My prayer, as always, is that I am going to be able to love and lift you a little so that you can love and lift all you ve been given.

Transcription

1 L IS FOR LISTEN JULY 17, 2017 My prayer, as always, is that I am going to be able to love and lift you a little so that you can love and lift all you ve been given. We are in our LOVE the Word series. We are in show number 3. We are talking today about Listening. We have looked at the LOVE the Word series in an overview and I gave you kind of an outline of what we re going to cover. We looked at Lectio Without the Latin. We looked at the history of Lectio Divina and what it means and what the stages are and the Benedictines from whence it came. Today we are going to talk about listening, the L part of the LOVE the Word. L is Listen, O is Observe, V is Verbalize or Visualize, E is Entrust. We are on the L today, talking about listening. As I mentioned a couple of shows ago, or even in each show, the whole premise behind the LOVE the Word came from a quote that I used in my book Unleashed where Pope Francis gave an address in St. Peter s Square back in 2013 and he talked about Mary as the Mother of Listening. He said What gave rise to Mary s act of going to visit her relative Elizabeth? A word of God s angel. Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son. Mary knew how to listen to God. But be careful, it was not merely hearing a superficial word, it was listening that consists of attention, acceptance, and availability to God. It was not in the distracted way with which we sometimes face the Lord or others. We hear their words but we do not really listen. Mary is attentive to God. She listens to God. That is what we are going to look at today. We are going to look at what listening really is. It s not just the hearing or just the reading. He even says that to be distracted means that we hear their words but we don t really listen. The parallel would be when we are reading the daily readings, or whatever we are reading, to do our Scripture time with God we read the words but we re not really listening for his voice. How do we do that? He tells us that it consists of attention, acceptance, and availability to God. What I d like to do is talk about several things. We are going to look at the stages of prayer in the mystical tradition of the church, and we are going to look at the Doctors of Prayer: Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, and we are going to look at those stages. I mentioned a little bit about them last week but I want to go through the whole outline of what those stages are because that teaches us how to listen. What we are doing is praying we are praying with the scriptures. I must say that when I came into the Church the whole Carmelite thing was a bit of a surprise to me. In Nashville near where I live we have a very vibrant Dominican community. It s growing, it s young, it s enormous, and it seemed like a natural fit for me. It s very close to home, within an hour drive, and there is a lay Dominican community there and they meet every month. It was natural for me because of what I do, my ministry, it seemed like the perfect fit. So, I went, I started going, and I did not like it. I don t know what it was about it. My favorite part about it was being at the convent, especially during Vespers. The prayer was the part that I loved the most, which was strange to me because Dominicans are teachers. It s a natural charism. I just remember going to the meetings and I dreaded the readings. It just wasn t fitting. I talk about it in terms, ladies (and even gentleman), you know how it is when you re dating somebody who should fit but they don t? You force it, you try so hard because you really like the person and you see how great a mate they might be or what a good match they should be, but something is just off and you can t put your finger on it. That s where the old thing comes from It s not you it s mean. Let s just be friends. You just can t force it when it doesn t fit. I was in Columbus. I was doing a retreat for deacon s wives and it was in the St. Therese 1 P a g e

2 Retreat Center up in Columbus. What a gorgeous place. It s quiet, it s secluded, and it had a very old feel to it. It is old. I remember being there and I had a book on St. Therese. My godfather always sent me books. Anytime I expressed an interest in something he would send me like 5 books. It got the point I didn t even tell him anymore because he would send me all these books, which I love but I didn t want to take advantage. So here I was, at the St. Therese Retreat Center, reading a book about St. Therese. I have been to the chapel. I have seen her relic because they had relics there. It just struck me suddenly. I had been trying so hard for this Dominican thing to work. I texted my godfather and said This is really weird. I m here at the St. Therese Retreat Center reading this book that you gave me on St. Therese, I ve been the chapel and her relics are here. And he said Sonja. Just ask her what she wants. And I though Oh Yeah. You know, converts that s not the first thing we think of. So, I went back to the chapel and I said St. Therese? What is it you wanted to say to me? And she did. And it has been a consistent sort of inside joke between