SPIRITUAL ACCOMPANIMENT: LOVE
AND ITS TRANSFORMATIONS
LILIENFELD 4
I BESEECH YOU
BROTHERS, . . . BE TRANSFORMED IN THE NEWNESS OF YOUR MIND THAT YOU MIGHT
DISCERN WHAT IS THE GOOD AND WELL PLEASING AND PERFECT WILL OF GOD (Romans 12: 1, 2).
Discernment, as
Love supplies the energy that
brings about the transformations which are required for the fashioning of the
new man in his maturity. Again it is
And he gave
some to be apostles, others prophets, others evangelists, others pastors and
teachers for the perfecting of the saints in view of the work of service, for
the building up of the body of Christ, so that we might no longer be children,
tossed about and carried away by every wind of teaching in the craftiness of
men, in their malicious deceitfulness of error. Rather we are to practice the
truth in charity so as to grow up in all ways in him who is the head, Christ
(Ephesians 4: 11-15).
So it is by ‘practicing the truth
in charity’, following up the gift of new life at baptism with deeds of love in
conformity with the heavenly realities that give substance to truth, that we
are to fulfill our destiny as mature members of the body of Christ. This
constitutes a dynamic view of the life of the Christian. It presents life and
our way of employing God’s gifts and the use we make of the opportunities of
our condition as a developing process that calls for a willingness to leave the
familiar behind as we advance into the future; we must avoid the human tendency
to repose in the enjoyment of the attainments we acquire. This process is
ordered to culminate in a superior state of being, a maturity that represents
the ‘perfecting of the saints’, united with the head, Christ. All too often
psychotherapy and counseling have as their goal a better adaptation to the
world as it is. This aim in some situations is good in itself and necessary; in
many cases it is not adaptation but a new direction of the whole of life that
is the proper goal, a conversion. Anything less is inadequate for a number of
reasons, chiefly because of what it excludes. Even where it is appropriate
adaptation is but the first in a long series of stages of growth. The
aspirations for a fuller life, knowledge and love of truth and lasting beauty,
communion with all that is good and wholesome, and possessing these things in
an absolute manner, not subject to diminution or transience and yet filled with
the movement of life, in short, union with God is what measures man’s spirit.
The Christian is to be on the move as he goes through life, not only in his
outward behavior but also and above all, his inner dispositions and aspirations
are to progress to ever fuller, more complete attunement to the manifestations
of God. Paul had stated just prior to the phrase urging transformation in the
text cited at the head of this conference that we should ‘not be conformed to
this world’.
The energy that is required by
this life-long movement that refashions our whole personality in all its
elements into a creature ready for eternal participation in God’s life is
supplied by love. God’s love for us, agape, and our complex love for God which
is composed of both human and divine elements. Natural desire, Eros, itself is
complex, being manifold in its aims and in its manner of functioning. For
desire is not the child of want (πεvία) only, as Plato
taught; desire is fed also by possession of the good. Father Sebastian Moore
has explored in a fruitful analysis this positive manner of viewing desire.[i][i] It is precisely because we
already know, by possession, how sweet and joyous life can be that we desire it
in its absolute fullness. It is the person in health, not the sick, who has
appetite for food that maintains and increases his healthy state. The
philosophical tradition has had all too little to say in concrete detail
concerning interpersonal relations, and possibly Fr. Moore is on the right
track when he ascribes this serious lack to the failure to recognize this
positive element in desire.
