What is most disconcerting for souls who have been on the journey for twenty or thirty years is that each time we make the transition from one level to the next, we are likely to encounter the same temptations we had before we started the journey, and we think, "I'm not getting anywhere; I'm just the same old stick." We may even think all is over or that we made a mistake to start the journey. Those commentaries are from our prerecorded memory bank and are just baloney.

What can we say about the distress that arises when the same old temptations recur? For example, difficulties with a particular person that we thought we had resolved once and for all recycle. In actual fact, it is not the same temptation at all. We encounter it again because there is a circular structure to a spiral staircase and hence horizontally we seem to meet the same old problem. But vertically we are now dealing with it at a more mature level. Hence, we are capable of making a more complete surrender of that attachment or that aversion. If the Spirit asked us in the beginning to make a total surrender of every difficult person or situation, nobody could do it. By leading us gradually (the way human things work), through growth in trust and humility, we are able to make an ever deeper surrender of ourselves to God. In this way we reach a new level of interior freedom, a deeper purity of heart, and an ever increasing union with the Spirit.

If God did not seem to disappear, how many of us would keep going? God is always one step ahead of us in this journey toward the center. Just as we think we have found him, he slips out of our grasp. The worst thing that can happen to us is to settle in an oasis under a palm tree. Growth is the challenge of the gospel. The great sin in the New Testament is to refuse to grow and to choose to stay as we are. The spiritual life is dynamic. The Spirit keeps inviting us to new levels of surrender, faith, and love.

The Divine Therapist continues the treatment in daily life. God brings people and events into our lives and takes them out again to show us other things we need to see about ourselves. Thus contemplative prayer and daily life work together if we are willing, and mutually reinforce the therapeutic process.

What happens when we come to the bottom of the spiral staircase and fully access the divine presence? It will be a great surprise and not like anything we expected. All the things we valued to reach that state will be seen in a new light and many former convictions may be shattered.

Every time we go down in this process (using the spiral model), we also move in the opposite direction by accessing a new level of freedom and growth in faith, hope, and charity under the influence of the Spirit (see Diagram 7). Every level down is also a level up and releases our creative energy. The humiliation of the false self leads to humility and humility leads to invincible trust. The fruits of the Spirit enumerated in Galatians 5:22-23 begin to appear and later the Beatitudes (Matt 5:3-10).

The transforming union seems to involve reappropriating every stage of our life, not with its details, but by reliving the values of each stage of life. We may realize that some of the things we rejected early in the spiritual journey were the result of misinformation. God invites us to take another look at the good things of life and its legitimate pleasures that we might have needlessly rejected. Everything good and of true value in life is reappropriated under the influence of the Spirit. It is as if we were led through our developmental process again, taking possession of the values appropriate to each level or period of life and letting go of the limitations that the human condition and our inability to handle them had imposed on us.

Will we ever come to the point where the false self and all the junk is emptied out? I think this is possible, but that does not mean that the results will be what we expected. On the contrary, the very capacity to love without self-interest is going to increase our capacity for suffering.

The journey, or process itself, is what Jesus called the Kingdom of God. This is a very important point. To accept our illness and whatever damage was done to us in life by people or circumstances is to participate in the cross of Christ and in our own redemption. In other words, the acceptance of our wounds is not only the beginning, but the journey itself. It does not matter if we do not finish it. If we are on the journey, we are in the Kingdom. This seems to be what Jesus is saying in the parables. It is in bearing our weakness with compassion, patience, and without expecting all our ills to go away that we function best in a Kingdom where the insignificant, the outcasts, and everyday life are the basic coordinates. The Kingdom is in our midst. Our attitude toward reality can go on improving as the Spirit--according to our personal history, determination, and all the other uncertain factors of life--enables us to negotiate the spiral staircase.

Rather than try to identify where we are on the spiral staircase or which dark night we are in, it is better to surrender to the process. The dark nights are helpful guides in a general way, but they take different forms in different people. For those living active lives in the world, external trials may predominate. For those living in solitude, interior trials seem to predominate. Both will certainly be present in some degree. For some people, the dark nights are very clear; for others, not so. Some people seem to be in them for longer periods than others, and some seem to be in and out of them or in both states at once.

Perfection, or holiness, it seems to me, should be measured by our commitment to the spiritual journey with its spiral staircase, rather than by attaining some particular goal. There are breakthroughs along the way, followed by plateaus in which we see our dark side as never before, but with growing serenity and acceptance. During these periods may also come experiences of divine union that then may take years to work into all our faculties, relationships, and bodies. But then the journey continues. We are called to a deeper humility, which in turn calls for a greater trust and an all-encompassing love of God. In a sense, the bottom and the top meet or collapse into one another. Humility and boundless confidence in God's infinite mercy merge, and the ongoing journey becomes whatever God wants it to be.

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Excerpted from Intimacy with God by Fr. Thomas Keating

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