the 2 of us. She sends me this particular phrase and I see it everywhere. Not as much now but I saw it all the time then, at least once a week, and so I know that s her. My point, though, is that I tried so hard to be a Dominican but what I realized at that retreat center, praying in that chapel with her, that I was being called to the Carmelites. Everything that I have read, everything I read that led me into the Church as far as prayer and that sort of thing, all of that was Carmelite. I thought Oh my gosh, I wonder if there is a Third Order Carmelite and sure enough there was. One of the things that really struck me about the Carmelites is how deeply rooted in the Scriptures they are. That was the surprise when I went and got the compilation of St. John of the Cross s writings. I started in The Dark Night of the Soul and in that he begins with a review of the other steps, and I will get to those in a few minutes. He sort of did a little review and it was just enough of a synopsis to get me sucked in and I was like Oh my gosh, there s me. Oh my gosh, I do that. Because he names out all of these faults and sins in each of the stages. I was sitting there reading and he just cut me to the quick. Here I thought I was so spiritual and I spent all this time in the Bible and all of this and here St. John of the Cross just goes Oh you think so? You got your big girl panties on but you re not doing so hot. And I loved it. I loved it because he used the Scriptures to teach me in a way that I had never been taught before. It was so deep and so spiritual. I felt such a kinship with him that I took his name. He is my patron saint. The tradition of the Carmelites is just steeped in the Scriptures. When I did some research on the Carmelite Third Order and I started going to formation classes and meetings and the readings they gave us were all on the Scriptures I knew I had found my home. It just quiets me in a way that nothing else does. There is something about knowing that you are connected that way to a whole order or a whole group of people. That is the tradition, the lens, through which I am presenting to you the LOVE the Word method and the whole idea of it. Lectio Divina is so important. It is just so important to everybody s spiritual life. You just can t get away from it. The Catechism tells us that it is part of the one table. If you don t have both parts of the table, the Scriptures AND the Eucharist, then you are missing half the table, Dear One. We don t want to be malnourished. Non-Catholics have the Scriptures and they feed on that. Catholics have the Eucharist and they feed on that but we are just now getting to the point where we are mushing the two of those things together. I believe there is going to be an enormous wave of unity. There is an enormous wave of unity on the horizon. We talked about this in the End Times teachings. The Scriptures are the key to that. The Scriptures are what unite us. As Catholics learn more about it and non-catholics see Scriptures through the lens of the Church, and Church history especially, we re going to be on fire. If you re not already on this LOVE the Word series then I think you re going to be before it s over with. So, we re talking about Listening to the Word today. We know logically that listening is not just reading the Scriptures or reading the Bible. I have a friend who loves to post on Facebook what he s 2 P a g e

3 reading in the Bible. He s trying to read through the whole Bible in a year, and he did it last year too. So, he just reads and reads and reads. I m not sure but maybe he does, I m not making a judgement here but it seems like his goal is just to get through it. It s not actually to hear God speak. In LOVE the Word we are not doing exposition, which means we are not trying to extract information from the text, though that will naturally happen because you will be drawn to certain things and you ll have questions about stuff. If you want to read about that it s all covered in my new book with Deacon Harold Burke Sivers, Ignite. We are talking there about how to read the Bible. It gives you specific information on the background and things like that which is helpful as you read the Bible because you are going to have natural questions and things that come up as you re doing this. That s why I say the Carmelites were so important to me. After I came into the Church, what I realize that all that had gone before in the Bible that had gotten me so far I mean I got so very far in my practice just through Lectio Divina, and when I say that I mean in the stages of prayer. The Bible, when you approach it in this Lectio Divina way which is traditional throughout the Church and Church history when you approach the Bible this way God truly transforms you. That is what it is so necessary for Catholics who have only ever just had the Eucharist to really begin embracing the Scripture practices of the Church too. This is the thing: As a non-catholic I did get really far but you can t become one with God in unity, truly, unless you ve received the Eucharist. The Eucharist is Him. It is Him giving himself body, blood, soul, and divinity to you. It completes your scripture practice. You have to have both. Both are very important and I wanted to be careful