Although his explanation was
ultimately reductionistic in ascribing Eros and its transformations to
sexuality in its subtle (infantile) and more overt (genital) manifestations,
yet Freud has the merit of calling attention to the pervasive nature of Eros as
the motive force generating the energy invested in significant persons
beginning with infancy and strongly active in early childhood. Subsequent explorations of human relations
and their role in the development of the individual personality, have all been
largely indebted to Freud’s early work, even while rejecting, as most
psychotherapists do today, his exaggerated emphasis on the sexual in the
formation of character and in the causality of neurosis and other psychic
disorders. Some, such as Karen Horney and Eric Erickson, quietly paid little
attention to the more extreme views of Freud concerning sexual motivation in
development and in disorders of the psyche and mind and as they built up their
own theories of psychic functioning and of the formation of neuroses. At the same time, they made such use of those
of his ideas and insights as provided a plausible basis for a schema of
development that stressed interpersonal relations much more than the biological
drives and bodily functions that were the basis for Freud’s manner of viewing
the stages of human development. Even those men of great talent, such as Jung
and Adler who reacted forcibly against his emphasis on the sexual origin of
psychic energy and elaborated original theories at variance with Freud’s, were
greatly in his debt for certain of the most basic intuitions to which Freud
gave expression and directed attention.
Significantly it was attention to
Eros, the god of love, that led to the intensified study of human relations and
their role in psychic unfolding and soul making that has characterized modern
thought. We see many exaggerations in our culture that have arisen as a
consequence of this emphasis of the interpersonal: many persons give too great
a place to feeling, to the subjective and manifest an over-sensitivity to
offending others even when justice and charity call for correction. There is
given too little importance to hard fact (history is what you choose to make
it) and truth in its transcending and absolute character is hardly accepted as
existing in many circles. Still, this recognition that the inter-personal is a
key element that contributes decisive form to the psychic energies as they
arise in our depths has opened new possibilities of understanding of our human
nature, and has provided a corrective to the too negative view of the human
person that considered desire too exclusively as expressive of poverty and
lack.
Desire is generated by love. And
love, Jesus has made clear, is the chief, ultimately even the sole measure of
our worth in God’s eyes. One cannot speak of love without reference to desire,
at least by implication, and that is the case whether the beloved is present or
absent. Gregory of Nyssa maintained this would remain characteristic of our
union with God throughout eternity, in the beatific vision, with this
distinctive difference that desire would have nothing restless or unfulfilled
coloring it; on the contrary, the very repletion of the desire for God’s beauty
and truth will serve to stimulate further desire to penetrate more fully into
his mysterious being. This view of what is denominated epectasis brings out the positive element in desire that, to our
loss, so frequently goes unrecognized.
Not always is it overlooked,
however, as the teaching of St. Gregory of Nyssa shows. St. Bernard too
appreciated the advantage of perceiving desire in its affirmative aspect and
commented that we would not seek God unless we already had found him in some
manner. Thus encouraging us to discern in our desire for God a pledge that he
has first communicated himself to us in some hidden but real fashion. That such
encouragement is badly needed will be obvious to anyone who has listened to
many life stories. The problem of the false self with all its disastrous
consequences in the form of alienation from what is potentially a source of
fulfillment in one’s true self, of inability to enter into intimate relations
of friendship, of lack of trust and healthy belief in God and a host of others,
is in some measure inherent in the human condition since the fall. Karen Horney
has, better than any other analyst, shown in her descriptions of the
manifestations of this pseudo-self, the dynamics operative in a large sector of
human behavior that contributes to unhappiness.[ii][ii] Accordingly she envisages the therapeutic
goal as the discovery of the ‘true self’ and its liberation from the crippling
and distorting influences of oppressive and arbitrary inner forces. While she does not enlist spiritual realities
in her approach, her identification of the problem and its manifestations
proves very helpful for many in the search for self-knowledge of the affective
life. Obviously, her schema requires to be supplemented by the spiritual
tradition, and such doctrines as the image and likeness anthropology, but she
fills in large gaps in the area of human character study and personality
development.
I stated above that one cannot
speak of love without reference to desire. The converse is also the case:
desire is inextricably bound to love. We simply presume that what any one
desires he loves. It is not surprising then to discover how prominent a role is
assigned to both love and desire in the spiritual life and what attention both
have received from the greatest of spiritual teachers and directors. The two
who were the most influential teachers of our Cistercian fathers have long been
recognized as the most helpful Patristic authorities in regard to these two
topics.
