The soul is not plunging into a state of quietistic oblivion. It is not disappearing into an inward state of nothingness, with a loss of identity and all awareness. The passivity stressed by Saint John of the Cross has to do with the withdrawal from any active pursuit of a knowledge or an experience. The passivity is in the refusal to direct or control what is taking place. The soul allows God to take the lead. On the other hand, there is a certain active receptivity necessary in such prayer, at least in its beginnings. Our soul must accept the inclination that it delicately experiences of being drawn to an inner “cavern” of loving quiet where a desire for God is present deeply within it. The effort, mildly and gently undertaken, is to remain open, receptive, free to being drawn, but refusing as well to grasp at an experience or at any kind of knowledge. As Saint John of the Cross just affirmed in the last passage, one is not entirely passive in keeping one’s eyes open to receive light. The surrender to that light occurs passively but cannot take place except that
our soul is willing to be receptive and does not obstruct this receptive disposition. The result is a knowledge bestowed on the soul by a love to which it surrenders itself. As Saint John of the Cross writes: “This reception of the light infused supernaturally into the soul is passive knowing. It is affirmed that these individuals do nothing, not because they fail to understand but because they understand with no effort other than receiving what is bestowed. This is what happens when God bestows illuminations and inspirations, although here the person freely receives this general obscure knowledge” (AMC 2.15.2).

It is important also to reaffirm that the inclination to remain alone and quiet with God, in a peaceful desire and loving awareness, without making acts or pursuing discursive exercises, must be a real state of grace granted to a soul. The danger in the realm of deeper prayer is to seek possessively after a “state of prayer” that is not being given by grace. There are people who might choose by way of preference to cultivate a state of “induced quietude” in prayer. The practice, for instance, of slowly repeating a single word or a mantra, as so-called “centering prayer” teaches, can be an example of this. The method may bring a “quietude” to the psyche, emptying thoughts from the mind and conveying a noticeable tranquility to the inner feelings. But these effects have their likely source in the rhythmic repetition of the mantra. It is a serious misrepresentation to identify this practice and its effects with genuine contemplative prayer. The symptoms induced by the method are quite capable of coexisting with an indifference in some lives to grave personal immorality. That in itself should raise questions. No method of prayer advertised as a contemplative practice of prayer can dispense with the need to pursue virtuous and sacrificial living. Even for a person in a state of grace, however, the inward quiet and tranquilizing peace experienced in pseudo-contemplative approaches pose a dubious and deluding feature. These effects are generally sought as a goal in themselves as part of a self-oriented pursuit, rather than coming as an inclination moved by a grace drawing the soul to God. In that case, the real focus is not directed toward God. And the passivity of inner emptiness, with the mind doing nothing, becomes over time a harmful condition for a soul. The person would not be turning with loving attentiveness to God, but descending into a progressive exercise in self-absorption. The fruits, as always, are seen in time. Without addressing, of course, contemporary practices, Saint John of the Cross is nonetheless clear on the importance of a careful discernment.

St John of the Cross: Master of Contemplation written by Father Donald Haggerty

The ease with which contemplation can take place when a soul is accustomed to approach God with a deeper surrender of itself is evident in this passage. The great soul at this time, on the other hand, as mentioned already, lies in an excessively conscientious approach to prayer that resists adaptation. And in a real sense, this involves a lack of surrender to God. The conscientiousness to “do prayer” as taught in one’s training is not necessarily a virtue; it actually can be a fault that makes a soul reluctant to alter its ways. The person may have become accustomed for many months, sometimes for years, to fill a silent time of prayer with an imaginative gaze on the Gospel or in searching for spiritual insights. The familiarity of the method has trained the person to seek satisfaction in the acquisition of new thoughts or in the enjoyment of some felt sense of loving God. The virtuous resolutions that may conclude such
prayer give the time of prayer a sense of a purposefulness. For many souls, it becomes very hard to accept that a prayer less active, less searching, a prayer more inconclusive, more open-ended, can be an advancement in prayer. The suggestion to remain quiet seems to invite the laziness of nonactivity into prayer and to yield fruitless results. As we have mentioned, these souls, if they are receiving contemplative graces, are the fervent and dedicated people of the spiritual life. They are people who do give themselves generously in charity and to the will of God. They work hard and spend themselves. Otherwise, the grace of contemplation would not be occurring. But it is precisely this conscientiousness that can work against them at this time. They are not acclimated to a more receptive acceptance of subtle graces from
God. If the person can trust inwardly and allow the soul to follow its deeper instinct of love, as described in the fifth sign, then the door opens to the graced inner desire to seek nothing but to love God in prayer. Unfortunately, an active mentality may tend for a time to resist the “apparent” abandonment of concrete fruits from its prayer. Such a soul may prefer, as Saint John of the Cross comments, to do over and over again what has been done and completed already. The aversion can be strong to doing what is thought to be doing nothing. Yet how mistaken this may be. Saint John of the Cross employs a striking image: removing the rind from a piece of fruit, so that it is ready to eat, and then trying to peel it once again:

“Many behave similarly at the beginning of this state. They think that the whole matter [of prayer] consists in understanding particular ideas and in reasoning through images and forms (the rind of the spirit). Since they do not encounter these images in that loving, substantial quietude where nothing is understood particularly and in which they like to rest, they believe they are wasting time and straying from the right road; and they turn back to search for the rind of images and reasoning. They are unsuccessful in their search because the rind has already been removed. (AMC 2.14.4)”