to point that out for you non-catholics who are listening and going Yeah, I don t need the Eucharist. YES YOU DO. Because the Eucharist is Him. It s not that He s not everywhere else too, it s that Jesus is present uniquely in the Scriptures in a way that he is not present anywhere else. Not in the Scriptures, not anywhere else. That s why when He talks in John 6 he says His flesh is true food and his blood is true drink. He is talking both about the Scriptures earlier on in that chapter but also about the Eucharist. He talks about His flesh and His blood. The new covenant is Him in His person. It is not symbolic of the Scriptures. The new covenant is Him in His person. We receive the new covenant by receiving Him in that Eucharist. The two go hand in hand. You have to have both. When we are listening we are not just reading the Bible. You can read passage after passage and book after book but you haven t really prayed if you ve not discerned God there as a person and adjusted your life to what you ve heard, what He s said to you. Mary does that. She goes further than just hearing or reading the Word. We talked about this in the Magnificat series quite a bit, but I love that St. Catherine Emmerich says that when Mary receives the Word of God at the Annunciation she is alone in silence in her chamber praying for the promised Messiah. She is attentive and available. Remember there were 3 things that Pope Francis said: He talked about attention, acceptance, and availability to God. Attention is just being present, being present every day in a disciplined way. I don t want to harp on the time of day, I really don t, but it is really important because the Bible says it s important to approach the Scriptures in the morning. I understand, people who are morning people. I am not a morning person. But it begins the day and sanctifies the day and consecrates the day to God right out of the chute. You haven t screwed up and cussed somebody out on the road or sinned 5 minutes after your feet have hit the floor because 5 minutes after your feet hit the floor you re in your prayer time. It s important to make a habit. Listening consists of attention. We must make a habit. I am so happy to hear from so many of you who are attempting to do this with me in LOVE the Word on a regular basis. That s the reason I do this show every week. If it s too hard to do every day, and maybe it is to begin with, especially if you have little ones if it s too hard to do a whole hour just start with the Gospel reading on a daily basis and do that. You will find that you naturally work up to an hour very easily. The more you get the hang of it, the more you practice, and the more God speaks to you, you re going to be hooked. I promise. 3 P a g e

4 Before we jump into the stages of prayer and the stages of listening, I want to talk just a little bit about another thing that is important, and another thing that Mary illustrated for us in her listening is what Pope Francis called acceptance. She was humble, meaning when God spoke to her, she assented. My point, Dear One, is when God comes to you and He says to you You need to correct so-and-so behavior or You need to try to mend so-and-so relationship or You need to separate yourself from that person who gets you in trouble and helps you fall into sin maybe it s some sort of active sin or a gossipy sin, I don t know. Whatever it is. When God speaks to you He s speaking about YOU. Not the other people in your life, not the people in your relationships, He s talking about you. So when you hear God speaking to you through a verse you have to think to yourself, God is speaking to me about this. Where is this in my life? We ll get to that next week when we talk about Observation and Observing. Part of acceptance is that humility of being willing to say yes to God no matter what He says. The overarching thing that is so good about Lectio Divina is you can hear God tell you the truth about yourself and you can receive that self knowledge that He shows you in prayer, and He will not break the bruised reed in you. I don t know how He does it but He tells you the absolute bald-faced truth but it s so gentle and it makes it so easy to say Yes Lord, you re right. Could you please help me get rid of this? I m so thankful for that. I am already naturally so critical of myself and I take criticism very deeply, so I just appreciate that about Him a lot. He makes it easy for us to have that acceptance. The attention and the availability are the habit of prayer. They are getting into a quiet space, carving out a place in your home, wherever it is. If you have small children or a really busy schedule or whatever it is, I understand. I truly understand busyness, but I m telling you it is necessary to have that time with Him in the Scriptures on a daily basis. And you know that, that s why you re here. Whatever you have to do, do it. Part of the fun, I have always thought, in preparing for your time with God is preparing. You get your tea or coffee or whatever you like, you get your journal, you get your favorite Bible, you get your favorite Rosary, you have your little corner, you might say a specific prayer. And that s fun. Those things are fun, but we ll find out in the moment they can also be an