St. Gregory here opens an
illuminating window on his method of spiritual accompaniment. In his concern to
stimulate desire, he chooses as a means the practice of lectio divina, to the
kind of reading that leads to union with God. When he states that it is the
heart of God, ‘cor Dei’, that we learn through Scripture study he directs
reading more to love than to increase of knowledge. He does not say that we learn sacred
theology, the history of the people of God, the style of sacred Scripture and
its literary genres. Of course, he was
attentive to these matters as far as the learning of his day permitted, and he
obviously had studied the Bible with a view to cultivating such knowledge. But he did not stop there; nor does he want
his readers to do so. We are to pass
through the words of the sacred text to the very heart of the Divine Person who
inspired them. The prayerful study of
Scripture leads us to the depths of God's own being, which he refers to here as
‘cor Dei’. Incidentally, though Gregory could not yet be conscious of a form of
devotion that would take form only centuries later, he prepares the way for its
growth when he makes the ‘cor Dei’ the object of Scriptural reading.
St. Thomas Aquinas, moreover, actually
takes this step of discovering in his reading of Scripture the Heart of
Jesus as the key. In a memorable passage
he makes a most interesting reflection on the relation between understanding
Scripture's true meaning and the heart of Christ.
The phrase
"heart of Christ" can refer to Sacred Scripture which makes known his
heart, closed before the Passion, as the Scripture was obscure. But the Scripture has been opened since the Passion; since those who from then
on have understood it, consider and discern in what way the prophecies must be
interpreted.[iv][iv]
This passage was taken up in the
New Catechism, as Fr. Chrysogonus has recently pointed out.[v][v] It shows how Thomas' insight, and as we have
seen this applies by implication to St. Gregory as well, in this passage is in
harmony with one of the three criteria for Scriptural interpretation set forth
in Vatican II (DV 12¶4) , which it cites and glosses in the following terms.
Be especially
attentive "to the content and unity of the whole of Scripture". Different as the books which comprise it may
be, Scripture is a unity by reason of the unity of God's plan, of which Christ
Jesus is the center and heart, open since the Passover.[vi][vi]
Thus Gregory’s concern to
stimulate desire for God in giving spiritual direction, is conveyed through
insistence on the very concrete means of lectio divina. St. Ignatius Loyola in
the same line as Gregory stresses repeatedly in the course of his Spiritual
Exercises the need to clarify one’s desires. In order the better to discern and
choose God’s will we must know our own. The spiritual director does well to
heed this basic truth. Our most deeply rooted desires are so readily disguised
even from ourselves that we fail to know they are motivating us. We easily
develop false expectations whether of ourselves or others or, more commonly
perhaps, both. Often enough we are driven or at least influenced by conflicting
desires that result in frustration of our best efforts. The first step toward
eliminating those which are problematical is to discern their existence.
Ignatius was keenly sensitive to this requirement of progress and so he urges
that the retreatant asks himself what he truly wants. If an obese man wants to
lose weight but also allays anxiety every time he feels it by eating to excess,
he will find himself constantly frustrated and so susceptible to frequent feelings
of anxiety. The same law is operative on the level of the spirit as with the
psyche and the affections: incompatible desires existing side by side result in
self-defeat and frustration. Recognizing
the existence of such dividedness is the first step in removing the conflict
through the right ordering of desire. That can be achieved only by the right
ordering of love. Discerning the precise desires operative in our choices and
plans, our relationships and our hopes is the way to discovering the state of
our loves. Such recognition puts us in a position to take more efficacious
means to harmonize our loves, to set love in proper order. That spiritual
directors need to give special attention to his task of examining the nature of
love, its kinds and fruits, the way it operates in relation to the manifold
areas of life too often overlooked. Learning to speak without embarrassment of
such feelings and experiences of the love of God is a neglected task for most
persons of our culture. If it is not done in spiritual accompaniment where will
it seem appropriate? This is, in my considered opinion and experience, one of
the more pressing challenges of spiritual direction in our times.
