Crisis of Faith/Crisis of Love

Chapter 11

by Fr. Thomas Keating

The Development of Spiritual Attentiveness

Reflecting on the liturgical feast of St. Mary Magdalen I suggested that although three people were commemorated, they nevertheless are all one spiritually. They came to the deep knowledge of Christ, not by an intellectual penetration, but through the experience of love--the only way that anybody can really come to the knowledge of divine things. They went through the trials of faith and hope, and reached God through humiliation and suffering.

Now in the psalms you have examples of what persons like these say to God after he has given them this grace. Psalm 34 is the song of such a person. It was written by David after he had escaped from the presence of Achish, the Philistine king of Geth.37

Here is the background. David was being pursued by Saul. Just before this incident Saul tried to pin David to the wall with a spear, but missed.38 Then Saul started tracking him down like a dog in the wilderness.

David escaped to the camp of the Philistine king. Doeg, a man in the hire of Saul, unfortunately was there. Realizing that he was trapped, David hit upon the expedient of acting like a lunatic. That was no small humiliation for the mighty warrior who had slain Goliath. David began to lean against the wall and to drool on his beard like a madman, making an utter fool of himself.

King Achish, who had been expecting to get a mighty warrior to add to his troops, said, "Why did you bring this lunatic into my presence? Are there not enough fools around here already? Get him out!"

Thus David made good his escape. His response to God's answer to his prayer for deliverance is exactly the same as that of the three women. It is a wonderful response to the gifts of God and to his grace--the only one he asks for. David's heart melted in gratitude to God. You get echoes of this profound disposition of gratitude over and over again in Psalms. That is why they are such a good teacher of prayer. They teach us how to respond to the gifts of God, and if the spirit of the Psalms ever gets into our bones, we will really know how to pray.

This is exactly the deep spirit of loving gratitude that Mary of Bethany felt when she saw Lazarus coming forth from the tomb after four days of decomposition. Or when the penitent woman realized in the depths of her heart that what she had wanted most, the forgiveness of her sins, had been freely granted by her Savior. They just had to thank him. The rising tide of loving praise is the inspiration of Psalm 34.

Listen to a few verses of it: "I will bless the Lord at all times. His praise shall ever be in my mouth."

Praise is the the fruit of love. The heart of the Christian Community is on fire to praise God. It feels an urgent necessity to thank him, not just once in a while, but all the time, because of the graces he pours out on the world at every moment. The three women commemorated in the feast of St.  Mary Magdalen, and David, are all under the influence of the same grace. They are entering deeper into the heart of the Christian Community, the mystical body of Christ, and they have to praise God. It is a need of love and of gratitude.

The psalmist continues, "Let my soul glory in the Lord; the lowly will hear me and be glad." The lowly, that is to say, those who have been humbled like me. They will understand what I am shouting about ad why I am jumping up and down in thanksgiving and joy. God is so good. He has been so good to me.

"How about glorifying the Lord with me? Let us together extol his name." His name is what God stands for, that is mercy and goodness, which David has just penetrated anew by experience. 

Then he described what happened: "I sought the Lord and he answered me, and delivered me from all my fears." David on this occasion was scared. Like the penitent woman, he did not know whether the Lord was going to answer him.

"Look to him that you may be radiant with joy; and your faces may not blush with shame." Here is an afflicted man who called out; and the Lord heard him and from all his distress he saved him. "The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear him, and delivers them." There is no question in David's mind now about the continual and sure protection he is going to receive from the living God.

Here is the line I am most interested in emphasizing: "taste and see how good the Lord is; happy the man who takes refuge in him."

The Christian community singles out this verse for several responsorial and communion songs. It suggests the mystery of love, the fact that we know god and attain to a deep knowledge of him through love rather than by intellectual reflection.

In the ordinary run of things, we first understand, we first know, and then we love. But in the supernatural order, it is the reverse. According to the psalmist, we must first taste and then understand. We first experience God by love before we understand him and respond in the way that David and these women did.

The spiritual senses are an analogy of the material ones: sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste. In bodily things, taste and touch are the most intimate because an object of the senses is present directly when we taste or touch it. It is less directly present when we see it, hear it, or smell it. Touch is experienced when an object of sense is present to our bodies. God is present in the inmost depths of our souls, and if he makes his presence felt there, the most appropriate analogy of it is taste--the most intimate and direct of all the experiences of the senses. Here taste is not a sensible reality, but a spiritual experience.

The Fathers of the Church remind us over and over again that the experience of the spiritual sense requires the discipline of letting go of outward things and natural knowledge to go to God. Moderation of the external senses is required to experience the reality of the spiritual senses. And so David is inviting and urging us to humble ourselves, to take the path of suffering and humiliation that he endured in order that we may "taste" the experience of God and understand how wonderful God is.

Quoniam suavis est Dominus is the Latin for "How good the Lord is." That is, how suitable, how well fitting, how just right, how much like coming home, is the experience of God.

The same word is also used in this saying of Jesus, "Take my yoke upon you because my yoke is easy (suave) and my burden light."39 Suave is hard to translate. The idea is that God's will is tailor-made; it suits you, fits every wrinkle of you back.

The experience of God, then, is just right; it fits you to a t. It is the thing that you have been waiting for. While nothing will be fully satisfying until you get to heaven, still, through the spiritual senses, this experience strikes us as being the  perfect coming home; something which always should have been there and which we suddenly realize is there. "Taste and see."

The result of this experience is that total turning to God that these three women bear witness to: Mary of Bethany, by emptying the whole bottle of perfume over the head of Jesus40, and Mary Magdalen, by throwing herself into his arms.41 We are not told just what the penitent woman did. It is left to our own imagination. But they all could sing in their own way Psalm 34.

If we get through some of our trials, we will sing the same song.

Footnotes

More information can be obtained by reading the book Crisis of Faith/Crisis of Love by Fr. Thomas Keating.  It is offered in our