Joining friends in prayer for the Pentecost vigil stirred up for me so many thoughts and feelings about this pilgrimage that is the spiritual life. It is amazing to me how powerful and yet how intangible is that interior battle.
"The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh weak." - Matthew 26:41
Sometimes it seems incredibly tempting to turn away from the battle and follow the easier path of doing my own will since I seem to keep trying to do that anyway even when I disguise it as trying to surrender to God's will. I hear that those who choose to follow that path do not have to face temptations. After all, if they are already doing what the enemy wants, why would he bother with them?
I used to think that once one followed the path of holiness, it would become easier to choose the right. Yet the opposite seems true: those who choose to face that battle find it grow harder day by day.
As my grandma has reminded me, the closer we go to the light, the deeper are the shadows.
Although the battle grows harder day by day and the shadows deeper, there is no surrender, however dearly-bought, that does not allow the Lord to work. Opening one's heart in surrender and trying to empty out the desire for anything but Him alone may allow the enemy to attack with all manner of doubts and the heart to rise up in rebellion, but grace remains.
"For the flesh has desires against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; these are opposed to each other, so that you may not do what you want." - Galatians 5:17
Saint Paul was a man of great wisdom, as is my friend who gave me this scripture verse in answer to my questioning about this interior battle and the heart's rebellion. I tend to think that any sin—or even resistance to God—spoils the good that I wish to do. Yet I must realize that is the attitude of pride: it comes from the self who wishes to be perfect and to do great things for its own glory.
The sword of truth cuts deep. It must, for it must pierce between our illusions and the reality of God.
So long as we form our own ideas of God and what it means to please Him and belong to Him, we rush toward a fearsome precipice. This is to build our own idols in the place of God. We may find ourselves creating schemes of grandeur for our service in His sight also that we may find our worth, but our true value lies in belonging to Him alone.
We are already His. We need to prove nothing to become the children of God. For He has already purchased us with the price of His blood. All we need to do is learn to accept that reality and open our hearts to being His in all our apparent weakness and uselessness.
Otherwise, we risk losing our very selves. In the words of Father Thomas Merton (shared providentially today by another good friend):
"Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self.
"This is the man that I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him. And to be unknown of God is altogether too much privacy.
"My false and private self is the one who wants to exist outside the reach of God's will and God's love - outside of reality and outside of life. And such a self cannot help but be an illusion.
"We are not very good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves - the ones we are born with and which feed the roots of sin. For most of the people of the world, there is no great subjective reality than this false self of theirs, which cannot exist. A life devoted to the cult of this shadow is what is called a life of sin.
"All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my own egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered. Thus I use up my life in the desire for pleasures and the thirst for experiences, for power, honor, knowledge, and love, to clothe this false self and construct its nothingness into something objectively real. And I wind experiences around myself and cover myself with pleasures and glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and to the world, as if I were an invisible body that could only become visible when something visible covered its surface.
"But there is no substance under the things with which I am clothed. I am hollow, and my structure of pleasures and ambitions has no foundation. I am objectified in them. But they are all destined by their very contingency to be destroyed. And when they are gone there will be nothing left of me but my own nakedness and emptiness and hollowness, to tell me that I am my own mistake."
In that void—when we are emptied of all our illusions—we come to the feet of our Lord and Master. There we begin to receive true love: the love that counters all the deceits of the enemy and reveals how irreplaceable we are in the eyes of Christ, who longs for our friendship more than we can ever imagine. When we allow that love to fill us, then our emptiness becomes transformed into something beautiful.
May the Holy Spirit bring us to that emptiness, and to the shores of mercy, by our own consent!
Veni Sancte Spiritus!
On this Solemnity of the Sacred Heart, that is exactly what He is asking us, just as He does every day of our lives. He longs so much for our love that He has given Himself to the last drop. Now He asks the same of us.