impediment. Before we cover those stage of prayer I want to talk about praying and listening with small children. If you have an under 2, we ll say, the squirmy and fidgety kids who just can t listen maybe even up to 4. Sometimes when they re little you just have to say Let the child come to me. What I did in the early days, first of all, was I got up too early for them to even get up. You know as well as I do, if you have small children you only have 2 windows: naptime and when they re in bed. That s it. You either get up really early, stay up really late, or you try to cram it in during naptime, and if you have more than one child that s not really practical. I ll tell you one thing that actually did work for me is when they were really little I would sit them in my lap and we would practice going to Mass. I would put them in my lap and I would tell them to be as quiet as they could possibly be. I d give them a toy with my boys it was always a Matchbox car. I would give them a Matchbox car and I would tell them they could play with this car but they had to be as quiet as they could possibly be for one minute. I would time them and I would let them see the timer, and I would sit them on my lap. Now listen, you re not going to get a whole lot of praying done, not yet, but you have lay the foundation. You have to teach all your peeps that this is your time. Don t sweat it just spend the time up front so that you have time later that is completely yours. So how do you carve the time out to listen to the word of God? Lord knows you re listening to all sorts of things when you have little kids but it s not always the Lord. As I said, one of the things I would do with my little ones is we would practice going to Mass. That s what I d tell them: We are going to 4 P a g e

5 practice going to Mass. I would put them in my lap and I would give them something to play with, something quiet that didn t make noise, unless it was dropped. If you can get a plush toy that s even better but my kids loved Legos and Matchbox cars. So I gave them a Matchbox car. And this also works if you work at a desk, if you re a writer or something like that, maybe a transcriptionist or you work from home and you re at your desk and you need to teach your kids how to sit quietly at Mass, this is how. You put them in your lap, you give them the little toy, and you tell them that they have to be as quiet as they can possibly be for one whole minute. They can play with their toy however but they have to be quiet with it. Mine always used to, if they were sitting in my lap at my desk or in my lap in my prayer corner, they would run their Hot Wheels up and down my legs but I wouldn t let them make the Vroom Vroom sound. They had to be very quiet and had to do completely silent for one minute. And then as soon as the one minute is over you put them down, shoo them away and you try to get in as much time as you can. Do this for 30 days and every single day increase the time by 1 minute. This seems like a huge project but I am telling you if you can do this you will have the rest of your life in Mass with quiet children and you will have a prayer time that no one will bother you in. But it take about 30 days of consistent concentrated effort to teach them how to be quiet for an hour. If it helps you can give them a baby wipe box with toys that are just their own, but I would encourage you to actually train them to be as quiet as possible for one whole hour. You have to lead up to that. As they got older I could up it by 5 minutes instead of 1, but when they are really little they need help. I promise you it really works! I know you are probably shaking your head going I don t know about that but I am telling you up front that it works. You have to put the work in up front but it pays these dividends for years and years and years later. It s that way with all parenting: If you ll just put in the effort up front you ll have a whole lot less headache down the road. That s how I did it. I taught my children from their very earliest days. I already had my Scripture habit in place when they were born so I had to help them respect that time. It was my time. It is still my time, still to this day. Part of what happens is they get in the habit of seeing you in the Scriptures. They get in the habit of knowing that you are praying. It teaches them how important prayer is and how important the Bible is. It teaches them how to be quiet for themselves so that when the time comes and they are able to get in the Scriptures on their own, you can help them with that and they know how to be quiet already. Quiet interiorly not just quiet on the outside but on the inside. It s very important that we get it right first so we can impart it to our children almost by osmosis. I hope that helps a little in 2 ways: First of all listening at Mass, but secondly listening to the Word at home with small children. It just takes a little effort up front. At this point I d like to talk about what listening means as far as prayer in the tradition of the Church. No one is better, in my opinion, than John of the Cross. He describes the stages of spiritual growth in 3 ways: Stage 1 is called the Purgative Way. It is the purging. This is where we get the word Purgatory. Stage 2 is