Consider yourselves fortunate when all kinds of trials come your way, because you know that when your faith succeeds in facing such trials, the result is the ability to endure. -James 1:2-3
Ego is often maligned as some sort of table-pounding ogre, or a spoiled brat who throws all the toys out of the pram when things don’t go its way. While ego certainly has its bad days, it is also quite happy to charm the birds out of the trees, especially if it helps it enjoy the adulation of a coterie of admirers.
Spirituality is champagne for the ego. Cork after cork pops as ego guzzles enthusiastically while reading up on what phase of the spiritual life it is in, what doorways of prayer it has pranced through; or it insists that it is “spiritual, not religious,” or “religious, not spiritual”-whatever the trendy sound bite of the day is that will keep it at the center of all drama or trauma. Ego does not have to be unpleasant or tiresome, but it does need to be center stage.
Ego, therefore, does not take boredom lying down. It has a way of stealing the keys to the car so that it can drive excitedly, even recklessly, revving the engines of self-centeredness as it barrels along for all to see and hear anything to keep boredom at bay.
But if we are set on becoming free, and not just on feeling secure or winning arguments, the velcro mesh of our lives must be pried loose from ego’s many, tiny hooks. Ego cannot do this itself; it clings with such tenacity. We can only receive contemplation’s gift; ego knows only how to take.
Once we have become acclimated to the liberating role of boredom in our prayer life, indeed come to prefer this desert over the fleshpots of religious experience, as our prayer life may once have been, there is yet more freeing up and deepening that the practice of contemplation will continue to do. But we may well not see this deepening; more likely we see our prayer life crumbling, yet all the while there is deepening taking place as we are exposed to things within ourselves that we would rather not see, but need to see. This humbling self-knowledge is a crucial component of the deepening of our practice. Saint John of the Cross insists that this light we are filled with is “very loving light,” but for lengthy stretches of the spiritual journey, as our practice deepens, this “very loving light” enables us to see aspects of ourselves that we would rather not see but nevertheless bear our name. This humbling self-knowledge is the direct result of the inflow of light into our awareness. As when opening the curtains in a room we have not been in for some time, the light exposes all manner of dirt and dust. The dirt and dust were always there, but there was not light sufficient to see. But St. John of the Cross never wavers from his conviction that this light is not simply luminous but also “very loving light.”
In this season of our prayer life-a season that can last for quite a long time-what the light illumines is not altogether pleasant. It all depends on how much of the mesh ego has its hooks into. One of Flannery O’Connor’s more unfortunate main characters, the bigoted Mrs. May in “Greenleaf,”[F. O’Connor, “Greenleaf,” in The Complete Stories (New York: Noonday, 1995] is illumined by self-knowledge in a rather brutal way that she does not happen to live through. Mrs. May does not encounter light so much as she is gored by light as it comes racing toward her like the Sun of Justice, in the form of a bull. As the bull gores her, she has “the look of a person whose sight has suddenly been restored but now finds the light unbearable.”
The ordeal with loving light has no other purpose than to free us by pointing out what our minds cling to. Both Flannery O’Connor and St. John of the Cross indicate that this is a deeper cleansing and release. The real shackles of the heart pertain more to intellect: the mind’s laziness, its scorn, its preoccupation with reputation. Saint John of the Cross learns something quite similar from watching wood burn. He says that the divine light “has the same effect on a soul that fire has on a log of wood.” The fire attributes to wood its own properties. While the wood continues to have properties characteristic of wood such as weight and quantity, it takes on properties characteristic of fire: it is hot and it heats; it is brilliant and also illumines; it is dry and it is drying. The fire produces all these effects as it gradually transforms the wood into flame, the union of Creator and creature, in such a way that we now have wooden flame or flaming wood.
Gradually, the fire makes the wood “as beautiful as it is itself.” With this process, however, there is deeper liberation and, as St. John of the Cross implies, deeper pain, for this liberation targets not our greed, gluttony, or lust but the intellect; this is a more painful liberation. “At this stage, persons suffer from sharp trials in the intellect, severe dryness and distress in the will, and from the burdensome knowledge of their own miseries in the memory, for their spiritual eye gives them a very clear picture of themselves …. They find relief in nothing, nor does any thought console them, nor can they even raise the heart to God, so oppressed are they by this flame.” Through all of this, however, the fire remains loving; it’s just that what love draws out is unsightly and for sometimes long stretches of time difficult to bear.
~Martin Laird, A Sunlit Absence: Silence, Awareness, and Contemplation
