Fire Within chapter 13

a watered garden / a howling wasteland

Fire Within: Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross and the Gospel on Prayer (Fr. Thomas Dubay, S.M.)

https://ignatius.com/fire-within-fwp/

(If you are catching up: chapter 1, chapter 2, chapter 3, chapter 4, chapter 5, chapter 6, chapter 7, chapter 8, chapter 9, chapter 10, chapter 11, chapter 12)

Chapter 13 “Discerning Growth”

(Saturday 7:32am) Lord, I am very tired b/c I was woken at 4:18am by someone insistent. You are right, Lord, in saying that if the man does not get up because of his love (friendship) he will because of the asker’s insistence. [This was the Gospel on some previous Sunday.] I was asked yesterday evening to pray for J— A—, a young woman who is sick (with cancer?) and so I ask You again to restore her to whatever degree of health is Your good pleasure; give her perfect health if it is in accordance with Your will; but in any case please make her a saint, as well as the woman who asked me for prayer, and me also (o please); I will go on asking, You know, so You might as well do it. May she receive a miracle through the intercession of Ven. Rose Hawthorne if it is Your will.

(7:45am) I am on chapter 13 apparently? “Discerning Growth”. A person could summarize in a sentence: if someone is not evidently growing in charity, humility, and obedience they are most likely wasting their time. Alas! I am cautioned “they who think the matter simple are probably the most deceived of all” — this is true since St. Therese of Lisieux was misjudged as a nothing-burger by those around her; it is easy to hide charity, and even humility... and no one notices obedience (like we do not notice the air unless it is against us). We ought therefore not to assess anyone if it is not our absolute duty to do so. If it were our duty we would be assisted in it by grace (what, then, Lord, of my assessment of authors?[1] One ought to have the humility to be willing to learn from anyone (since You can teach us through anyone) but one also ought to be prudent. Do not eat poison.) (Trust intuition if it smells bad.) [Moving on to the next section of the chapter] “A sturdy realism” (but then it was time for Mass)

2 AM - Sunday - at adoration (substitute). I am grateful that there was a night hour in need of a substitute (12, 1, or 2 is my feasible range) ... first, Lord, I commend to you J.A. through the intercession of Ven. Rose Hawthorne. ... I would be content to stare at You as You stare through me (nothing hidden in a glass house) except there is some risk I would fall asleep which is not commensurate (is that the right word) [maybe?] with being the sole watchman in the night, so I am going to stick with my original plan (commentary on a book chapter). Well, Lord, what did You think about it? ... (silence) ... To want to discern growth in oneself is sometimes a bad idea because there is already a risk of making the salvation of one’s soul, and the sanctification thereof, into a self-help project. Yet, Lord, if one is not moving forward up the mountain, one is sliding back down because in the spiritual life there is no standing-still, and ought not a person to have some concern for it? Help me to reason about this...

Well, a person ought to be doing “absolutely the most that I can” and it is our capacity to do so that increases: absolutely the most surrender to You that I can which initially is frankly pathetic: here, do whatever You want with me within these ten minutes of the day and with these exclusions and of all the rest I myself am the sovereign ruler: I, the captain of my soul (steering it onto a sandbar). This I think was before I had read Interior Castle and had no idea..., well; and, Lord, years before that did I not want (tentatively want) a book that talks about how to pray? and I recall disappointment in C.S. Lewis’s “Letters to Malcolm chiefly on prayer”, not what I was looking for, and had no idea (as a reader exclusively of sci-fi/fantasy) where else to look. Madness.

Later, however, I must have spent a few years on “where am I in this Interior Castle” which is a mug’s game. What, after all, would one do differently (beyond a turning point)? but what bewildered me the most was an attempt to identify stages in my life prior to a turning point (metanoia: μετανοια) which, because now everything I had ever done was overshadowed with profound inadequacy and the conscious — no longer suppressed, no longer crammed into a large brown grocery bag and shoved into the linen-closet of one’s mind, under some towels — ... the conscious awareness that I had been habitually and knowingly violating Your law. Impossible to recapture the point of view before this admission of guilt: first the denial, then the weak and flabby intention to “make things right” in the future ... then years of interior gnawing — the unpleasant awareness of putting something off that makes procrastination bitter; the cowardice. How did I live this way? By “not thinking about it”... how is it that all this time I pretended to serve you?, like a waitress who is solicitous until the second half of the meal and cannot be found when one would like to settle the bill and go. I am grateful that I did not die this way; O Lord, grant me final perseverance. Knowing that I have badly wronged You in the past, I know therefore that I am capable of kicking over the traces... of sitting down in the road and refusing to move, or bolting back down the hill.

I am capable, Lord, of slapping You in the face and saying that we are no longer friends (here I see You in memory as the icon of the bridegroom; hands bound; reed scepter, crown of thorns O my Lord.) [2] I do not want to do this.

But we know that I could.
and without Your grace I would.

“Discerning progress!” what is there to say? I know how it is with You. You plant treasures in a soul... drape it with finery like a bride... You construct in it a garden... while she is not looking. You hide this from her eyes. Dust, dry dust, barren; rags and bone; stone; a plain covered with dry bones. How can both of these be true? Why is the soul at the same time being made into

          a watered garden / a howling wasteland

(it is 2:45 am) You do not lie; You cannot lie; when a soul has the impression of what it is and what You are, it is not false humility or self-deprecation or modest demurral or poor self-esteem; it is the way things are (one ought to add that if it were from the enemy it would tend toward despair and giving up; if it is from You it would tend toward childlike confidence that, although it appears that “a bomb went off in the kitchen” You can in an instant render it worthy of You. Childlike: You can kiss it and make it better. If you desire now instead this misery I am content.)

To cry is a good temporary remedy for dry-eye (with which night driving with the AC on or windows open is not so great).

(2:57): Well! in short, this chapter has plenty of good advice and I think I have talked about none of it. But at least I did not fall asleep, Lord, and I am grateful to have been here w/ You. (2:59am) here is the next night watchman. Let us keep our eyes fixed on You until the sun arises in our hearts; amen.

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[1] There are three categories of authors writing about the territory: 1. you can smell on their breath that they know (even if they are not writing about themselves); 2. it appears that they are writing a guide for tourists that is based only on other guides for tourists (some of them are honest about this) and have never been there and don’t have much to add (unless they are at least very good at organizing) and now you are one step farther from the source in what might be a game of Telephone; 3. something smells wrong and I should stop reading. Really there is also a category “1.5” in which I am gathering data (does this person know from experience at least some part of what they are writing about?) and there might not be a definitive answer one way or another.

[2] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=icon+of+Christ+the+Bridegroom&iar=images for a general idea