Words of Encouragement
(from Richard J. Foster's anthology Devotional Classics)

Spiritual Dryness:

At a certain point in the spiritual journey God will draw a person from the beginning stage to a more advanced stage. At this stage the person will begin to engage in religious exercises and grow deeper in the spiritual life. Such souls will likely experience what is called "the dark night of the soul." The "dark night" is when those persons lose all the pleasure that they once experienced in their devotional life. This happens because God wants to purify them and move them on to greater heights.

After a soul has been converted by God, that soul is nurtured and caressed by the Spirit. Live a loving mother, God cares for and comforts the infant soul by feeding it spiritual milk. Such souls will find great delight in this stage. They will begin praying with great urgency and perseverance; they will engage in all kinds of religious activities becuase of the joy they experience in them. But there will come a time when God will bid them to grow deeper. He will remove the previous consolation from the soul in order to teach it virtue and prevent it from developing vice.

...Let it suffice to say, then, that God perceives the imperfections within us, and because of his love for us, urges us to grow up. His love is not content to leave us in our weakness, and for this reason he takes us into a dark night. He weans us from all of the pleasures by giving us dry times and inward darkess. In doing so he is able to take away all these vices and create virtues within us. Through the dark night pride becomes humility, greed becomes simplicity, wrath becomes contentment, luxury becomes peace, gluttony becomes moderation, envy becomes joy, and sloth becomes strenght. No soul will ever grow deep in the spritual life unless God works passively in that soul by means of the dark night.

--John of the Cross

Slow Going:

...many people who have a few natural gifts and a little ingenuity tend to imagine that they can quite easily learn, by their own cleverness, to master the methods -- one might say the "tricks" -- of the spiritual life. The only trouble is that in the spiritual life there are no tricks and no shortcuts. Those who imagine that they can discover gimmicks and put them to work for themselves usually ignore God's will and his grace. They are self-confident and even self-complacent. They make up their minds that they are going to attain to this or that and try to write their own ticket in the life of contemplation. They may even appear to succeed to some extent. But certain systems of spirituality -- notably Zen Buddhism -- place great stress on a severe, no-nonsense style of direction that makes short work of this kind of confidence.

One cannot begin to face the real difficulties of the life of prayer and meditation unless one is first perfectly content to be a beginner and really experience himself as one who knows little or nothing and has a desperate need to learn the bare rudiments. Those who think they "know" from the beginning will never, in fact, come to know anything. ...We do not want to be beginners. But let us be convinced of the fact that we never be anything else but beginners.

--Thomas Merton

Losing Confidence:

...I must tell you that for the first ten years [after I resolved to give my all for God's all] I suffered a great deal. The awareness that I was not as devoted to God as I wanted to be, the awareness of my past sinse which were always present in my mind, and the great yet unmerited favors God did for me were the source and substance of my suffering. During this time I sinned often only to rise again soon. It seemed to me that all the creatures of the world, all reason, and even God were against me. All that was in my favor was faith. I was troubled and sometimes with the thought that all of my blessings in this endeavor were merely my own presumption, pretending to have arrived at this state so easily while others arrive with great difficulty. At other times I thought that this was all merely a willful delusion and that, in attempting this, I had lost my hope of salvation.

When I finally reached a point where I wanted to quit, I found myself changed all at once. In my soul, which until that time was in distress, I suddenly felt a profound inward peace as if it were in its true place of rest. Ever since that time I have walked before God in simple faith, with humility and with love, and I apply myself diligently to do nothing and think nothing which might displease him. I hope that when I have done what I can, he will do with me what he pleases.

--Brother Lawrence

Unsure in Prayer:

No one can believe how powerful prayer is and what it can effect, except those who have learned it by experience. It is importnat when we have a need to go to God in prayer. I know, whenever I have prayed earnestly, that I have been heard and have obtained more than I prayed for. God sometimes delays, but He always comes. It is amazing that a poor human creature is able to speak with God's high Majesty in heaven and not be afraid. When we pray, the heart and the conscience must not pull away from God because of our sins and our unworthiness, or stand in doubt, or be scared away. When we pray we must hold fast and believe that God has heard our prayer. It was for this reason that the ancients defined prayer as an Ascensus mentis ad Deum, "a climbing up of the heart unto God."