Saint John of the Cross: Master of Contemplation written by Father Donald Haggerty

But when the soul becomes more seized by love for God, the isolated and separate acts of love that may occur inconsistently at various times in meditative prayer are likely, with the onset of contemplative graces, to fuse together into a more continual longing of love. What has just been said has a parallel truth in the life of charity toward others, and this, too, is a symptom of crossing the threshold into contemplation. Over time, the soul itself, and not just the particular acts it performs, can become full of a steady quality of love. It is as though the flame of loving desire for God now burns almost without ceasing. This more continual state of a longing for God and for his will is an essential condition for contemplation. Saint John of the Cross teaches that sometimes God favors a soul and draws it into the loving knowledge of contemplation without a great need for prior acts of knowledge and insight gained through meditation. –St John of the Cross: Master of Contemplation written by Father Donald Haggerty

St John of the Cross Adoring

Saint John of the Cross probes more forcefully here the need for a purification. The satisfaction that meditation had been providing, which is now painfully absent, may have been feeding a certain self-seeking in prayer. God begins to draw the soul away from a “lowly” manner of prayer that was to some degree rife with subtle tendencies of self-absorption. Meditative prayer may have become over time an effort to arrive at pleasing experiences for the self. Now God begins to strip this self-seeking from prayer by leaving the soul in dissatisfaction. In the view of Saint John of the Cross, a direct action of God, while concealed and secret, is implicitly present in the struggles that the soul undergoes at this time. These are not primarily struggles with a personal incapacity for prayer itself or a breakdown in general spiritual life. Rather, God is secretly at work emptying the soul in silent prayer for the sake of a greater encounter in faith with himself. The emphasis in the following passage from The Dark Night is on God’s watchful, overseeing role in the transitional period into contemplative prayer. The trials of that time are meant, not to impede prayer with insurmountable barriers, but to lead it to a new depth. The words in this passage of Saint John of the Cross begin with a sharp comment on meditative prayer. It is not that he is dismissive of this practice; it has its place in the formative period of spiritual life. But he is insistent that it is a type of prayer that must be forsaken with the advent of contemplative graces.

“Since the conduct of these beginners in the way of God is lowly and not too distant from love of pleasure and of self, as we explained, God desires to withdraw them from this base manner of loving and lead them on to a higher degree of divine love. And he desires to liberate them from the lowly exercise of the senses and of discursive meditation, by which they go in search of him so inadequately and with so many difficulties, and lead them into the exercise of spirit, in which they become capable of a communion with God that is more abundant and more free of imperfections. (Dark Night of the Soul)”

Father Donald Haggerty “St John of the Cross: Master of Contemplation”

…many people who approach prayer seriously enough to commit time to a daily prayer of meditation do not realize how seriously God takes the soul. What begins possibly to happen-the commencement of contemplative graces in prayer-is a sign that God does not seek just a devout form of prayer from a soul, whatever that might mean. He longs for the soul to give itself to him, so that he in turn can give to the soul a fuller gift of himself. The discussion of contemplative prayer is never simply to aid a soul in the advancement of prayer. That goal is always subordinated to the more primary purpose of interior prayer in opening a door within our soul to a progressive union of the soul with God.  —Father Donald Haggerty from “St John of the Cross: Master of Contemplation”

This dying out of feelings and of tangible satisfaction is the context for the purifyıng experience in prayer that will be one indication, among others, of the possible onset of contemplative graces. Again, the ‘dark night of the senses”, a phrase Saint John of the Cross adopts for this transitional time, will be invoked as the telling metaphor for this purification, which dries up feeling and closes down fruitful experiences of reflection or of the imagination. Instead of the “light” that for some time shone on the practice of meditative reflection, providing new insights and steady consolation, the soul begins to encounter a sharp dissonance with its prior experience in prayer. A troubling sense of struggle with the exercise of meditation begins to arise. And there is no understandable reason or any evident solution to correct this. It is not simply as though a tool used in prayer had broken for the moment, a tool that could be fixed or replaced with a better tool; nor is it simply a need of finding an improved method of reflection that can cast richer light in meditation; nor is it a matter of manipulating feelings and restoring them to their former warmth. The reality of what seems now to be an ineffective effort in prayer has a source in God’s action on the soul. He apparently seeks, for one thing, to expose the soul to a greater awareness of its own inner poverty. –“St John of the Cross: Master of Contemplation” by Father Donald Haggerty

A soul aspiring to union with God must truly allow itself to be emptied and purified in radical ways. The road of purification can take a long time, or it can be relatively short in duration, depending in large part on how serious we are in mortifying our own self-absorbed tendencies. This is the primary lesson of these pages on the spiritual vices at the beginning of The Dark Night. The great need of our soul is to refine our desire to please God alone and to leave ourselves empty and unimportant in our own estimation. We have to give ourselves away, strip ourselves of self-preoccupation; it is never sufficient simply to be generous in charitable actions. The Gospel admonition to lose ourselves for love is an effort of interior and exterior demands that allows no compromise and no turning back on self. Such efforts are not without effect. They are the preparation for the purer longing for God and the accessibility to God that are traits of a soul ready to receive the grace of contemplation. –Father Donald Haggerty “St John of the Cross: Master of Contemplation”