THE  CALL
TO 
DEEPER  RELATIONSHIP  WITH  GOD

          The contemplative journey can be appreciated through many different images and ways of understanding. Here we present it as a process of growth through five phases as one journeys in the land of unfamiliarity. The descriptions of the five phases were adapted from one of the many articles by Marie Beha OSC from the Review For Religious.  Most of this content was assembled by Sr. Helen Banyai SJC on my suggestion. The last third of this content ( most of phase 5) was assembled by Vicky Chen, M.D.**.  Several people including Ruth McLean **  helped me bring this to you. 

           Since all calls to deeper relationship with God embrace a common core of values and attitudes, we offer this meditative material as a possible support. Individuals can use this meditation resource to understand, accept and respond to the struggles going on in their own prayer experience.

-- John Veltri 

          For a long time I experience nothing but distaste, dislike, aridity in my prayer, yet such a great desire to meet you, Lord. The very presence of you that once flooded my being in deep affective prayer and in contact with the world, now seems to be utterly absent. It is as if I had lost you. Dryness is now the outcome of fixing my senses upon subjects which formerly provided satisfaction. The light I had before appears as darkness itself.

          God divests the faculties, affections and senses, both spiritual and sensory, interior and exterior. He leaves the intellect in darkness, the will in aridity, the memory in emptiness and the affections in supreme afflictions, bitterness and anguish, by depriving the soul of the feeling and satisfaction it previously obtained from spiritual blessings.⁽²⁾

          The night seems very dense and dark. I feel that I will never find you again. Yet, I do not experience true panic or disquietude. I experience only a deep abiding trust that you will come, that in a way you are present in your absence.
 

       Where once you breathed your loving breath
         upon my cheek, my neck, my ear ...
           now, you are gone.

        Where once you stroked my waiting palm
                   laid open to your flaming touch ...
           now, you are gone.

                  an empty womb
                  the stillness hangs   upon
                                    within
                                   around.
                  your absence aches
                  its shadow sears      my mind
                                    my heart
                                   my soul.

         Where once you filled my vacant stares,
                  my empty rooms ...
           now darkness pounds.

         Where once you tamed my rampant storms,
                  unleashed with fury in the night ...
           now darkness pounds.

                  i am the babe
                  abandoned to      the emptiness
                                 the thick, dark black
                                the hollow arms.
                  i am the babe
                  set free amidst    the tunnels of aridity
                                 the spirals of unending
                                      space
                                the waves of incongruity.

         Where once you danced before my eyes
                  in raptured strains of liturgy ...
           now, sorrow reigns.

         Where once you dressed my soul in love
                  in orbs of fragile reverence ...
           now, sorrow reigns.

                  Lost keys   Lost doors   Lost light
                   Lost me      Lost You

                      Standing on the trail at sunset
                          i await your next caress.⁽³⁾

          It seems to me that God calls me to leave behind the past the ways I hold dear in relating to him, and meet him, experience him in new ways. It is like being called to a foreign country where I must learn all over again.

          The privation of the senses is one of the conditions required, that the spiritual form, which is the union of love, may be introduced in the spirit and united with it. The Holy One works all of this in the soul by means of a pure and dark contemplation.⁽⁴⁾
 

            i awoke, one morning,
                    from shades of sleep,
                    to find my world had changed ...

            the ground on which i had always placed my feet,
                    had subtly shifted with the darkness.

            the firm beliefs and solid suppositions
                    that ordered my daily decisions
            had evaporated before my eyes ...
            the images of God
                    which sketched my thoughts
                    and traced my days
            now seemed anachronistic to my mind ...

            comfortable pillows
                    that held my head
                      and spoke of warm security
                 in familiar ways
            were slipping silently from my bed ...

            the props i  used
                    to keep me strong
                 now seemed obsolete
            and strangely out of synchronization.

                      submerged in pools of doubt
                     lay the buoys i'd worn
                 to hold me up in times of trial.