the Illuminative Way. Stage 3 is the Unitive Way. Together Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, they say the same stuff in their respective works but they say it differently. Teresa of Avila talks about the Interior Castle and John of the Cross talks about these ways or these stages. I had a really hard time following Teresa of Avila because she s all over the place. I didn t with John of the Cross. I don t know what the difference was but I found him to be much easier to follow. I ll just warn you a lot of people can t read him. It s probably a temperament or personality kind of thing, I don t know. You can try it. You can find his collected works on Amazon. It s a great book by a guy named Kavanaugh who did the translation. Both Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross were Spanish saints. Stage 1, The Purgative Way. This is the beginning stage of the spiritual life. First of all, it really is an act of the will. We want to want to go to our prayer time, we want to feel like having our time with God in the Scriptures. That s all well and good but I promise you that you re not going to feel it, 5 P a g e

6 especially in the beginning. It is an act of will. You cannot let your feelings run the train. Your feelings are the caboose of this endeavor, of LOVE the Word. Your feelings are the caboose. This is true of every spiritual endeavor. We don t follow the feelings. You re not going to feel like getting up early and doing this. You re not going to feel like doing it when you don t feel anything. You re not going to feel like doing it when you think you re not hearing anything. You re not going to feel like it. You have to make your will the engine. I will to do this. I am going to do this every day. This is true of every spiritual endeavor, or any other endeavor. Your will is what leads. If your will doesn t lead you are not going to do it very long. You have to decide I m going to do this and then stick to it. That s why you start very small, just like we re teaching our children: one minute. You start as small as it takes to make sure you can do it every day, then you increase it a little at a time. This is very important because we fail before we ve ever begun because we have these lofty ideals about how it s supposed to be. Wipe that all away and start very, very small. You might think it s simplistic, you might think it s childish, whatever, that s fine. We re all spiritual children. Start as small as you need to in order to make sure you can do this every single day. If it s just 5 minutes make it 5, but do it every single day. In that beginning stage you have to decide it. You decide that you want to grow in your relationship to God. You decide that you want to spend the time with Him in the Scriptures. John of the Cross says this time is marked by 2 characteristics, one of which is you have great consolations. This word consolations, when I first came into the Church and I was reading John of the Cross I was like What the heck does this word mean? Consolation in Church history reading means the feelings of joy and devotion and happiness and excitement in the spiritual life. They are happy feelings. This is sometimes called sensual feelings, from the senses. As you stick with the habit God will give you these, the consolations. The opposite of a consolation is a desolation. It s a feeling of abandonment or dryness. Maybe it comes from poor decision making, maybe it s an attack of Satan, maybe God gives Satan permission so you can be purified, but desolations are the negative feelings. Consolations are good, that s the happy feelings. Desolation is bad it s not actually bad, it s good it just feels bad. Consolation and desolation, those are important if you are going to read any of the Doctors of the Church or the writings of the Church. Early on they all use these words. The very first stage, The Purgative Way, is marked by great consolations. It also is marked by the purification of sin and the over attraction of the pleasures of consolations. Consolations feel good and when you start out, once you ve proven yourself serious and somewhat disciplined, God will start sending you really happy feelings. You re going to love doing it. You re going to get a lot out of it. You are going to feel close to Him. That s good. What he is doing is He s giving you the cake. Actually, you re getting the spinach but it s tasting like cake. He s giving you the cake in order to help you with the habit. He wants you to instill the habit so he s helping you by giving you the happy feelings. Usually, I m telling you, it doesn t happen right away. You have to prove yourself faithful. You have to prove that you have decided that you want to do this. I want to grow. I want to grow, Lord. I m here everyday. When that happens and you have started on this trail, He will send you consolations. Usually what happens here is we are praying our rosary or we re in our Scriptures on a daily basis, whatever our discipline is, and God begins to convict us of our sin habits. This is where He begins talking to us about our relationships, our habits overdrinking, overspending, whatever. He starts to talk to us about our habits. He is purifying the outward sins. I talk about this in Unleashed. He begins with the outward and He works inward. It s like an onion out to in. He begins in the Purgative Way with the outward behavior and in order to temper that some He sends consolations. In the Purgative Stage we have made the decision to follow God and we are actively working to remove our sin habits or do add good habits. As you re using the LOVE the Word method that s what you re doing, if you ve never done it before or even if you have. The method works no matter what stage you re in. The method works no matter what one you re in. That s part of what s so wonderful about 6 P a g e

