by Fr. Thomas Keating
Chapter
9
The
Goal of the Crisis of Faith
The
trials of life, both within and without, are meant by God to mature our souls
little by little until we are fully prepared for heaven. That program, however,
does not appear as neatly in daily life as it may on paper. Because the very
nature of suffering, especially spiritual suffering, is that you suffer, and
therefore do not have the consolation of realizing that it is bearing fruit. If
you felt you were getting somewhere, it would cease to be suffering; it would be
consolation. Once in a while the Lord may lift a corner of the veil and reveal a
little fruit that may be ripening. But it is only a corner. The curtains are
never drawn completely.
Let us now take a look at other relationships which deteriorate during
the crisis of faith.
Someone who enters a monastery, for instance, may well raise the
complaint: “Outside everybody treated me nicely, praised me, looked up to me.
But here, when I do something wrong, these holy people give me a hard time. They
do not seem to appreciate me. They expect me to do jobs I never had before. How
can I possibly satisfy them?”
It is a great disappointment to find oneself little appreciated, paid
little attention to in a monastery, when outside you had successful friendships
and were given credit for being able to accomplish something. If a novice does
not realize what is happening, he may find himself asking the question: “Maybe
I’ve come to the wrong place. I could have done much more good had I remained
in the appreciative milieu in which I was a shining light.”
Such an attitude, of course, will not get one very far in a monastery,
but the feeling of humiliation could be a movement in the right direction. The
Spirit often uses occasions like this to tear down relationships with others
that were based on self-centered satisfaction. When we rendered service to
others, we were thanked and felt pleased with ourselves, and so we had our
reward.
Other interpersonal relationships can become even more demoralizing. St.
Teresa Avila went through a trial of this kind. Although she had previously been
very sociable and pleasant to others, she felt a great desire to chew up people.
When she got into a little tiff with the other nuns, instead of rising with
great ease to apatheia, as the Greek Fathers recommend, she felt the
greatest difficulty to keep from sinking her teeth into them. Truly one may ask
oneself in this state: “What is happening to me? I never felt this way
outside. I wouldn’t swat a fly. But now I feel a strong inclination to take a
beam out of the ceiling and crack it down on someone’s head.”
The cause is not just the strain of the devout life. It really is the
divine action tearing down our pride. God is tearing down, not so much our
virtues, but our over dependence on them, that is, our personal efforts as the
means of going to him. Our own efforts can take us only so far, then gradually
their inadequacy shows up. We are reduced step by step to the situation in which
the Canaanite woman found herself when, despairing of all her own resources and
with a desperation tempered only by hope in Jesus, she cried out from the bottom
of her heart: “Help me!” Two little words that express grades of meaning
that are almost infinite, from the lip service of somebody who has read that one
should depend on God, to somebody who has experienced the complete destruction
and loss of all one’s own resources and who turns to God utterly. This total
surrender is the purpose and goal of the crisis of faith. In the Gospel of John,
just before Jesus’ passion, a group of interest Greek proselytes wanted to see
Jesus.
Normally Jesus was very gracious about meeting people; for instance, Nicodemus,
the Samaritan woman,
in fact almost all people who wanted to meet him.
But here are these people who said, “We would like to see Jesus.” The
disciples brought their request to him and he seems to have paid no attention to
it. He was on the verge of his passion, the purpose for which he had come into
the world.
His only reply was, “The hour has come at last for the Son of Man to be
glorified. I tell you plain truth, unless the grain of wheat fall into the
ground and die, it remains just one grain. But once it has died, it bears
abundant fruit. He who holds his life dear, destroys it, but he who sets no
store by his life in this world will preserve it for eternal life.”
This was an opportunity for a little apostolic work, to enter into an
ecumenical discussion. But at this moment his passion was too close. And no one
knew better than Jesus that it is not through talking but through his passion
and death that people are saved. And so rather than talk to them, he was
interested in bringing home to the disciples the importance of submitting to
this law of death out of which springs the fullness of life. He wanted to teach
them that this growth in our own person is so important, this growth obtained by
means of surrendering to the disappointments and sufferings which the divine
action sends to us, that compared with it, all other activities—including
apostolic activity—should wait until his job has been accomplished, or at
least has gotten well under way.
What good, Jesus seems to say, do you think you can do until you have
allowed your life to fall into the ground and die so that it can bear fruit?
It is a mistake to imagine that those who enter upon the spiritual
journey are going to attain to a kind of paradise on earth, spiritual to be
sure, but still paradise, filled with ineffable consolations and the
uninterrupted enjoyment of Gods’ presence.
The literature on the contemplative life does in fact hold out the
promise of some substantial breakthrough after one has been banged around long
enough. It suggests that one will enter into a wonderful interior freedom where
God is within reach at every moment. The experiences of some mystics do in fact
lead one to believe that this really happened to them. But we have to understand
in what sense this is so.
The longer we live, the more we realize that the ecstatic experiences of
the mystics only lasted a short time. Perhaps the first time we read Teresa of
Avila we do not pay much attention to the fact that her ecstasies lasted only
half an hour. We get the idea they mush have lasted half her lifetime. There is
a great difference between one half hour and the other twenty-three and a half
that have to be lived in an ordinary day.
Any true contemplative life is always going to involve a large proportion
of suffering. If for a few moments, even a half hour, great graces come our way,
they will make the other twenty-three and a half more burdensome. The Christian
Contemplative tradition never held out a panacea for all our ills in this life.
The Christian life, they said, is perfect only in heaven. Anybody who seeks his
or her reward in this life is on the wrong road.
Notice how Jesus reacts in this incident recounted by John, in which he
seems to experience a kind of foretaste of his passion. He confesses: “Now is
my soul shaken in its inmost depths!”
Jesus is nearing the end of his life. He has only a few days to live. And
he is terrified at the prospect of dying! He is miserable in an almost infinite
degree. There is no question of his passing through beautiful, peaceful, and
painless death into the arms of his heavenly Father. There is agony, the sense
of abandonment by his Father. The triumph of Jesus is the acceptance of
that situation, not the enjoyment of it. “Father, save me from this ordeal!”
That is Jesus’ reaction to the cross.
But then immediately comes his heroic submission. “No, for this very
purpose I have come into the world.” In other words, “I want to face this
ordeal!” But he does not say that it is anything but an ordeal.
The idea of suffering becoming pure joy or stopping altogether is
nonsense. To be a Christian, the gospel nowhere says that you must relish and
savor all the anguish and suffering that may come upon you. Growing in grace
does not mean becoming inhuman or insensible. Jesus suffered as a human being.
But there is this difference between him and us: he was prepared, out of love of
his Father, to suffer anything that the Father wanted him to suffer.
This is what the Canaanite woman did in the face of her outward
humiliation. She hung on, she trusted, she hoped against hope. These are the
dispositions that are truly Christian and that indicate spiritual maturity. When
the virtues of faith, hope, and charity are the principal means by which we go
to God, and we are willing to let all other means be taken away when God asks
for the, then we are truly imitating Christ; we are his servants.
Jesus in this same incident extends this promise to his servants:
“Whosoever remains in my personal service (in imitation of my crucifixion)
will be honored by my Father.”
Not, perhaps in this life, but certainly in the next one.
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.
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