                 caught and helpless,
                     uprooted and airborne,
                         i existed ...

                 dangling in space
                     between the old
                         and the new ...

            one eye was fixed with longing to the past,
               the other,
               with an urgent expectancy,
                   to what might lay ahead ...

            one hand was clutching
                    at what had been so easy and certain,
                    the other
                        grasped at what might fill
                        the freshly-opened void.

                      i had a new space within myself
                          which i had not discerned before ...
                 it begged designs to form its cast.

            a voice emerged      deep in my heart
                    which called me to an alien land.
           it tugged and pulled
                    and bade me come
                    to risk and grow
                       in tune with it.

            i felt the promise
                    of a more profound love
                    and communion with      divinity ...
            if i could only
                    shirk my fear
                    and put my trust
                       in what beckoned me ...⁽⁵⁾

Fear And Resistance
          New beginning involves a wrench, a break, perhaps a repudiation. The total, final break with all I hold dear is not achieved without tears. Your call, my God, is both fascinating and terrifying. I relate to it with mixed feelings. I sense fear and resistance.

          The attempt to flee from reality, to deny your call, puts me in a kind of vacuum. It is like being nowhere, having no place to stand. Your call, my God, to pure and dark contemplation has already made a difference, and that difference is irreversible. I realize that the return to former ways is no longer a possibility, much less an option. Yet, I am afraid. I must choose to break through the fear and come to new life or try to escape from your disturbing call. To escape would be a way of self-defeat. I acknowledge that I am afraid and fear begins to retreat. I am freer now to go into surrender.
 

                               ^{i plod the land of ancient time
                                where faceless days and voiceless nights
                                   rest anaesthetized
                                beneath the hand
                                   of willed and bland oblivion.}

                               ^{descending burrowed abysses
                                where memory plays its instant frames,
                               i step into the tangled mesh
                                of mortal patterns etched in ice;
                               i crouch surrounded
                                   by   my   self
                                and feel the web encircle me.}

                               ^{peering into mirrored pools
                                i see the past disrobe and speak
                                of crusted blood and careless tears
                               that filtered through my roaring streams;
                                i see my thoughts undress and hide
                                  along the empty paths i ran.}

                               ^{i try to wash the pain away
                                        and
                                slice the ropes that keep me bound,
                               but razor edges of my sin
                                   slide deep into the fleshy part,
                                   wedge firm within my fleshy part.....
                                  i taste the cutting with my tongue
                                  and bite the harshness as they sink.}

                               ^{i throw myself against the wall
                                and dash my head with jagged stones,
                                in efforts to escape this purge
                                   of looking at my nakedness,
                                   of sewing on my barren limbs,
                                accepting them as part of me.}

                               ^{i lie awake upon the floor
                                amidst the crumbs of who i am,
                                and dig the lava from my eyes
                               that blinded me to sacred light,
                                and tear the blanket from my heart
                               that let me sleep contentedly.}

                               ^{i plod the land of present time
                                with fearless days and voiceless nights
                               and raise my arms
                               in anguished call.....
                               i stand and bellow
                                  ....           to my God.(6)}

Surrender
          Out of my fear comes the acceptance of surrender. It will be a gradual and progressive revelation in me and it will be total. I am called to let go of what has been familiar to me, of that "very self" by which I have identified myself. I am resolved to seek nothing and do nothing but what is willed by my God. I know it is all love.

1. Ruth McLean (Guelph, Ont., 1990)

2. The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, Kieran Kavanagh, O.C.D. and Otilio Rodriguez, O.C.D., trans. (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1973) Vol. 2, p.333

3. Ruth McLean

4. St. John of the Cross, p.333

5. Ruth McLean

6. Ruth McLean

7. George A. Maloney, S.J., Invaded God (Denville, N.J.: Dimension Books, 1979) p.176

a. Ruth Mclean's Website can be found at: http://www.poemsforyou.org

b. Vicky Chen's Website can be found at: http://tidbits.0catch.com