7 the Word of God. It doesn t matter what stage of prayer you re in and it doesn t matter what your temperament or personality is because it works no matter what. That s why I add those LOVE the Word meditations, the written exercises, in each of your weekly s. I want you to be able to get it in several different ways: multimedia. You re reading it, you re hearing it, you re watching the videos, you re getting the audio, all of it, and hopefully you re looking at the Scriptures on your own. That Purgative Way is actively purifying our lives. That means adding to the things that need to be added and taking away the things that need to be purified. That s why it s called the Purgative Way. We are actively working on our outward behaviors. In the beginning of this stage, in the beginning of the Purgative Way, we are given these sensible consolations: these happy sensations that are associated with our prayers and our sacrifices and our masses and all of that. Just about the time we get really comfortable with that and this whole stage can be many years, and for me it was it takes a long time, the stage is long, but at some point you are going to come to the realization that you re not feeling anything. It s going to become very dry. You might be in that stage right now where you re prayer is dry. You ve been doing this a long time. It used to be wonderful and then suddenly it just dried up, like God wasn t even there. The reason why is you re heading into the next stage. He takes away the feelings. He withdraws them because He wants you to search Him out for Himself alone and not the happy feelings. It s a similar thing that we do with our own children. We give them gifts but we don t want them to depend on them. So that s what God does. He kicks all the props out from under us. You will have gone to the Scriptures and you will have been nourished there, and then one day you will realize that you have been at this for a week or more, 2, 3, a month, and nothing is happening. You re still keeping your habit but God is not showing up. You re not being punished, you re actually being invited to the next stage. He is weaning you off of those happy feelings. He wants you to do what you re supposed to do just for the sake that it is right and virtuous. He removes the feelings and then he pushes you out there to do it anyway. Do it whether you feel like it or not. Usually you re in some sort of ongoing stress and fear at this point because you feel like God has abandoned you. You feel like you ve done something wrong and you re being punished but that s not the case at all. You re making great progress. Especially at this point you re avoiding mortal sins, you re avoiding attachments to the world. It s called the Illuminative Way because our hearts and minds become more enlightened with the practice of virtue. We have a greater desire for a union with God, not just in virtue but in every way. We long to be one with God but we realize our wills are not one yet. We really start to ratchet up our charitable works because we can see by our own behavior that our practice of virtue is actually doing us a lot of good even though we re not feeling a lot of happy feelings. We continue in it and we grow by leaps and bounds because suddenly we re not doing it because it feels good, we re doing it because it is good. The prayer that is most often associated in Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross with this stage is meditation. We see that also in the Catechism in You can meditate on the mysteries of the rosary, you can go to Ignatian retreats, our Lectio Divina is good here meditation is just the active mental work of chewing of what we are reading and listening to. In our case it would be our Lectio Divina, our LOVE the Word exercise, the Scriptures. We are chewing on what we are reading and what we re hearing at Mass. That s called meditation because it s a thought process. At this point we should desire silence in prayer. And there is a point where we are careful to have integrity in the things that we say and the things that we do, and especially in the motivations for our actions. God has begun with the outward and He is moving inward. Suddenly we re really starting to pay attention to the motivations behind why we are doing what we are doing, and we are doing that because He has removed the consolations. And we say to ourselves Why was I really doing this after all? Was I doing it because it felt good or because it was good? That introspection and that self-knowledge begins to really deepen our faith. It s not uncommon for this stage to last several years. 7 P a g e

