Serious Sunday Thoughts About Three Stages of the Interior Life

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.

    “Since the object of the interior life is God, not dwelling beyond the distant stars, but indwelling in the soul itself, the direction of the activity of the interior life must necessarily be from the outside world inward. The interior life is a pilgrim’s progress from the creature to the Creator. It begins with a desire for God and ends with the complete possession of Him. Like any journey, it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. In the beginning, the activity of the interior life consists in turning from the outside world of sin to the world inside the heart of man. To break with sin and the occasions of sin, he employs the outward thrust of mortification. This disciplines the five outer senses. To realize the truths of salvation, especially that God is the only goal of life, he practices the inward thrust of meditation. Meditation feeds the desire to go on with the journey. This is the way Christ Himself pointed out when He said, ‘If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself’; it is the purgative way or the way of beginners.
    “During the middle of the journey, the activity of the interior life becomes more interior: the inner senses and the passions are disciplined. We depend too much on feelings; we so want to feel our devotion. At first God caters to this desire. Like the Sister who gives the child a prize for being good, God lets us taste in our spiritual infancy how sweet He is, just to wean us from the world. But consolations, so good in the beginning, can become harmful in the end: it can happen that we might not seek God, but only His consolations. We must, therefore, become independent of our feelings. But because these are so much a part of our very being, we can do little to win this independence: God Himself has to intervene. Like Aeolus, who bagged the evil winds that would have impeded Odysseus’ homeward journey, God harnesses our feelings by withdrawing His consolations from us. By withholding these consolations, He liberates us from dependence on our feelings. To practice virtue despite our feelings is indeed virtue; then the soul is really making progress, is truly taking up its cross and following Christ. Since Christ is the Light and who follows Him walks not in darkness, this stage of the road is called the illuminative way or the way of those advancing.” - Fr. Albert J. Shamon

Happy Sunday!