In our society, such discussion is
increasingly left to fundamentalists whose manner of expression and narrow
views concerning religion all too regularly tend to compromise in the opinion
of others the very real love of God they possess. Noting the absence of
discourse on the love of God among believers, including priests and religious,
a few years ago a professor of moral theology at the Jesuit School of Theology
at Weston, Father Edward Vacek, published an article in which he shares his own
observations and reflections on this phenomenon. He entitles it The Eclipse of Love of God.[vii][vii] Here are his opening lines.
When David
Hare interviewed clergy as part of his research for his play, "Racing
Demons," he ran into a problem:
None of the priests wanted to talk about God. One of the disturbing questions his play
raises is whether Christians, with the exception of a few fanatical
fundamentalists, are concerned about loving God. In my own conversations with Christians, I
find that almost all of them talk approvingly of love for others, some talk
confidently about God's love for us,. but few are willing to talk about their
love for God.
This phenomenon is not altogether
new, to be sure. Of course, it is one thing to love God, quite another to talk
about that love. As I indicated above,
it is not necessarily those who love God most who are best qualified to discuss
or write about their relation to Him
Take, for example, The Sayings of the Fathers, which reflects the
experience in the desert of Egypt at the beginning of monastic life, a time of
notable sanctity of life. In the
numerous paragraphs that make up this collection, how few there are that speak
of the love of God explicitly! In the collection that lists the Sayings
according to subject one of the topics treated is ‘Charity’, however, all 25 of
those listed refer to fraternal charity not love of God as such. These holy men
felt great reticence before so exalted a topic, in spite of their obvious love
for God, so that they spoke of it but rarely.
However, I believe it would not be too difficult to show how, in the background
of their teaching, the theme of love for God is ever present, and in fact
motivates and inspires the great care these men took to purify the heart and
prepare themselves for seeing God, for living with him in glory.
Father Vacek's observations, it should be noted, go beyond
the question of speaking about the love of God with others; he raises the more
basic issue as to whether believers still consider the love of God to be an
important reality in their lives. It is
not easy to evaluate people's answers to the questions he posed them. In such a matter as this many will not be
able to reply off‑hand at any deeper level; some, if helped, might come
to recognize in themselves a hidden love for God which they had never become
consciously aware of to a point where they would name it as such. Still the answers he got to the questions he
put do reveal that more attention needs to be given in preaching, teaching, and
in prayer to this theme of our own love for God.
When people replied, for example,
to the question,"What do you mean by love for God?" all replied with
answers like "Helping one's neighbor", or "caring for the
poor", or "respecting your
deepest self". The author points
out that many atheists do all these things and consider them responsibilities. Even some theologians give very
unsatisfactory answers to this question, he notes, such as saying that God does
not need our love. The author finds all
this very unsatisfactory, and gives it as his opinion that it is not enough to
love creatures; if we wish to develop as full human beings we must love God
Himself. We are made for Him and unless
we enter into a direct relation with him we cannot become ourselves, or even
remain healthy human persons. Moreover,
the first commandment makes it our primary duty to love God; the second
commandment does not substitute for the first but rather grows out of it.
I believe that Fr. Vacek is on to
something important for all of us today.
It is challenging to face the issue head on: "Do I really love
God?" Perhaps the first thing many
of us need to do before we try to answer that question is to clarify what we
mean by love,. There are different kinds
of love, after all, and distinguishing them can help us to discern more
precisely our relationship with our heavenly Father and the other two persons
of the Trinity. We can love God for his
own sake, we can love him for our sake and we can love him with the love of
friendship, that is, for the happiness of sharing the things we treasure with
God. This last contains some elements of
the first two but adds to them the concept of mutuality.
