Backsliding in the spiritual life–yes it happens!
©2020 Face of Grace Project Muncaster Castle trees hills misty morn
The 4th Luminous Mystery of the Rosary: The Transfiguration
The Fruit of the Mystery: Holiness
With all reverence, the account of the Transfiguration is one of those scriptures that leaves me chuckling. “Now Peter and those who were with him were heavy with sleep” (Luke 9:32). Those three are always asleep at the most crucial moments! They fall asleep at the Transfiguration; they fall asleep in the Garden of Gethsemane. In Luke 9:12 we hear they were tired, wanting to send everyone home and call it a night. They would have missed the miracle of feeding the 5000!
In their defence, we read in the previous chapters of Luke how they had spent all this time living in community, roaming around with Jesus hearing Him defeat the attacks of the pharisees, cast out demons, heal the sick and even raise the dead. All the while, He is instructing them and the people in the Truth and Wisdom of God. It is after their formation that He sent them out to do similarly (Luke 9:1). He tried to bring them to respite but the crowds followed Him. Then after this amazing miracle of feeding about 15,000 people (5000 men plus wives plus kids plus any slaves/sojourners who tagged along), He starts to teach them privately about His cross and the need to suffer (Luke 9:23-26). These were ‘strange times’ indeed.
Is being in the presence of God enough to keep us awake?
We are in the presence of the Tabernacle, and yet how often mass or adoration is an hour of fighting sleep or distracted thoughts. We are also in His presence in private mental prayer and fight the same battles. Unfortunately, being in the presence of the God who is sustaining our existence in that very moment isn’t enough to keep us awake and alert either. At least we are in good company, like Peter, James and John. Before being purified and made holy, the saints were just normal people too.
Back to the Transfiguration…God has them awake in time to see what is happening. What is happening is the very action and presence of God. In partaking of this, the Apostles are graced to participate in the Eternal. In mental prayer, God will sometimes give us those consolations too. It’s more than just psychological relief or natural joy. It comes from a different space in the soul. In the Transfiguration, Peter tries to extend this consolation of his experience of God by wanting to pitch the tents for the Holy ones to remain. Too often we do the same, trying to extend the consolation received in prayer by staying in prayer longer than the planned time or dwelling on how it felt rather than talking with God Himself. We seek the gift rather than the Giver. This particularly happens if under distress in life. Ironically, grasping onto these experiences actually inhibits growing in the Hope needed to overcome the cause of the distress: “the less scope and capacity is there for hoping, and consequently the less hope have we.”
“To three kinds of evil and inconvenience the spiritual man is subject when he persists in desiring to make use of all natural knowledge and reflections of the memory in order to journey toward God, or for any other purpose” … “I say that the soul, in order to attain that blessing, must never reflect upon the clear and distinct objects which may have passed through its mind by supernatural means (St. John of the Cross)
The saints are unanimous in teaching this is a big no-no! And while it may not seem a big deal, it is spiritually a huge problem. In the spiritual life, there is no standing still. We either go forward or backslide. Receiving a consolation from God is a moment in eternity—forward. Prolonging it, we leave the eternal and stay with our sensory memory of it—backslide. We are doing so of our own accord rather than His—pride—backslide. Rather than developing heart-memory of God, we become more apt to mistake our own psychological action as being God’s movement. This actually conditions us into not knowing God rather than being conditioned by Him into knowledge of Him—bigger backslide. We can easily spend lots of time in prayer and have an enviable rule of life, making no spiritual progress at all.
“but the soul, as far as in it lies, must be continually preparing itself; and this it can do by natural means, especially with the help that God is continually giving it” (St. John of the Cross)
The fruits of legitimate “God experiences” should be a desire to be giving up desires for anything but Him—this is what our soul was created for. It should play out into the small stuff of our daily life. For example, there many ways a person can create too much busy-ness for themselves: socializing with friends, community service, spiritual gluttony (too much time in things of the faith). In themselves, these are each good things. But the habit of attaching to God’s consolations rather than God will bring us to desire emotional satisfaction more than Him. Add to the mix that satan is watching it all take place and will take every opportunity to confuse or ratchet-up desire for these things. So when good things are overused, or enjoyed for the wrong purpose, these can become detrimental to us.
We might even end up treating God superstitiously. I want to buy this, do that, spend time with them, etc. … so I take all the actions to make it happen and then if it comes together, it must be God’s will. Perfect Protestant thinking. For Catholics, we see how this approach is centered in the person not God, and so isn’t true self-denial or indifference. It is orchestrating achieving our satisfaction rather than giving up to Him our desire for it. And we get skillful at orchestrating too; with success we assure ourselves that this is the ‘discerning’ way of following God’s will. Instead, the person growing in relationship with God should experience a battle with their own will: their self-love wanting the emotional fulfillment vs. their newly-growing Love (the Virtue) desiring God. Now, if the person asks God to give them desire for Him instead and willingly rejects these unnecessary things that (although good in themselves) take their attention away from God, they grow in their natural virtues like fortitude, temperance and prudence. Grace builds upon nature, so with enough of this God supernaturally begins to transform them too. Desire for Him rules over their natural desires, and eventually those 7 Gifts of the Holy Spirit infused in the Baptized soul begin to flourish.
The fruit of this mystery: Holiness
This is how St. Peter and St. Paul could open their mouth and the Holy Spirit spoke (as taught in the Acts of the Apostles). It is how the Venerable Mary Ward could walk into a room of shouting angry men who would immediately become still because of the presence of the Holy Spirit within her. And as St. John of the Cross teaches in the Spiritual Canticle:
“Aminadab, in the Holy Writings, signifies the devil; that is the enemy of the soul, in a spiritual sense, who is ever fighting against it, and disturbing it with his innumerable artillery, that it may not enter into the fortress and secret place of interior recollection with the Bridegroom. There, the soul is so protected, so strong, so triumphant in virtue which it then practices, so defended by God’s right hand, that the devil not only dares not approach it, but runs away from it in great fear, and does not venture to appear. The practice of virtue, and the state of perfection to which the soul has come, is a victory over Satan, and causes him such terror that he cannot present himself before it.”
Our personal response to the universal call to holiness is the answer to our problems in the world today.
It also makes a huge impact upon our receptivity to sacramental graces, particularly Eucharist, Confession and those living in Sacramental Marriage. Let us continue to pray for those who aid us in our receptivity through their prayer and pastoral efforts, especially Pope Francis, all clergy and religious, and those in training.
Draw near to your servants, O Lord,and answer their prayers with unceasing kindness, that, for those who glory in you as their Creator and guide, you may restore what you have created and keep safe what you have restored.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam 😊