The Gift of Understanding corresponds to the Beatitude of the pure of heart. The Gift of Understanding has two sides: it gives us a penetrating insight into the truths of faith and at the same time a realistic view of our own weakness. When full-blown, it communicates the experience of our nothingness and our incapacity to do anything good by ourselves. The Gift of Understanding is chiefly at work in the Night of Spirit. Whatever interior freedom arises from the purifying love of the Holy Spirit is of immense value and is greater than all external works put together, both for our own redemption and the redemption of the world. We cannot bring this about ourselves, but by submitting to God's purifying love, the Spirit gradually incorporates us into the mystery of the redemption, making us a kind of sacrament of God's presence and a transmitter of divine grace.

The Gift of Understanding is like a laser that casts light into the depths of our spirit and reveals the roots of our emotional programs for happiness as well as all our prejudices and over-identifications with our bodies, feelings, roles, and cultural conditioning. It leaves nothing unrevealed. At first we are not even aware of the hidden tendencies to sin within us: these are sometimes called the capital sins. We may be enjoying the period of close union with God that usually follows the Night of Sense. But at some point God wants us to go to a deeper level of communion, and that involves one of those transition periods on the spiral staircase in which everything is dark. We are disconcerted because we do not know what the next plateau is going to involve.

The insights of the Gift of Understanding bring people into the Night of Spirit. Normally contemplative prayer moves us in this direction. The divine action is thorough and, at the same time, very balanced. In the midst of the awareness of our weakness, or even our sense of rejection by God, there arises an occasional bright spot; a window on the fruits that this purification is bringing about within us. We may enjoy an experience of God that is so delightful that we may think all our troubles are over and we have at last completed the journey. Then after a few hours or days we find ourselves on the spiral staircase again and cannot even remember the pleasures of that transient experience of divine union. The whole purpose of this alternation is to bring the soul to the total transformation of love.

We normally interpret trials as punishments from God. This is a misunderstanding that Jesus tried to clarify. Nothing in this world is a punishment from God but rather a means of healing some hindrance to our entering into the fullness of divine life and love. The Gift of Understanding introduces and sustains us in the Night of Spirit, culminating in the beatitude: "Blessed are the pure of heart for they shall see God" (Matt. 5:8).

At one time, I was at an interreligious workshop in which there was a panel of people who had been through the most barbaric events of our century: two world wars, the Holocaust, Cambodia during the time of Pol Pot, and the Vietnam War. This was the most extraordinary panel I had ever heard. As each panelist spoke about his or her personal experience, it became more and more impossible to react, because anything one could say would sound like a platitude in the face of what these people had suffered. A Vietnamese girl had been abused by both sides in the war because, as a survivor in her village, she was believed to have cooperated with the enemy; she was threatened with death and raped by both American and North Vietnamese troops. A Cambodian boy was forced to watch the torture and murder that went on twice each day in the camp; yet if he had shown any emotion, he, too, would have been liquidated. He told us that to survive he had learned how never to cry. He had forced himself to show no emotion in the face of such horrors. Now, sensing the immense acceptance and sympathy of this group of people, he actually did break down and weep for the first time.

There was also a Jewish lady on the panel who as a girl had been in the Holocaust. Both her parents were killed in the concentration camp where they had been taken. As she was telling her story, she casually mentioned that she had established a humanitarian organization to prevent things like the Holocaust from happening again. Then, she casually remarked, "I really could not do this humanitarian work unless I was fully convinced that if the situation had been reversed, I could have done the same things that were being done to my people." My ears went straight up as she went on with her presentation. Although she said she had lost her faith in God as a result of losing her family, to me she seemed extraordinarily close to God. She had discovered through terrible human suffering what true humility is. The Night of Spirit brings about the same realization: we know with great clarity that if situations in our lives were changed, we too would be capable of any evil. The fruit of the Night of Spirit is the total turning to God, without reservation and without relying on any form of human support.

