certain very enjoyable TV show; they can’t grasp how it could be bad for them if it is so enjoyable.
A sign of maturity in an adult is consistent order among all the levels of human experience. Mature adults keep their senses, instincts, and emotions in harmony, guided by their reason and faith towards their true life-purpose: to know, love, and serve God, and to love their neighbors as themselves. They are like a master charioteer who is able to keep four different horses pulling together in harmony towards his worthwhile destination (to borrow an image from Plato). They don’t let strong passions or instincts, or waves of negative or positive emotions, or intellectual pride lead them away from the path of God’s will (the commandments, the responsibilities of their state in life, the inspirations of the Holy Spirit).
The Place of Emotional Experience
So we have different levels of experience, and the level of emotional experience is not the most important one. My emotions can be affected by all kinds of irrational factors: weather, biorhythms, other people’s offensive behavior… And so, if I guide my life by my emotions, I will inevitably be led astray; I will have an unstable life, like a dry leaf being blown around in the autumn breeze. This doesn’t mean that emotions are unimportant. God gave them to us, and without them we would be inhuman. The point is, we need to educate our emotions, just as infants need to learn how to govern instincts and passions. We need to understand that the experience of faith is rooted in a deeper place than our emotions; it is rooted in our minds and our wills. Our friendship with God is based on a spiritual recognition, which occurs under the influence of grace, that God is our Lord and Savior, that he is worthy of our love, reverence, and obedience. That recognition is an ongoing thing; it may begin with a powerful, born-again experience that involves not only our intellect and will, but also our emotions and our passions. It may be boosted and renewed periodically through powerful, emotionally charged experiences of God’s presence. But if God takes away those gratifying emotional experiences for a period, which could be long or short, that doesn’t alter the reality of the recognition, the reality of our experience of God’s majesty and goodness. Rather, he is teaching us to “walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7).
All of this gets even more complicated when we remember that sin (both original and personal) has disrupted the harmony that should exist between the different levels of our human experience. Our senses, instincts, passions, emotions, and will often rebel against what our reason and faith show us to be true and good. Sometimes, in fact, our passions and emotions can pull us so strongly away from God’s will that we experience excruciating pain – think of Jesus in Gethsemane. He was taking our sin upon himself, and as a result his human nature entered into agony; it took intense prayer and heroic self-sacrifice for him to bring his whole human nature into harmony with his Father’s will.
Our Present Plague
Now, it is true that I have repeatedly cautioned against trusting too much in our emotional experience of God – at least, I have intended to do so. There is a specific reason for this. Our culture is consumeristic. That means we are constantly, daily, hourly, being bombarded by images, words, and jingles that are trying to convince us to buy something. Billboards, commercials, Web ads, radio ads, movie previews, spam, mass mailings – unless you live in a monastery (or go on retreat in one), you are positively besieged by consumer propositions. This is the air we breathe. Furthermore, what is the most effective way for these producers to convince you to buy their product? Is it by presenting you with a syllogism, an extended, rational defense of why you need a particular item and exactly how that item will add existential value to your life-experience? Hardly. The shortcut to your decision mechanism is through your instincts and emotions. A billboard doesn’t have time for syllogisms; it has to bypass your reason and grab you by manipulating your emotions, often subliminally. And so, from the time we were toddlers, we have been immersed in a cultural milieu saturated with expert emotional manipulation. As a result, we have been conditioned by this atmosphere to equate emotional experience with true value. This consumer conditioning has been further reinforced by the strong entertainment component that has emerged in our modern economies. Through technological developments, we have come to have much more time on our hands, which we tend to devote to entertainment, and entertainment (especially popular entertainment) stimulates, above all, the emotions.
The result of this is simply that in our culture we tend to depend too much on emotional experience and too little on the deeper experience of faith, virtue, and spiritual truth. If something doesn’t give us an emotional return pretty quickly, we tend to dispose of it or disregard it. This is why, for example, Dan Brown’s books are read by millions, while Tolstoy and Sienkiewicz are truly treasured by dozens. This is why, for example, more than half of Internet traffic is directed to pornography Web sites. This is why, for example, it is so hard for most of us to spend 30 minutes in silence and prayer without distractions, and so easy to pay full attention to a two-hour Hollywood film.
Stepping towards Maturity
To actually grow in our relationship with God, therefore, we need to wean ourselves off an over-dependence on emotional experience. This doesn’t mean we should stifle emotional experience – that would be inhuman. Rather, we need to learn to govern our emotions instead of being governed by them. We need to learn to evaluate our lives, relationships, and activities not primarily according to how we feel on an emotional level, but according to what we know to be true on the level of our reason enlightened by our Catholic faith. This is the path to recover the true interior harmony that will enable us to experience the deeper satisfactions of spiritual experience, an experience which gradually brings our emotions into sync with our faith. This is the path to Christian joy and peace, which are so deep that they turn crosses into resurrections and so contagious that they turn victims into victors.
I do not want to disparage emotional experience in our Christian journey: God also works through that experience. I only want to encourage spiritual maturity. And in a world like ours, that may require over-emphasizing, at least a little bit, the dangers of emotionalism.
I hope this has helped to dispel your confusion. In future posts I will try to discuss more often the positive role that emotions can have in our spiritual life, so as to avoid giving the wrong impression that we should all become Puritans.
Yours in Christ, Father John Bartunek, LC
