A rare and ancient book on mystical theology that was so small and dishevelled that the censors must have overlooked it in the noviciate library, gave me the advice that I needed. “When sweet meditation” it said, “leads you into dark contemplation, be sure that you give to your new prayer exactly the same time as you gave to the preceding prayer”.
It is easy to love when all seems sweetness and light, but true love is shown and deepened and brought to perfection when you receive nothing in return and are prepared to go on loving. The author insisted that although in human love even the most true and persistent loving can be rejected, as I had already found to my cost, the contrary is true in Divine love. God never rejects such love and always returns it once its quality has been tried and tested.
The School were love is learnt – The Home
The God-given mystical spirituality that Jesus Christ introduced into the early Church was first practised by lay-people for hundreds of years before monks were even thought of. Like the Jewish spirituality from which it emerged, Christianity began in the home where it was first learnt and practised by mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters. In those days what is introduced today as catechetics in the classroom was first introduced in the home through family love that was inspired by, and infused with, the divine loving of their Risen Lord.
It was this loving that, through the sacrament of marriage, not only daily bonded parents ever more deeply together, but overflowed onto their children. If like Christ himself, or his Apostles, family members sought time outside the home for more intense moments of prayer in solitude, they nevertheless returned to their homes. Here they would share the fruits of their contemplation before sharing them with the wider world in which they earned their living. But make no mistake about it, the initial prayer that they were taught, be it different forms of vocal or liturgical prayer or the new form of meditation, would lead to mystical contemplation, as can be seen in the experience of St Paul (2 Corinthians 12:1-7).
Into the life of the Three in One
The only way to God was in, with, and through Christ. But not just in him as an inanimate object, but as a loving human being. When Christ contemplates he is caught up in an act of mutual loving in which his love rises to God and God’s love descends into him. This mutual loving is the Holy Spirit. So when our prayer life leads us on into Christ and into his contemplation which it must, else we will never be united with God, something utterly sublime takes place. We are actually led, at least in some measure, into the life of the Three in One even in this life. This is both the ultimate intuition and experience of the great saints and mystics and is the sign of their orthodoxy.
By their fruits you will know them
The profound mystical spirituality that was generated and lived in the early Church is not measured by whether or not you find them using the sort of mystical language and terminology that took centuries to find its way into Christian literature. It is measured by the simple principle first enunciated by Christ himself. “It will be by their fruits that you will know them”. These fruits, that are detailed by St Thomas Aquinas, which he calls the fruits of contemplation, are freely given to us when our contemplation is one with Christ’s own contemplation. For when we are one with him in his contemplation, then we are one with him in our actions in the world that Christ now wants to transform through us.
But contemplation is a God-given gift that cannot be generated by man-made methods or techniques, like mantras, that Christ never used himself or taught to his disciples, that charlatans are trying to introduce as true Christian mystical prayer today. The Holy Spirit invariably leads those who persevere onward to receive this God-given gift when they have consistently shown their desire to give themselves radically to God by their serious commitment to prayer, not in fits and starts but daily and consistently.
I am referring to prayer like meditation for instance, that leads up to and into the Mystic Way. When this happens, contemplative prayer begins quite naturally, for it is the spontaneous, personal and uniquely individual response to God-given loving whether it seems to bring darkness, as it does to begin with, or light when a person is sufficiently purified to experience it. As we will soon see, the simplicity of the spontaneous response to God’s loving action does not need to be explained because it comes naturally. It does however need to be elucidated and encouraged which is what I propose to do.
The Desire for Union
What I have called the great spiritual adventure, begins with the desire for God that rises from the depth of every human being, because every human being is made for love and to love God, because we are made in God’s image and likeness. It is this desire that is kept alive by the daily pattern of vocal prayer that I have detailed earlier. However, if our desire for God is to be further activated in such a way that it yearns ever more deeply for God, then something further is required.
It has to be directed to God in such a way that it can come to know and love him ever more deeply and ever more fully. This is precisely what happens in meditation. At the high point of meditation when, through meditating on God’s love as embodied in Jesus Christ, what was but a subtle and gentle yearning for God now becomes a craving. This craving raises our desire for union with him to such a level that meditating on him as he once was, is replaced by a craving for him as he is now. For the truth is that it is only now that we can be united with him, not as he was, but as he is now.