The Gift of Understanding, whether it comes through terrible suffering or develops gradually through a life of prayer, makes us aware that we are capable of any evil and that only God is our strength. Only God can protect us from the evil we might do if we were placed in circumstances of enormous tragedy and suffering. In this sharp light there can be no elation or pride in one's own gifts. There is no appropriation of one's own talents. There is no sense of being special or part of an elite. All of this is burned away in the night as we realize ever more profoundly that we owe infinitely more to God and to others than we can ever give back.

Humility is the right relationship to God. It is at the same time total dependence on God and invincible hope in God's infinite mercy Humble hope is the shortest formula I know for negotiating the spiritual journey.

In the Night of Spirit one goes through periods of intense suffering that can last a long time. In this period, people do not normally benefit from advice but desperately need encouragement. Just to sit with them and hold their hand is much more useful than advice. Advice feels like platitudes to somebody in the state where he or she clearly perceives that all the good things they have received from God are gone, while God seems to have abandoned or rejected them. It is a more intense experience than the Night of Sense, in which sensible consolations are swept away In the Night of Spirit our relationship with God is questioned on the deepest level and one feels in oneself a kind of monumental corruption. At the same time, as the parable of the Leaven (Matt. 13:33 ff) boldly declares, the Kingdom of God is at work, even in the midst of moral corruption.

An example that might communicate this insight more concretely is something that happened to me while I was going through some heavy trials of this kind. I watched a movie called Love Story, starring Ali MacGraw and Ryan O'Neal. It is about a couple who were very much in love so deeply in love that they literally had nothing but each other. The young man alienated his family, who were well-to-do, by marrying an Italian girl, who had no comparable social background. They married when he was just out of college and didn't have a job. After he got his law degree and a good job. she is diagnosed with cancer and given only a short time to live. They think of taking a last trip to Europe, but she is too sick to travel. In the last scene, she dies in her husband's arms. As the young man leaves the hospital and walks off into the fog, a poignant melody plays in the background. He has lost absolutely everything. His only treasure has been wrenched from him. There is nothing for him to live for. He sits down on a park bench while the fog thickens. We are left with a keen sense of his absolute despair, loneliness, and loss. Sheer loss.

I shed buckets of tears before I realized what this last scene meant to me. It was a paradigm of the way I felt in the Night of Spirit; it was as if God had died and that I had literally nothing left. It was total grief. Having put all my energies into the loving search for God, God seemed to have died or gone away, without even saying goodbye.

It was not the tragic end of the romance in Love Story that made it so moving for me, but rather the experience of what it feels like to lose the center of your life. This, I think, is the chief characteristic of the Night of Spirit. There are other pains and much anguish in that Night, but the sense of loss, rejection, and abandonment by God are paramount. People who talk this way may sound as if they need an antidepressant, but that is not the remedy in this case. They need to wait with unlimited confidence for God to complete the work he is doing in secret. He never takes anything from us except to give us something better. When we actually hit bottom and can't go any farther, God will help us. God is not in this to finish us off, but to bring us to Divine Union. The feeling that God is angry with us is a projection of human feelings onto God and is simply not true.

A poem might help to describe the inner dispositions of this state:

The Twilight of Self

My soul is solitary now.
It finds no companionship anywhere
And no wish to find any.
My sole desire is you,
And you are emptiness and absence
Can one love absence so intensely
That any presence is an intrusion?

I am as one moving in aimless circles.
Rituals, prayers, and sacred symbols
Are meaningless to me.
They communicate nothing of you 
Who are eerything to me,
But for whom and from whom I feel no love,
No consolation, and no hope of consolation.

I am as one turned inside out,
And there is nothing there--not you, not me.
There is only your boundless Presence 
hat treats me like a thing without a heart--
Except perhaps a broken heart.

I long to relate to everyone,
Yet find no way to relate to anyone.
Or is it just a lack of inclination?
For you with whom I desperately long to relate
Are not.

Where now is trust?
Where now is love?
What remains when passive purification is complete
And the Night of Spirit is near its end?
To die to self

Is inner resurrection.
Who I am arises
In the ashes of the self.

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Excerpted from Fruits and Gift of the Spirit by Fr. Thomas Keating

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