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ONCE
man has entered on this spiritual life,
its growth if healthy will be not merely
upwards but also outwards; so that ever
wider areas of interest and activity are included
in its span and subdued to the supernatural demand.
The gift of Wisdom, savouring God Transcendent,
and aware of His touchings of the spirit, penetrates
and enhances that gift of Understanding, which
reads experience in the light of God Immanent,
and the gift of Counsel, which subjects all personal
choice to the secret counsellings of that Will in
Whom all things are one. Thus all that is felt,
done, loved and sacrificed is more and more perceived
to be part of the apparatus through which Spirit
Increate works on the spirit that is being created;
that by means of this created spirit's transformation,
It may work on the whole fabric of life. Man,
called to incarnate something of the Holy, must do
it by a dedication of body as well as of soul; purging
and transforming the natural, and making it the
vehicle of a supernatural life. This is the truth
upon which the whole Christian religion is based:
and the Pattern of that life as manifest among us
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is marked above all by the rich variousness of its
self-spending ardour, a ceaseless longing to teach,
to heal, to save. Not our 'superior'
faculties alone,
our will and instinct for Eternity, but our 'lower'
nature, our deeply-rooted correspondences with the
created order, must be unselfed and harmonized to
the purposes of the Spirit, and the unity of our
being restored. For that being is called to be a
bridge between temporal and eternal Reality.
'I
will ask of God', said Elizabeth Leseur,
'such an
enlargement of soul, that I may love Him with
ardour, serve Him with joy, and transmit His radiance
to the world.'
This sense of total surrender to Spirit for Its
purposes and not our own, moving within the time-series
as the agent of Unchanging Love, is the ruling
characteristic of great saints, and the essence of
Eternal Life.
'For as many as are led by the
Spirit of God, they are the sons of God. The first
term of the spiritual life must always be God's
hidden but felt Presence and action, His absolute
priority; not the little soul He moves and incites
to seek Him, still less that soul's interests, feelings,
or experiences. And this hidden Presence, itself
unchanging, discloses Itself in many ways and on
many levels ; from that which we call wholly
natural, to that which, lying beyond our comprehension,
we refer to the '
supernatural
' world. So
too the response that is asked from Its child and
creature may involve the extreme of world-renouncement,
or may seem to pin down the soul to the
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most homely duties of the natural level, and possess
none of the characters we attribute to the contemplative
life. Yet even so, lived towards God,
based upon that ground where Spirit guides and
sustains us, each response, whatever its appearance,
will have the quality of prayer.
Thus we see that this life, in its perfect norm,
can neither be a life of pure contemplation, nor a
life of pure action. It must in its own small way
enter that balanced rhythm of rapt communion and
self-spending love which ruled the earthly life of
Christ; a life in which the soul expands to embrace
and love and serve the greatest possible number of
persons, contacts and events, and calls in its faculties
to find again their meaning and their poise in God.
And it is this double movement at its fullest, with
all that it involves of tension and sacrifice, which
constitutes the supernatural charity of saints. We,
standing at the verge of their mysterious country,
can only guess at the experiences which are contained
in
' the breadth, and length, and depth, and
height
'
of this humbling yet exalting life in God.
Indeed, when we consider the curve of St. Paul's
life, the shattering events of his conversion, his total
surrender and its results, we can hardly dare to
suppose that our best thoughts penetrate far into
the meaning of these words. Yet, in their own
small way, our souls too are required to expand
in more directions than one. Because our lives
unfold in a world impregnated with God Immanent,
the first movement of quickened spirit will be a
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willing and supple self-giving to His purposes
therein declared. On the other hand, because in
the last resort He alone can suffice and complete
us, we need a certain solitude and withdrawal from
succession, in which to experience those interior
'stirrings and touchings'
of the Spirit which are
the secret causes of the spiritual life. These movements
must balance and enrich each other. Neither
must be seized and enjoyed for its own sake alone.
For we are being remade in order that we may be
useful: not in order that we may abandon our
post within that time-series where God acts, and
wills to act, through human souls.