St Bernard saw the immediate
purpose of the whole of the ascetic and spiritual life as an attempt to order
charity and spoke of this undertaking in his Sermons on the Canticle. He was
following in the steps of
Phaedrus, the
argument has not been set before us, I think, quite in the right form;‑
we should not be called upon to praise Love in such an indiscriminate
manner. If there were only one Love,
then what you said would be well enough;
but since there are more Loves than one, you should have begun by determining
which of them was to be the theme of our praises. I will amend this defect;; and first of all I
will tell you which Love is deserving of praise, and then try to hymn the
praiseworthy one in a manner worthy of him.[viii][viii]
Pausanus, whose words I have just cited,
goes on to distinguish two types of love: the one he calls common; it is that
of meaner types of men, and is rather of the body than of the soul; the other
Love is heavenly. It is free of wanton
behavior, noble in its manner and purposes, and faithful throughout life. While his concept of heavenly love has
certain other features that we can hardly agree with, yet he does us the
service of showing the need to distinguish among loves before speaking of them.
All too few persons seem to have the ability and inclination to engage in such
discriminating consideration on this subject which plays such a major role in
every one’s life. One who did have both
the appreciation of the fundamental importance of love and the talent required
to analyze its workings was St. Augustine of Hippo. He had learned much on this
theme and on the spiritual life in general from Plato and his later followers,
but still more from his meditation on the New Testament and often commented on
his views. The following is one of the clear statements on this theme.
By charity,
therefore, it happens that we are conformed to God . . . what else is there
that is best for man, save that he clings to the one who is the most blessed?
That is certainly God, to whom we cannot adhere except by love, affection and
charity? . . . But if virtue leads us to the happy life, I would affirm that
there is no virtue save the highest love.[ix][ix]
Augustine then completes his
argument by pointing out that precisely because virtue leads to the happy life,
it must be ordered to the highest Good, which is God himself, the Blessed Trinity. This is achieved through the operation of
charity.[x][x] In another context the bishop of Hippo
defined virtue as ‘the order of love’[xi][xi] Men are good or bad according
as they love what is good of evil. Thus love is what determines to which city
anyone belongs. In his own words: ‘Accordingly, two cities have been formed by
two loves ; the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the
heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self.’[xii][xii] He returned to treat of this subject of love
so often and with such insight as to merit the title ‘doctor of love’.
If he spoke so often about love
and sought to demonstrate its manner of affecting the dispositions of the soul,
the virtues and defects of character and determined the relation with God, it
was because he was convinced that explaining love as adequately as possible is
a way of helping others to purify and intensify love. Thus such analysis and
description forms an important task of spiritual direction. Aware as he was
that love in its manifold, often subtle manifestations repeatedly requires to
be examined in order to be properly directed and maintained in its proper
orientation it is certain that in his private dealings with those who he
accompanied spiritually he often had recourse to the same kind of exploration
of love that we encounter in his writings.
Moreover, to examine and speak of
it has the effect of appropriating it more fully and of increasing its hold on
us. Through discussion and expression of the deep things of the Spirit, and
that includes love of God and the desire to be united with him above all, our
sense of identity as children of God and members of Christ is strengthened and
confidence in our convictions is enhanced.
St. Bernard took up this task for
his own time as
Since we are
carnal and born of concupiscence of the flesh, our cupidity or love must begin
with the flesh, and when this is set in order, our love advances by fixed
degrees, led on by grace, until it is consummated in the spirit . . .[xiii][xiii]
In order to form a conception of
Bernard’s manner of assisting his monks to gain deeper insight into themselves
in view of advancing in the love of God, we can hardly do better than examine
his analysis of desire in his book On the Love of God. He presumably
would employ the same kind of approach in the privacy of spiritual direction as
he does in the book destined for a larger public. Bernard begins his
investigation with stating a fact of experience that all readily admit: ‘Every
rational being naturally desires always what satisfies more its mind and will.