8 When we are headed into the third stage, The Unitive Stage, things get very dark and we begin to suffer a lot. This can last several years. John of the Cross says the deeper God wants to form you and the more important that formation is the longer this particular purging lasts. In the first stage we re actively working with God to purge our life from bad behavior and we re adding good behavior. In the second stage, the purification that comes at the end of the second stage God does. What He does is he begins to make you long for quiet and silence and peace and prayer. You ll just want to sit there. This is where, really, you need to just sit with your Gospel reading and then just sit. Read it out of discipline and habit and duty and just sit with it. You probably will not have the desire at all to think about it and that s okay, what you really need to do is just sit. Just sit and rest in God and your soul is passively purified, John of the Cross says, and so does Teresa of Avila. This is a passive purification that occurs at the end of the Illuminative Way. At this point this passive purification requires God s intense work. You re going to experience a lot of desolation. In balance you are probably going to also experience some incredible consolations. There are lots of things that go along with this: spiritual betrothal and embrace and lots of other things that I don t have time to get into. You re consolations will be few and far between but when you do get them, they are going to be big. They are going to change you. This is what happened to Mother Teresa. When she had that experience on the trail and it changed her so deeply that she was able to spend all of those years in the complete lack of any comfort, spiritual or physical, for all those years of her life. That is the kind of consolation that you get in this stage. God sends you that consolation because the purification and desolation that are happening passively while you re resting in His presence out of love for Him and not the feelings but just Him, you re drawn to that silence and peace in His presence, and while you re there things are truly happening. John of the Cross says that during this stage you should just occupy your mind with God. Just sit in His presence. It s much easier to be recollected in peace. Your mind doesn t wander around so much, you feel much more rooted and at peace, you re much more restful. You can experience joy and not just happiness. You have a deep and abiding joy. That s what happens in the latter part of the Purgative Way. It is a passive purification that leads into the third stage, which is the Unitive Way. There are still purifications in that Illuminative Way but usually with dryness, boredom, trials, and darkness. A lot of time you will experience a lot of external sufferings: persecution from other people, slander, enormous loss of some sort, maybe the physical loss, a death, anything that is a monumental upheaval in your spiritual or physical and temporal life. He permits these things because they fortify our faith. He is not punishing you, Dear One. If you are there, you are not being punished. You are being drawn more deeply into Him. You should persevere. Just push through it with constancy in your prayer. Show up to LOVE the Word every day. Show up every day. Read that Gospel reading and just let Him do that work. That s what we re doing in that stage. That leads into the Unitive Way. That is the third stage. It is the way of those who have persevered to that general state of desiring God s will only. This is the stage that they call perfection, but it doesn t mean that you re perfect. It means that you re mature. Perfection in Biblical or spiritual terms means to be mature. That s what s happening here in this stage. You re almost completely detached from your ego, from any desire to be praised, you don t care about any of that, you don t care about the worries of the world, you don t care about materialism, you don t care about anything except what God wants. These are the people who are great peacemakers because they experience their day-today trials but they don t affect them much. They have found a peace that is not dependent on the world. It is unchanging, unwavering. It s a perfect peace. The peace that passes all understanding, the Bible calls it. It is also called the state of perfect charity because we are oriented to serving the other person. Our person is to serve other people, so our orientation is outward. It s very apostolic. All we care about is whatever God cares about. That s what happens in this stage. It s called the Unitive Way because our will has finally become one with God. We just want what He 8 P a g e

9 wants. If He sends desolation we re fine with that. If He sends consolation we re fine with that. If He takes away something from our life we re fine with that. If He sends us a winning lottery ticket, we re happy to have that too and whatever God wants us to do with that money is fine with us. That s what happens in this stage. When you ve reached this stage, Dear One, you have reached contemplation and that is the highest love of God. Mary teaches us how to reach this stage of prayer -- contemplation. We are loving the Word the way Mary loves the Word. Next week we are going to talk about how to Observe. 9 P a g e