The Night of Sense

The stages of acquaintanceship and friendliness normally bring us to this crisis of faith. John of the Cross calls it the Night of Sense and teaches that it happens to almost everyone who seriously undertakes the spiritual journey. God removes the sensible consolations and devotional practices that we enjoyed in the first few years. Now the liturgy is boring and uninspiring. Scripture is like reading the telephone book, ministry is a disaster, family life is full of all kinds of woes. We may suffer lawsuits, divorce, tragedy. We may have huge financial worries. Not infrequently we may ask ourselves, "Is there not a better way of getting to heaven?"

The basic issue is, "Can I trust this God enough to commit myself to a life of prayer and service?" Union with God does not normally interfere with other relationships. It simply changes our attitude towards them so that we can persevere in them, not for the sake of what we get out of them, but from a motive of unselfish love.

Contemplative prayer, which tends to stabilize in the Night of Sense, does not put other forms of prayer out of business. It simply reveals to us where they all are directed so that they actually become more meaningful. This enables us to let go of practices that were helpful in the beginning, but are no longer appropriate in the new relationship that we are developing with God.

Contemplative prayer relativizes our dependence on external practices in order to go to God. We no longer do them to placate God. Placating is a primitive kind of religious response based on an unhealthy attitude towards God. Unfortunately, God is often introduced to a child in an improper way. The fear of God is sometimes used by parents or teachers as a club in order to get children to behave. This is not good religious instruction. The best parenting is done by parents who really love each other. No education can supply that example of mutual devotion. If it is there, the seeds of a deep religious understanding are sown in children and their personal relationship to God takes on the tone that they have observed in the relationship between their mother and father. Parenting is the greatest vocation there is. Most of us are still recovering from childhood and the experience we had there. But our parents were also recovering from their childhood. This is one of the consequences of the Fall. We repeat the same mistakes that damaged us. Unless we undertake the spiritual journey seriously, we are likely to lay the same misguided trips on the next generation.

Lectio Divina leads to a personal relationship with God. The ancient monastic way of doing lectio does not mean reading a lot. It means reading the text until you feel the call of the Spirit either to reflect on a particular passage, sentence, or phrase, or to respond to the good things that you have read or heard. You may want to praise God, ask for something, or converse with God. Or you might feel like pouring out your heart to God. There is a movement from our concentrative practices to the receptive disposition that is essential for resting in God. The tradition has structured this process into sacred reading, reflecting (pondering), responding (that is, reacting with prayer), and resting in God. All these moments, so to speak, on the circle of relating to Christ are in the service of the final one, which is resting in God.

The full flowering of our relationship with God is somewhat like that of an elderly couple who have lived together for a long time, brought up the children, suffered together the ups and downs of daily life, and who really love each other. They don't have to talk all the time. They chat as they pour coffee in the morning, but they can also sit together and look at a sunset and just enjoy each other's company. They might hold hands or look into each other's eyes to maintain the sense of union. They have moved beyond conversation to communion.

This is a good symbol of what takes place in contemplative prayer. It is the capacity to give our recollected presence to God and to enjoy God's presence in return without saying anything or without trying to prove anything. We are just relishing the sense of communion, even if there is no special experience of consolation.

Lectio Divina develops spontaneously if we do not get stuck on one of the stages of the process like overintellectualizing or the multiplication of aspirations. The heart of the prayer is to recognize the presence and action of God and to consent to it. We do not have to go anywhere; God is already with us. Effort refers to the future and to what we do not yet have. Consent refers to the present moment and its content. Faith tells us that we already have God--the divine indwelling. The most intimate relationship with God is to be completely present to God in whatever we are doing. In this sense, prayer is a preparation for life. What we do in silence under ideal circumstances, we begin to do in daily life, remaining in the interior freedom we experienced during contemplative prayer even in the midst of intense activity.

Contemplative prayer and the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit that manifest it are active both in prayer and action. That is the experience that Lazarus symbolizes at the banquet. All he was doing was drinking his soup and enjoying the meal. He had united his capacity for prayer and action. Once the presence of God is a permanent part of daily life, there is a sense of spaciousness in the midst of all our activities. When difficulties arise because of events or other people, and our emotional reactions start to give us trouble, we can surround them with God's presence. This awareness relativizes the importance of the compulsion that we have to do something about every situation. Yes, we have to do something about certain situations, but if we do them from false selfmotivation, we will not accomplish anything. When we act from the conviction of God's presence within us and with openness to the inspirations of the Holy Spirit, action becomes effective.

The spiritual journey is very hard to initiate if we have interiorized a negative or emotionally charged idea of God in early childhood such as: "God is a tyrant who demands instant obedience. An implacable judge who is always about to bring down the verdict of guilty! Or a policeman always on the watch to catch me if I do something wrong."

This is not religious education; it is a form of terrorism. It makes God into a monster. No such God exists. The notion of God that many of us received in early childhood should be put in the wastebasket. Unfortunately, because it is emotionally charged, it keeps coming back when we start thinking of God or about the things of God. The old tapes keep replaying. "Are you sure you can trust this hazardous God?" We cannot have a profound spiritual relationship with God if we are afraid of God. The "fear of God" is a technical term in Scripture that means "cultivate the right relationship with God." And the right relationship with God is trust. In the psychological climate of our culture, we normally translate "fear" as the emotion of fear, and this is not the proper meaning of the term in Scripture.