It is never satisfied with something which lacks the qualities it thinks it
should have.’[xiv][xiv] By adducing a series of
instances that display this natural law of behavior and which reveal the
insatiability and futility of pursuing
desires that are driven by excess passion, the principle he enunciated assumes
the more concrete and even vivid form of life. Desire fulfilled leads to increased
craving when pursued without reason’s control; such abandon to unreasoning
craving produces fatigue and restlessness rather than satisfaction of the
appetite. Passionate desire is circular in its movement, never arriving at a
goal that satisfies its appetite for more. In order to find the restful
satisfaction of fulfilled desire, one must know himself. Being spiritual and
possessed of reason the human person can rest only in that which corresponds to
its nature. Material goods will never satisfy the mind. God alone can produce
the rest of fulfillment for ‘he is the efficient and final cause of our love.
He offers the opportunity, creates the affection, and consummates the desire.’[xv][xv] As he pursues this line of
argument he presents God’s love with enthusiastic appreciation of God’s
goodness to us and his desire for us. ‘No one can seek you unless he has
already found you. You wish to be found that you may be sought for, and sought
for to be found. You may be sought and found, but nobody can forestall you.’
Thus the abbot ends by showing how passionate and futile desire is cured
through discerning that its very insatiability is an indication that it masks
the craving for the true riches of the spirit, God himself. This analysis
serves to introduce the description of the four stages of love. Thus it points
the way to the transformations of this deep-rooted natural desire for God that,
culminate in a love sufficiently pure and strong as to render a human person,
elevated by grace, capable of sharing in the life of God himself. Although
there is no indication that Bernard was following St. Basil in this line of
demonstration, yet his argument is based on the same principle that the
Cappadocian had invoked when speaking of the love of God in monastic spirituality.
The love of
God is not something that is taught, for we do not learn from another to
rejoice in the light or to desire life, nor has anyone taught us to love our
parents or nurses. In the same way and even to a far greater degree is it true
that instruction in divine law is not from without, but, simultaneously with
the formation of the creature- man, I mean- a kind of rational force was
implanted in us like a seed, which, by an inherent tendency, impels us toward
love.[xvi][xvi]
It is natural, he affirms, to love
the one who gives you life and intends you for himself. God is the efficient
and final cause of love, says Bernard, thus affirming the same case in a more
abstract language.
Q F Q
The goal of the spiritual life is
the most intimate union with God imaginable. A sharing of all that one has and
is with the Creator who fashioned us
with this purpose in mind. Spiritual accompaniment has precisely the purpose
of assisting another to attain this end. For such a surpassing and noble aim
nothing less than a metamorphosis, a restructuring of the person is requisite.
Adequately to conceive the state to which we are destined and for which we
undertake the great work of spiritual direction is clearly beyond our powers of
conception. Even so eloquent and intelligent a mystic as
Later
One such description that appears
to me to illustrate most effectively the need for spiritual accompaniment that
is ordered to the dynamics of transformation was written in the 13th
century by a poetess who was influenced by Cistercian spirituality,
Hadewijch. In a poem she composed we
find the lines that read: ‘Until you come to that luxuriant land/ Where beloved
and loved one shall wholly flow through each other.’[xvii][xvii] This depicts divine intimacy at the level of
one’s very being, though the author is careful to point out that the being of
God remains distinguished from that of the creature even while permeating its
very substance. This imagery points up the active nature of our union with God
so that we shall know our very being as existing in his being and realize that
our most spontaneous and personal acts belong wholly to God while remaining
truly ours.
We are made for mutuality, a mutuality
that engages us completely. In order to become fully the self we are created to
be we must cultivate our capacity for sharing all we are at every level of our
person, not only the deepest center, which for most of our life escapes our
focused consciousness, and all the hidden recesses of memory, but all our
faculties and their operations. Spiritual accompaniment is, ideally, ordered to
realize such a state of the person by itself actualizing it, as far as our
present condition permits. Our Cistercian fathers held a view of spiritual
friendship that approaches such a conception very nearly. St. Aelred formulated
it at great length and in profuse detail. He was not alone, however; the
writings of St. Bernard, William of St. Thierry and other abbots of the Order
also reveal a similar manner of viewing the ideal relationship among friends.
