Crisis of Faith/Crisis of Love

by Fr. Thomas Keating

Chapter 6

Time Was Made for Waiting

The spiritual progress revealed in the events that we have just reviewed is not a kind of growth that we can feel and understand. The values involved in spiritual growth are quite different from the values indicating progress in some other sphere, such as running a business, taking higher studies, or learning a trade. If you are making headway in these things, you experience greater facility, satisfaction, and skill. These natural indicators of progress are pretty much the reverse when it comes to spiritual matters. This is illustrated very well in the incident of the Canaanite woman.

She came forward to speak to Jesus with reasonable self-assurance. She knew of his kindness and compassion. She had heard of many people whom he had helped. She heard of his miracles and believed in them and in him. She did not anticipate any difficulty in obtaining her request. It was a well deserving and humble request. She spoke to Jesus in a way that she had heard other people had done. Thus, she is a good example of those who have reached a certain degree of faith and expect that things will continue to remain the same forever.

There comes, then, this mysterious silence. Call it aridity, dryness, desolation, whatever you want. The terrible, inner realization grows that no matter how hard we try, or how loud we cry, there is not going to be any response from the other side of eternity.

We tend to make judgments according to the way we feel. Until we have passed through the crisis of faith, there is not much understanding of Jesus and his ways. We tend to judge him as we would anybody else who seemed to be ignoring us. And so the judgment forms in our hearts: “He doesn’t love me anymore!” After all, if you try to talk to someone and he constantly turns around and walks away, the logical conclusion is, “There is not much use in trying to keep up this relationship. It’s a little too one-sided. God pays no attention to me. Therefore he does not love me.”

Now the precise purpose of the crisis of faith is to free us from the prejudice of our feelings so that we can make judgments and act according to faith.

Suppose we take the Israelites, the children of God’s household, to whom the food belongs by right, as examples of those who feel they deserve a certain amount of attention from God on account of their good works. Generally, when you have given up a great deal for God or have served him energetically for a while, you start feeling virtuous. You may have taught catechism for a few months or attended daily Mass for a few years. Maybe you refrained from hitting someone on the face when he insulted you. As a result everybody in your little world begins to think that you are really the cat’s whiskers. “Here is somebody who really practices his religion,” they say.

If you are good at arguing, you may convince someone that he should go to church or get back to the sacraments. Maybe you even succeeded in converting some poor devil. You begin to feel as though God owes you something. Perhaps you really are a virtuous person. At least other people think so, so why contradict the obvious?

We generally expect people to think well of us and are not surprised when some morsel of praise comes our way. And from that it is a short step to think that God thinks the same about us. He more or less relies on us to keep the world going and the Church as it should be.

Then one day we come to make our request like the Canaanite woman, and there is no reply. We begin to wonder whether we have done something wrong. We think, “Am I going backwards?” Not at all. The first step, you might say, the first sign of movement as far as getting anywhere in the spiritual life, is to begin to be anxious about whether we really are such good friends with God. I do not say this should be a terrible anxiety, but it should shake the foundations from under our colossal self-satisfaction. It does not cross our minds that we desperately need help until the innumerable props on which we have been relying begin to crumble.

The first reply that Jesus gave the Canaanite woman, or rather the coldness that he showed her, brought her down a little. For her next request, she prostrated. He was gradually pulling the carpet out from under her. He finally had her down on the ground with her nose in the dust. It took her a short time to reach that point. But, let’s be frank, it is taking us quite a few years.

As a matter of fact, most of us are not really convinced of original sin, especially when things are going well. We spend a few years being kind to people, a few years without temptations of the flesh, and we think all our troubles are over. We have passed to the angelic life and will never more experience movements of anger or sensuality. In other words to ignore the consequences of original sin practically speaking, is not to be humble. Humility consists in accepting the whole of reality, and the consequences of original sin are at least half of it.

When Jesus by his passion and death gave us back grace, he did not give us back integrity, that is to say, the perfect control of our senses and emotions by reason and will—that was the gift that he gave Adam and Eve. Maybe you would like to pick a bone with god for not giving it back. The only trouble with that is that we are just the clay and he is the potter. There is no use saying, “Look here, why didn’t you complete the job? You did so much. You could have done one little thing more. You could have restored our fallen human nature to what it was before.”

But he did not do so. And he did not do so because it was his will to show the power of his grace in our fallen human nature. He may also have wished to make sure that no human being would again make the same mistake that Adam and Eve made, which was to presume, through lack of the experience of human weakness, on the gifts of God.

Although Jesus by his passion and death has raised us to a much greater height and dignity than we had when Adam was the father of the human race, God has left our nature in the appalling weakness, blindness, and ignorance to which it fell through original sin. It is the triumph of Christ’s passion when the Holy Spirit transforms all this rubbish and debris into a garden of paradise.

Spiritual progress consists first of all in embracing the reality of original sin as it exists in ourselves, but without despairing. Human nature is constantly presented with two great temptations: despair and pride. Everybody who likes to oversimplify and to solve thinks by the quick route, in three easy lessons, is very much tempted in one direction or the other. Either he gives the spiritual life up as impossible, saying “I’m too bad,” which is a sin against hope. Or he says, “I guess I’m pretty good after all with all these virtues of mine, I’m all set,” and that is presumption.

Jesus, in the scene with the Canaanite woman, desiring to lead her to union with himself, brings her to face reality. He teaches her that she is nothing, and that she deserves nothing. Yet, through the power of his secret grace, she keeps on hoping in spite of the delay. The habit of waiting for God gradually establishes us in a right attitude towards him. We cannot push God around. But that is what we try to do when we say, “Give me this; give me that.” Or even, “Please, give me this.”

Some even make bold to say: “if you don’t give me this, I won’t say any more prayers.”

Or, “How can you do this to me?”

But God’s answer to all this is: “Well, who are you?”

There is nothing so humbling as waiting. Time was created so that we might learn to wait.

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