Alcoholics Anonymous is one of the most succinct and accurate expressions of Christian spirituality. It is one of God's greatest gifts to our time. It brings many of those in recovery to a contemplative practice. Candidates for the addiction of alcoholism would save themselves and their family a lot of trouble if they seriously took up a contemplative practice. The Night of Sense, which is the ripe fruit of a regular practice of relating to God, brings us face to face with the dark side of our personality. We begin to perceive the dynamics of our unconscious, and to recognize the damage that has been done to us in early childhood. The damage may not have been deliberate, but we develop a homemade (false) self to compensate for the pain of our unfulfilled instinctual needs for security and survival, affection and esteem, and power and control. We can suppress them into the unconscious but the energy itself remains in our bodies. Then all through our lives, unless we undertake the spiritual journey or undergo deep psychotherapy, we remain unaware of the intense power that that energy continues to exert over our actions and in our decision-making processes.

For example, some people marry because they want to have the mother who loved them in childhood. They are looking for somebody to do their laundry and a shoulder to cry on like mama used to provide. Or they are looking for the father they never had. They may marry a person whom they think they love, but secretly they are looking for the healing of a wound that was never acknowledged. This marriage is in trouble from the beginning because when your spouse finds that you married her or him because he or she was a father or mother figure, he or she is going to say, "I didn't marry you for that." People can also enter religious life because they never had a family, and a religious community may look like it would provide one. It is a family in the broad sense, but not the one they are expecting. No one is going to sit you on his or her lap and sing lullabies to put you to sleep.

Traditional practices and devotions are not always the tradition. They may be just something people have done for centuries and may never have thought of changing. In recent centuries, mental prayer has been presented as stages or states each of which takes a long time to negotiate. First there was discursive meditation, usually reflection on some text of Scripture or from a spiritual book. That was followed by a long period in which affective prayer predominated: the multiplication of explicit acts of the will in the form of aspirations. If you lived long enough, you might have a few moments of contemplative prayer or resting in God. This was a "false tradition." It became so formalized that if anybody regularly said grace at meals or night prayers, or went to Mass a couple of times a week, they were encouraged to enter a cloister.

Christian contemplation unfolds from the seeds of the graces planted at baptism. Among these are the Seven Gifts of the Spirit, all of which are oriented towards contemplative prayer and its development. Ordinarily, the Fruits of the Spirit appear first: charity, joy, peace, meekness, gentleness, long-suffering, goodness, patience, self-control (Gal. 5:22, 23). If we are developing our friendship with Christ, these fruits are bound to appear. If they do not, we can question the seriousness or the depth of the relationship that we are having with Christ.

But Lectio Divina is not a series of steps or stages as has been presented in recent centuries: reading, reflecting, responding, and resting. It doesn't work that way, although it could be a good way to learn it. Lectio is a dynamic relationship with God in which you may read, reflect, respond, or rest, all in the same period of prayer. Those four moments are like moments on a circle, not rungs on a ladder. By beginning at any moment on that circle, we are in relationship with all the other moments. The nature of lectio is to soften up and train all our faculties, so that each in its own way can enter fully into the spiritual movement towards divine union. Resting in God is not some abstract state but rather the full flowering of the potential of all our faculties to relate to Christ in their own way.

We can start people at any one of those four moments. If they have not had the experience of discursive meditation, the Spirit will see what is missing in their journey and simply lead them to it during the time of lectio. This is what happened in the Centering Prayer movement. At the time it began, I was concerned about offering in the marketplace a Christian method that would be comparable to the methods of our Hindu, Buddhist, and Islamic brothers and sisters. In the 1970s very few were coming to Christian monasteries while many--10,000 every summer according to some estimates--were going to India in search of a guru. They did not find comparable spirituality in the Christian tradition either in catechism classes, high school, college, the local parish, or even in religious life. This seemed to me to be tragic because through my studies and experience in the monastery, I realized the rich treasures that the Christian contemplative heritage possessed. I knew it was also a necessary base for interreligious dialogue and a source of unity among Christian denominations. Contemplative prayer crosses over doctrinal differences and emphasizes the essentials of the Christian religion, which is the lived experience of Christ and the love for others that flows from that experience.

After a few years a number of people practicing Centering Prayer spontaneously became interested in Lectio Divina. They asked what it was and wanted to know how to do it. In many groups, there is a period of lectio during the weekly meeting after the group has practiced Centering Prayer. Scripture supports contemplative prayer through the discipline of lectio. Without some such support, our prayer can get dried out and stagnate.

Our personal experience of prayer also finds apt expression in the symbols of Scripture. If we speak from the experience of resting in God, the gift of wisdom enables us to choose examples and symbols from Scripture that help to explain our experience to ourselves and to other people. Resting in God makes all the difference between preaching that comes out of love and preaching as an academic exposition of truths, however useful, which only engages the mind but does not touch hearts. Lectio Divina and contemplative prayer lead to a transmission of the living Christ beyond words and concepts. As John of the Cross writes, "The dogmas of the faith are like the shining surfaces of the ocean. They point to the mystery that lies beneath but they cannot provide the experience of that mystery." Like Peter, we have to launch out into the deep and let down our nets for a catch.

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Excerpted from The Better Part by Fr. Thomas Keating

You can obtain a copy by visiting the Contemplative Outreach Bookstore.