It represents very closely what we now call spiritual accompaniment.
Though he almost certainly did not
advert to the fact, when Aelred presents God himself in the very essence of
friendship, he was carrying to its culminating point the admirable doctrine on
friendship in relation to the contemplative knowledge of God formulated by a
fourth century monk in Egypt. Evagrius Ponticus had reflected intensely on this
theme while living in the contemplative solitude of the desert and by
experience came to understand that, far from being a barrier to spiritual
friendship, solitude devoted to the contemplation of God favored it. His
formulation of this teaching is calculated
to dissolve any objections to friendship in monastic life. ‘Spiritual
friendship’, he writes, ‘is knowledge of God in which the saints are given the
title friends of God.’[xviii][xviii] He advanced this doctrine still further in a
letter to a friend whom he directed when he observed that ‘Christ is truth and
friendship. And this is why all those who possess the knowledge of Christ are
friends of one another.’[xix][xix] Prior to Aelred this is the
highest tribute paid to the doctrine of friendship to be found anywhere: to
make friendship itself a descriptive title of the Lord Jesus. ‘Christ is . . .
friendship’; this saying awaited a completion that was brought to it, as we
shall see in a moment, by a twelfth century English Cistercian abbot. It is
very probable that Evagrius had instilled appreciation for this theme in his
more immediate disciple, John Cassian, who wrote with enthusiasm a conference
that commended the desert teaching on Friendship.
St. Aelred was above all a
perceptive pastor of monks, who consequently was intently concerned with
spiritual accompaniment. Of him another outstanding abbot has written that ‘The
major part of his writings forms a journal of a director of souls’.[xx][xx] The abbot of Rievaulx then was recovering the
best of ancient tradition when he took up the topic of spiritual friendship and
brings to its culmination the doctrine on friendship by a bold expression that,
unknown to him, complements the Evagrian affirmation that ‘Christ is . . .
friendship’. At the end of Book One of his work On Friendship, he had
equated friendship with wisdom. His friend, the young novice, Yvo, is at first
perplexed by this affirmation, but upon hearing further explanation suddenly
gets a fresh insight that, arguably, represents the high point of all that has
been written on the subject of friendship and spiritual accompaniment. Here is
the text.
That
friendship cannot even endure without charity has been more than adequately
established. Since then in friendship eternity blossoms, truth shines forth,
and charity grows sweet, consider whether you ought to separate the name of
wisdom from these three.
Yvo. What does all
this add up to? Shall I say of friendship what John, the friend of Jesus, says
of charity: “God is friendship”?
Aelred. That would be
unusual, to be sure, nor does it have the sanction of the Scriptures. But still
what is true of charity, I surely do not hesitate to grant to friendship, since
“ he that abides in friendship abides in God and God in him.”[xxi][xxi]
Spiritual accompaniment attains
its peak of achievement when it takes on the character of spiritual friendship.
For to practice such a pure form of love is to recover likeness to God whom
Aelred defines with the same term that Evagrius had used of Christ: “God is
friendship”. If we wish to know what
true friendship is we must know God and, as Evagrius had said, share in the
contemplative knowledge of him at its purest and best. By applying to this
teaching the insights brought to the study of love by Thomas Merton, this Cistercian
doctrine on friendship as a way to God that is formative of contemplatives, is
brought into our own times and made more accessible. Merton, through the kind
of analysis of love we have described in this conference, was able to give a
moving, eloquent, expression to the understanding of love that he had arrived
at after years of monastic experience.