A Modern Metaphor
That is why I have likened the desire that we have for God to a spaceship. Meditation has acted like the boosters that enabled the rocket that symbolises our yearning for God, to rise off the ground and to pass through the world’s atmosphere, but the gravitational pull would keep it earthbound. Now suddenly and alarmingly for the traveller, the boosters have to be cast away, for the desire to meditate on God’s love as it once manifested itself in Christ in the past, is replaced by a desire to be united with him as he is now in the present.
The adventure that we have embarked upon therefore enters upon a new phase. In this new phase, without the competent help of someone who has travelled before us, we think that the adventure is over. St John of the Cross said, that ninety per cent of those who have come so far give up. The reality of the situation is this is where the adventure begins in earnest. If it were possible to see the whole of the spiritual life as lived by a perfect practitioner on earth as a graph, then meditation would probably take up less than five per cent of the whole journey in this life while contemplation would take up the other ninety five per cent. So let me now turn to contemplation and what we can best do to facilitate it’s practice in our lives.
The Meaning of Contemplation
Voltaire once said that God created man in his own image and likeness and man has returned the compliment. Although first fervour or first enthusiasm has the distinctive benefit of surcharging the desire for God with powerful waves of energy that I have likened to the boosters on a spaceship, they do have a distinctive downside as well. The trouble is the receiver is filled with delusions of spiritual grandeur, feeling as I did, that I had arrived at the heights of the spiritual life.
We can believe that we not only see and experience God as he is in himself, but his plan for humanity too and our part in bringing it to the world, beginning with the world around us. In brief, as Voltaire so rightly observed, we can create God in our own image and likeness, and then fall in love with him! Travellers beware, lest it is not by Christ that you are being led, but by a Narcissus instead.
The Contemplation of Light and Darkness
In the true Catholic mystical contemplation that follows meditation for those who persevere, despite the temptations to make a run for it, God does but one thing. He presents himself to the believer not as they would make him in their minds or depict him in their imaginations, but as he is in himself. In short and in the words of St John, as ‘love’ or perhaps more precisely as ‘Loving’. That is who he is, and what he does all the time.
Contemplation can be described as the Contemplation of Light or the Contemplation of Darkness in so far as it is experienced by the receiver. At the beginning of the Mystic Way Contemplation is always experienced, and therefore described, as the ‘Contemplation of Darkness’. That is because God‘s love initially highlights all the sinfulness, all the evils that are present in us that prevent the union with himself, which has been his plan for humanity from the outset.
That is why in the first nine or so chapters of his book ‘The Dark Night of the Soul’, St John of the Cross details the sinfulness that rules from within the nether regions of our personalities and the sins that they induce us to fall into. Once a person has been sufficiently purified then we begin to experience, in some comparatively small measure, what we will experience without measure in the next life. These experiences are best detailed in St Teresa of Avila’s masterpiece, ‘Interior Castle’.
A Colourful metaphor
The ‘Contemplation of Darkness’ and the ‘Contemplation of light’ can be best imagined by likening them to colour. At first the contemplation of Darkness begins as hardly more than a shade of grey, so subtle that it is hardly detectable, but it gradually deepens to pitch black with every shade of grey in between, but of course only for those who persevere in this purification.
Exactly the same happens with the ‘Contemplation of Light’ until what appears at first to be a subtle shade of yellow finally becomes true gold, shining with glory. Confusion often muddles students as different mystics often give different names to different shades of black or yellow. Although it may seem logical for the ‘Contemplation of Light’ to follow when once the ‘Contemplation of Darkness’ has been completed, both come and go throughout the Mystic Way as inseparable and indispensable experiences that characterize mystical purification in this life.
That is, at least, until a person arrives at the Mystical Marriage when the contemplation of light finds its continual consummation, that not only involves the mind, or what some mystics call the ‘apex mentis’ but the body too, that has been transformed and transfigured in the mystical purification.
David Torkington’s latest book outlining the journey from Vocal prayer, through meditation to Mystical Contemplation can be found at The Primacy of loving – David Torkington