Further Understandings of the Journey

My opening journal entry read as follows:

"We have arrived.  Our plane (and us) arrived without a hitch in Louisville at 4:55 PM as promised.  We rented a car at the airport and were on our way.  We had dinner in Bardstown and met Sister Danielle at Bethany Spring at 8:00 P.M.  Everything exceeds my expectations.  The countryside, the sound of crickets, the quietness, all made me realize how precious I find stillness. I can’t believe I’m here, after reading about Gethsemane for nearly twenty years."  
 

After settling in, we went to bed early in order to get up for the 5:45 AM morning prayer at the Abbey.

My wife and I made two trips to Gethsemane; a four day visit in September, 1996 which only whetted our appetites for the much longer five week visit in the spring of 1997.  During these visits, I was given the quiet moments I needed to explore more deeply the writings of Thomas Merton, Thomas Moore, Thomas Keating, George Maloney and others.  

Through their insights, I began to unravel some of the obstructions in my own mysterious journey.

In "Care of the Soul", Thomas Moore wrote: 

“Writers are taught to “write what you know about”.  The

same advise applies to the quest for the power of the soul: be good at what you’re good at.  Many of us spend time and energy trying to be something that we are not.  But this is a move against soul, because individuality rises out of the soul as water rises out of the depth of the earth.  We are who we are because of the special mix that makes up our soul.  Power begins in knowing this special soul, which may be entirely different from our fantasies about who we are or who we want to be.”

Thomas Keating, in his trilogy of books, “Open Mind Open Heart”, Intimacy With God”, and “Invitation to Love” would introduce me to a system of prayer called “centering” which

caused my prayer of stillness to blossom. His books also brought me to a greater understanding of the tension I was experiencing at this point in my life, and thus provided some necessary assurance that many of the things I was experiencing were normal.

According to Keating, I possessed the symptoms of one who was experiencing the “dark night of the senses” an expression coined by St. John of the Cross.

These symptoms included:

(i)  a generalized aridity in both the conventional methods of prayer and discursive meditation, and daily life in general,

(ii)  a manifestation of a fear that one is going backwards, and that through some personal fault or failure we have offended God.

(iii)  an inability or disinclination to practice discursive meditation in which one ponders the teaching and example of Jesus

(iv)  a desire to spend more time alone and in solitude, not for the sake of isolating oneself from society, but to be obscurely in God’s presence.

Let’s look at each of these symptoms in a little more detail.

(i)  I was quite aware that I could not find the same interest in the conventional methods of prayer that use to be very satisfying.  Formal prayer seemed too structured. My attention to this prayer was very distracted, sometimes to the point of having little recollection of the contents of what I read.  Also, the sense of satisfaction that use to come from fulfilling these prayer commitments was dulled and ineffective.  The old enthusiasm for them was not there. Keating would explain this phenomenon in this way:

“This aridity springs from the realization that no created thing can bring us unlimited satisfaction or the satisfaction previously experienced.  In light of this intuition, we know that all the gratifications we were seeking when we were motivated by our emotional programs cannot possibly bring us happiness.  This creates a period of mourning, during which all things that we had counted on to bring us happiness are slowly relativized.”

(ii)  Although I experienced much consolation during my times of solitude and prayer of quiet, I carried with me a sense that following God required that I become more rooted in activity (Christian Service). In wanting to do otherwise, it was as if I was not being charitable, that I was being self-centered.  I carried an underlying belief that this outward action is what God expected of me, and I multiplied these actions in hopes of purging this self-centred attribute.  Again, Keating says:

“During these times, some people mistakenly think it is the end of their relationship with God.  This is not true.  What has ended is there over dependence on the senses and reasoning.  God is really offering a more intimate relationship.  If they would not reflect on their anxious feelings, they would begin to perceive it.”

(iii) In prayer, I spontaneously moved towards more times of quiet and solitude.  I continued with the other types of prayer but ultimately, stillness would result.  My outward prayer activities, however, were principally unsatisfying.  Keating remarks:

“Our ordinary ways of relating to God are being changed to ways that we do not know.  This pulls the rug out from under our plans and strategies for the spiritual journey.  We learn that the journey is a path that cannot be mapped out in advance.  God helps us to disidentify from our preconceived ideas by enlightening us from within.

(iv)  I discovered that looking too close at this tension, or attempting to purge this tension through more activity just did not work.  It only split, to a greater degree, the inner self (which truly wishes to be aligned with God’s will) from the exterior person who identifies and sees him(her) self in the frantic activity that never satisfies.  However, during this time it was difficulty to stop, to become composed, and then to place complete trust in God to do what I was unable to do myself.

A "saving grace" for me at this time (and for many years following) was the discovery of an the eight-day contemplative retreat experience in a book written by Fr. George Maloney SJ called "Alone With The Alone".