Love, then,
is a transforming power of almost mystical intensity which endows the lovers
with qualities and capacities they never dreamed they could possess. Where do
these qualities come from? From the enhancement of life itself, deepened
intensified, elevated, strengthened, and spiritualized by love. Love is not
only a special way of being alive, it is the perfection of life. He who loves
is more alive and more real than he was when he did not love.[xxii][xxii]
At the beginning of these
conferences we saw that spiritual accompaniment was not confined to the limits
of some formalized session, nor to well-defined areas of the spiritual life;
rather its scope is as broad as life itself. Nothing that is human escapes its
interest, and all that is divine and accessible to man’s sincere striving is
its proper concern. As Merton had so well understood, life at its best is elevated
to its purest and most noble expression by love. It is above all, then, with
this theme of love in all its extension and its manifold forms, human and
divine, that spiritual accompaniment keeps in view, and strives to purify and
render more full and complete. If this worthy task is pursued with discernment
under the guidance of love itself, then it will bear fruit that will endure
unto life everlasting.&
ENDNOTES
[i][i].Sebastian
[ii][ii].See especially Karen Horney, Neurosis and Human
Growth. (New York: W. W. Norton Co. Inc., 1950); also, Our Inner
Conflicts (New York: W. W. Norton Co. Inc., 1945).
[iii][iii].Gregory the Great, Epistola V.46. Corpus
Christianorum 140, p.340.
[iv][iv].Expositio in Ps.21, 11.
[v][v].Fr. Chrysogonus Waddell, Liturgy vol. 29 no.3
(1995)1.
[vi][vi]. Catechism of the Catholic Church, par. 112,
p.32 where it glosses Deo Volente 12¶4.
[vii][vii].Edward Vacek, s.j., The Eclipse of Love of God.
[viii][viii].Plato, The Symposium, 180. B. Jowett, tr., pp. 308,
9.
[ix][ix].Augustine, De moribus ecclesiae,
23‑25. PL 32:1321‑ 1322
[x][x].Cf. Dictionaire de Spiritualité 2.1, s.v. charité, 559.
[xi][xi].Augustine, The City of God. 15.22. (New York:
Random House- The Modern Library, 1950).
[xii][xii].Augustine, The City of God. 14:28. 477.
[xiii][xiii].Bernard of Clairvaux, On Loving God 15.39,
Emero Steigman, tr., Cistercian Fathers Series 13B (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian
Publications Inc., 1973) 40.
[xiv][xiv].Bernard of Clairvaux, On Loving God 15.18, p.
21.
[xv][xv].Bernard of Clairvaux, On Loving God 15.22, p.
24.
[xvi][xvi].Saint Basil, Ascetical Works, Sister M. Monica
Wagner, C. S. C., tr., ‘The Long Rules’, 2 (New York: Fathers of the Church,
Inc., 1950) 233.
[xvii][xvii].Hadewijch: The Complete Works, Mother Columba
Hart, tr., Classics of Western Spirituality (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press 1980)
Poem 4.11 p. ; see further Poems 35 and 36 and Letter 6, no. 350ff.
[xviii][xviii].Évagre le Pontique, Scholies Aux Proverbes, 69, Paul Géhin, tr. et
ed, Sources Chrétiennes 340 (Paris: Cerf, 1987) 162.
[xix][xix].Evagrius Pontikus, Briefe aus der Wüste, Gabriel Bunge, tr., Sophia
Band 24, (Trier: Paulinus Verlag 1986) 304.
[xx][xx].A. Le Bail, La spiritualité cistercienne, Cahiers du cercle
thomiste féminin, 7 (1927), cited by A. Hallier, Un Educateur Monastique:
Aelred de Rievaulx (Gabalda: Paris 1959) 134.
[xxi][xxi].Aelred of Rievaulx, Spiritual Friendship,
1.68-70 Mary Eugenia Laker , SSND, tr., Cistercian Fathers Series 5 (Kalamazoo,
MI, Cistercian Publications, Inc., 1974) 66.
[xxii][xxii].Thomas Merton, Love and Living. ‘Love and
Need: Is Love a Package or a Message?’ Naomi Burton and Brother Patrick Hart,
eds., (
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