His Spirit comes to us, as Caussade said, in
'the
sacrament of the present moment'. Joy and pain,
drudgery and delight, humiliation and consolation,
tension and peace each of these contrasting experiences
reaches us fully charged with God; and does,
or should incite us to an ever more complete selfgiving
to God. But each experience, as such, is
neutral when seen only in natural regard. It is
then merely part of that endless chain of cause and
effect of which our temporal lives are made. It
can only touch our deepest selves, help or hinder
the growth of the spirit, in so far as we do or do
not direct our wills through it in love and reverence
to Him. There is only one life—the 'spiritual'
life
consists in laying hold on it in a particular way;
so that action becomes charged with contemplation,
and the Infinite is served in and through all finite
things. The twofold experience of Spirit, as a deeply
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felt inward Presence and as the Ocean of reality
and life, must be actualized in a twofold response
of the soul: a response which is at once 'active'
and 'contemplative', outgoing and indrawing, an
adoring gaze on the Splendour over against us,
and a humble loving movement towards the surrendered
union of will and Will.
'Whenever the
Lord is about to bestow grace on us', says Osuna,
'He says (at least equivalently) what was said to
Rebecca:
"Let us call the maid, and ask her will".'
Thus total abasement before the transcendent
Perfect is one side of the spiritual life. Adoption
into the supernatural series divine sonship, with
its obligation of faithful service within the Divine
order is the other side. The Seraphim in Isaiah's
vision, who veiled their faces before the unmeasured
Glory, were yet part of the economy through which
that Glory was poured out on the world : and the
experience of reality which begins with the prophet's
awe-struck vision and utter abasement before the
Holy, ends on the words 'Send me!'
This double action of the soul, standing away
from the Perfect in contemplation and seeking
union with It in love, and this double consciousness
of the Holy as both our Home and our Father, are
the characters of a fully developed Christian spirituality.
But these characters are not found in their
classic completeness in any one individual. We only
discern their balanced splendour in the corporate
life of surrendered spirits; the Communion of
Saints. Not the individual mystic in his solitude,
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but the whole of that Mystical Body, in its ceaseless
self-offering to God, is the unit of humanity in
which we can find reflected the pattern of the
spiritual life. And as regards the individual, the
very essence of that life is contained in a docile
acceptance of his own peculiar limitations and
capacities, a loyal response to vocation a response
which, though it may sometimes be passive in
appearance, is ever charged with the activity of
God. 'I see no difference', said Bérulle, as he
bade farewell to his brethren before setting forth
upon an onerous mission,
'between those who go
and those who stay at home. In one sense all are
sent; for there is a double mission, one interior
and the other exterior. And it is on the interior
mission of grace, of mercy, and of charity, that I
declare all to be sent.'
So the life of spirit means such personal subordination
to God's total action, as weaves into one
the inward and outward movements of the soul;
and endues all work with contemplation, and makes
of contemplation the most mortified and selfabandoned
of all work. In this world, such a life
must always involve a certain tension between the
two movements, a nailing to the Cross of the restless
will, and constant failures in adjustment and acceptance
which keep the individual painfully aware of
incompleteness, and ever open to the wholesome
and purifying experience of penitence. Yet this
tension, this acceptance of suffering and limitation
is the price of all real life : every new entrance
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into the creative order, every union with Reality,
however feeble and incomplete. No servant of
truth or beauty, in art, exploration, science or
thought, can escape the ascetic law. If our response
to circumstance consists mainly in an unchecked
yielding to the attractions and repulsions of sensitive
nature, given over like a restless sea to 'the
winds of pain and pleasure, hope and fear', then
we wholly miss the interior significance of that web
of events in which we are placed, and which can at
every point convey God.
So the deepening and enriching of man's Godward
life by a regular and deliberate feeding of the
theocentric temper, and the cleansing of that vision
which beholds Him, are the indivisible implicits of
spiritual growth. For the loving inclination of the
purified will towards God alone makes possible the
inflow of His feeding strengthening Spirit; and that
supersensual Food increases in its turn the energy,
the purity, the self-abandoned meekness of the
growing spirit's tendency to Him.