--Martin Luther

Not Knowing How to Pray:

God must teach us everything concerning the nature of prayer: its object, its characteristics, the disposition it requires, and the personal application we must make of it according to our needs. In the matter of prayer we are as ignorant of the theory as of the practice. We know in general that prayer is a religious act, but when it comes to praying we easily forget that it is a supernatural act which is therefore beyond our own strength and can only be performed by the inspiration and help of grace. As St. Paul says; "Not that we are competent to claim anything for ourselves, but our competence comes from God."

...Since prayer is a supernatural act, we must earnestly ask God to produce it in us, and then we must perform it tranquilly under his guidance. We must draw down divine grace by our favor and then we must cooperate with it without interfering with its effects. If God does not teach us, we shall never know throughly the nature of prayer.

--Jean-Nicholas Grou

Facing Troubles:

Sometimes it is good for us to have troubles and hardships, for they often call us back to our own hearts. Once there, we know ourselves to be strangers in this world, and we know that we may not believer in anything that it has to offer. Sometimes it is good that we put up with people speaking against us, and sometimes it is good that we be thought of as bad and flawed, even when we do good things and have good intentions. Such troubles are often aids to humility, and they protect us from pride. Indeed, we are sometimes better at seeking God when people have nothing but bad things to say about us and when they refuse to give us credit for the good things we have done! That being the case, we should so root ourselves in God that we do not need to look for comfort anywhere else.

--Thomas à Kempis

Weary of Fighting Sin:

I then saw others who were fighting against their evil inclinations and forcing themselves to resist them. But I saw that the more they struggled against them, the more they committed them. So I said to them, "You are right in lamenting your sins and imperfections, and I would be lamenting with you if it were not for the fact that God is holding me. You cannot defend yourself and I cannot defend myself. The thing we must do is renounce the care of ourselves unto God who can defend our true self. Only then can God do for us what we cannot do ourselves."

God gives us his light in an instant, allowing us to know all that we need to know. No more is given to us than is necessary in his plan to lead us to perfection. We cannot sek this light; it is given to us from God only as he chooses. Neither do we know how it comes, or how we even know that it is! If we try to know more than we have been made to know, we will accomplish nothing. We simply wait like a stone, with no capacity until he brings us life.

--Catherine of Genoa

Feeling Ineffective or Helpless:

There is a time when the soul lives in God and there is also a time when God lives in the soul. What is appropriate to one of these conditions is inappropriate to the other. When God lives in souls, they must surrender themselves totally to him. ...when God lives in souls, there is nothing of themselves left, save what comes from his inspiration. For them there are no plans, no longer any clearly marked paths. They are like a child whom one leads wherever one wills and who sees only what is pointed out to him.... Frequently they are deprived of any spiritual direction. God leaves them with no other support than himself. They dwell in darkness, oblivion, rejection; suffer distress and misery without knowing from where or whence help will come. Calm and untroubled, they must wait for succour, their eyes turned towards heaven.

These simple souls often find themselves discarded in some forgotten corner, like pieces of broken crockery for which no further use can be found. Here, neglected by men, but in possession of God throught their pure, steadfast and passionate, though deeply tranquil, love, they make no effort of their own. They know only that they must allow themselves to be carried along in God's hands, to serve him in his own way. Often they will not know for what purpose, but God knows it well. The world will think them useless. Indeed, appearances favour this judgement, though the truth is that secretly and through unknown channels these souls pour out infinite blessings on people who may never have heard of them, of whose existence they are themselves unaware.

--Jean-Pierre de Caussade

Finding Faith Difficult:

[Revealed Christianity] sets up a relationship of conflict. This is exhausting. It is wearing on both sides. It is intolerable. Here is what I have called the social intolerability of revelation. A much more practical course is to make a gentleman's agreement. It is more satisfying for Christians to build up an organized church, Christian institutions, a Christian society and politics. ...The worst thing is that the intolerable element cuts deeper. It directly affects the human heart. All that the gospel declares is intolerable, unacceptable. Real people in any society, flesh and blood people, cannot swallow it....

Grace is intolerable, the Father is unbearable, weakness is discouraging, freedom in unlivable, spiritualization is deceptive. This is our judgment, and humanly speaking it is well founded and inevitable. This is one of the first reasons for the rejection of the proclamationof God in Jesus Christ. And because we do now want to seem to reject it, perversion and subversion take place. All these judgments and actions are based on good sense, reason, experience, and science, that is, on our ordinary means of judgment, on what all people think and believe.

But it is precisely here that we fall down. Jesus tells us plainly that if we simply do as the world does, we can expect no thanks, for are doing nothing out of the ordinary. What we are summoned to do is something out of the ordinary. We are to be perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect. No less. All else is perversion.

--Jacques Ellul

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