Septuagesima Sunday Thoughts About Three Stages of the Interior Life

It's Septuagesima Sunday in the traditional calendar. We prepare for Lent.

We're getting our bearings in this New Year of 2024. During the week, we suggested ways to properly get back into our work after what was for many of us a Christmas respite. We want to properly focus on our practical tasks. But we also want to be sure our spiritual life is alive and well, indeed fully energized, as we go about our work each day.

With that as background, we turn to our Interior Life on this New Year Sunday. After all, only a robust Interior Life will support our daily efforts to sanctify our work. Thus we turn to Fr. Albert J. Shamon to help refresh our understanding of exactly what this sometimes mysterious Interior Life might be.

    “As the journey ends, the activity of the interior life deepens still more, burrowing to the very faculties of the soul. But at this stage the activity of God predominates. He sends forth His illuminations and inspirations; and these faculties, the intellect and the will, made soft as heated wax by the gifts of the Holy Spirit, respond easily and docilely to God’s impress so that their activities bear unmistakably the stamp of the divine. In consequence, the soul, like a giant awakened from a long winter’s nap, leaps and bounds towards God. Again and again, it experiences His presence: sometimes it finds Him in a sea of bitterness – ‘My Beloved is a bundle of myrrh to me.’ Excruciating desolation is as much the touch of His hand as inebriating delight. ‘I am accustomed to visit my elect in two ways, that is, by trial and by comfort.’ (Imitation of Christ) To know God by these inner experiences – that is the life! ‘This is everlasting life, that they may know thee, the only true God…’ (Jn. 17:3). ‘Know Thee…’ – not in the abstract manner of the philosopher, but in the palpable, concrete way of the mystic. The mystic knows God by experiencing His presence; his knowledge is a deep, intimate one. This is the unitive way, the way of the perfect, namely, union with God through loving knowledge.
    “The activity of the interior life, then, is a movement from the creature to God. But since the soul moves by love, and since love springs from knowledge, the nature of the activity of the interior life is essentially that of knowing and loving. The interplay of knowledge and love constitutes the great drama of life – in fact, it is the life of the interior life. First, the soul knows God; then it loves Him. Since love expresses itself, the soul loving God strives to express its love by serving Him, doing all things to please Him. ‘If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word’ (Jn. 14:21). God, in turn, loves the soul. ‘He who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him’ (Jn. 14:21). God’s love is revealed by letting the fervent soul ‘feel’ His presence within it. By experiencing the presence of God, the soul gains an understanding of Him far greater than that given by ordinary knowledge. ‘I will manifest Myself to him.’ This knowledge in turn intensifies the soul’s love; love creates desire for greater knowledge of the Beloved. The Beloved fulfills these desires – ‘He has filled the hungry with good things’ – with deeper insight into Himself. And so the interplay goes on: knowledge breeding love; love enkindling desire for greater knowledge; God satisfying the soul’s desire; and the soul’s satisfaction only whetting a still greater love and desire. Thus ‘in ever-highering eagle-circles, the soul soars up to the great Sun of Glory’ until the day when it can look unblinkingly into the very face of the heavenly sun, God Himself, and drink in knowledge enough to satisfy all its desires for all eternity.” - Fr. Albert J. Shamon

 

Happy Sunday!