Draw close to the Lord, and He will draw close to you. James 4:8
St. John of the Cross explains how we must seek to mortify the physical appetites, in the process he calls the night of the senses. Mortification is not as popular these days as it was in prior centuries. Christians down the ages calmly accepted the duty to fast, abstain, keep vigils, and endure forms of pain and discomfort, all in the pursuit of holiness. These devotions have fallen out of favor in the past few decades. This is a great loss.
In his book St. John of the Cross: Master of Contemplation, Father Donald Haggerty has a chapter titled, “Asceticism: Recovery of a Neglected Value.” This chapter alone is worth the price of the book. He explains:
Writings on the quest for God through methods of meditative mindfulness typically ignore self-denial or bodily discipline as a prerequisite for spiritual growth.… The effort of seeking God ends up then often as a self-absorbed quest.… [S]ome evidence of an ascetic quality is surely a necessity in every healthy spiritual life, given the alluring attraction that human nature, wounded by original sin, will experience toward the pleasures of the senses. Asceticism is a response, a counterweight, to the moral danger of sensual temptation and to all tendencies to selfishness.
While we are pursuing purification, however, we must be careful not to fall into thinking that we have to clean ourselves up before God will want to associate too closely with us. We can imagine Jesus looking at us with disappointment; that look would be unbearable, so we try to avoid it by keeping our distance on our side. First, we tell ourselves, I’ve got to get rid of this or that habitual sin or imperfection, or I have to reconcile with some person, or I have to otherwise make myself more deserving of God’s love.
Catholic theology warns us against the mistaken belief that we can earn our salvation. The Church has long condemned this as a heresy, known as Pelagianism. The truth is that we owe our salvation entirely to the Blood of our Risen Lord. Yet we still must exert ourselves against attachments to created things. So how do we reconcile these two seemingly contradictory priorities?
This is not an either/or, but a both/and, one of many examples in Catholic theology. Yes, we are meant to be purified. But our present state, no matter how miserable, does not make us less attractive to God. He does not find our misery repulsive; He finds it irresistible, because of His infinite compassion and tender love for us. Like a parent rushing to the side of a child who has fallen and hurt himself, God longs to rush to us, even as we are.
“Remain in me,” Jesus directed His disciples. Jn 15:4. The great Carmelite Saint Elizabeth of the Trinity urges us to do this always and everywhere, “in wholly loving confidence.” Awareness of our miserable condition should not make us shy away from Him. “It is there in the very depths that the Divine impact takes place, where the abyss of our nothingness encounters the Abyss of mercy.” Elizabeth of the Trinity, The Complete Works, Volume One, p. 142.
When we accept this reality, we not only find new strength in paring away attachments, but we also may find ourselves at the beginning of a deeper prayer than the soul has ever known. What is needed is not perfection but vulnerability in relationship with God. We can be in the depths of our grief over the mess we have made of our lives. This can be the place where we truly begin to draw close to our Lord. We can never earn God’s love, but we have hope, for He gives freely and enthusiastically to the undeserving.
What then is the purpose of the purification that takes place in the night of the senses? It is not so we will be entitled to rewards, but because this purification removes impediments that keep us from receiving more of God’s love and grace. The obstacles are all on our side, not on God’s. To use another metaphor, people content to remain entangled in attachments are like leaky vessels, never capable of being filled. And we are made to be filled.
So let us follow the good advice of St. John of the Cross, and work energetically and joyfully to sever attachments. The urgency of our desire for God should be like the urgency of the bride in St. John’s poem, “The Spiritual Canticle.” Much of the poem is taken up with the bride’s search for her Bridegroom, as a metaphor for the soul’s search for God. We should see in the bride’s long quest the message that we must diligently pursue spiritual practices. But we also should recognize that the bride’s essential act happens in the first stanza. When she sees that the Bridegroom is absent, she acts at once: “I went out after you, calling out, but you were gone.”
We are all in that place, left, it seems, alone with ourselves, without God. The temptation is to resign ourselves to this sad condition. But we must make the decisive move like the bride – now, not when we feel more suited, or more prepared. We must draw close to God, and in order to do this, we must address the impediments in the way, principally, appetites and attachments. The severity of the saint’s writings can mask the underlying tenderness of the heart’s desire for God. Only this tender longing will motivate one to do the hard work ahead, in the night of the senses.
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