Wash me yet more from my iniquity

Psalm 51:2

The initial stage of the friendship formed with Jesus Christ is usually one of extraordinary happiness. For the soul has found for the first time a companion whose sympathy is perfect and whose presence is continuous. It is not, necessarily, that the soul consciously attends every instant to this new intimate, so much as that he is never wholly unconscious of him. As he goes about his ordinary business, paying to each detail of it as much attention as ever, the fact that Christ is present within him is never entirely forgotten: he is there as is the sunlight or the air, illuminating, freshening, and inspiring all that he experiences. From time to time he turns to him with a word or two; at times he speaks gently to him. He views all that he sees from his standpoint, or rather from his standpoint in him; lovely things are more lovely because of his loveliness; painful things are less distressing because of his consolation. Nothing is indifferent, because he is present. Even when he sleeps, his heart wakes to him.

Yet this is only the initial stage of the process; and it is sweet largely because it is new. Certainly he has experienced a tremendous fact, yet so far he has but just entered upon it. There stretches out before him a road that ends only in the Beatific Vision; but there are countless stages to be passed before that end is attained.

For the friendship, as so formed, is not an end in itself. Christ’s desire is indeed to consummate it as soon as may be; yet it cannot be consummated by his mere desire. The soul itself must be educated, must be purified and cleansed so perfectly as to be united with him by nothing except his grace. He must be first purged and then illuminated, first stripped of himself and then adorned with his favors, before he is fit for his final union. These two stages are named, by spiritual writers, the Way of Purgation and the Way of Illumination, respectively: and our subject now is the Way of Purgation.

At first, as has been said, the soul takes extraordinary pleasure in all those external things which, it appears to him, are sanctified by Christ’s presence, and more especially by those which are most directly connected with his grace. For example, a soul that has just formed this friendship – that has, perhaps, either just entered the Catholic Church by conversion, or has, for the first time, consciously and deliberately awakened to the glories of Catholicism, or even to some imperfect form of Christianity, as that system through which Christ has approached him – finds an overwhelming joy in even the most exterior details of that system. The human organization of the Church, her methods, her forms of worship, her music and her art – all these things seem to the soul to be wholly heavenly and divine.

And, extremely often, the first sign that the Way of Purgation has been really entered, lies in a consciousness that there is beginning for him an experience which the world calls disillusionment. It may come in a dozen different ways.

He may, for example, be brought face to face with some catastrophe in external matters. He may meet with an unworthy priest, a disunited congregation, some scandal in Christian life, in exactly that sphere where Christ seemed to him evidently supreme. He had thought that the Church must be perfect, because it was the Church of Christ or the priesthood stainless because it was after the Order of Melchisedech; and he finds to his dismay that there is a human side even to those things that are most associated with divinity on earth. Or it comes to him, perhaps, in forms of worship. The novelty begins to wear off, and the sweetness of familiarity has not yet had time to form; and he finds that those very things which had seemed to him to be the most directly connected with his new friend are in themselves external, temporary, and transitory. His love for Christ was so great as to have glided over all those exterior matters which he and Christ had in common; now the gliding begins to wear thin, and he sees them to be but earthly after all. And, the more acute his imaginative love at the beginning, the more acute his disappointment now.

This, then, is usually the first stage of Purgation; he becomes disillusioned with human things, and finds that however Christian they may be, they are not, after all, Christ.

Immediately the first danger presents itself; for there is no cleansing process which has not within it a certain destructive power; and if he is, after all, but a superficial kind of soul, he will lose his friendship with Christ (such as it was), together with those little gifts and enticements of Christ's with which he wooed and pleased him. There are wandering souls in the world who have failed under this test; who have mistaken human romance for an internal love, who have turned back again from Christ so soon as he has put off his ornaments. But if he be stronger than this, he will have learned his first lesson – that divinity is not in these earthly things, that the love of Christ is a deeper thing than the mere presents he makes to his new friends.

II

The next stage of Purgation lies in what may be called, in a sense, the disillusionment with divine things. The earthly side has failed him, or rather has fallen off from the reality; now it begins to seem to him as if the divine side failed him too.

A brilliant phrase of Faber’s well describes one element in this disillusionment – the “monotony of piety.” There comes a time sooner or later when not only do the external things of religion – music, art, liturgy – or the external things of earthly life – the companionship of friends, conversation, business relations – things which at the beginning of the divine friendship seemed radiant with Christ’s love – begin to wear thin; but the very heart and essence of them begin to fail also. For example, the actual exercise of prayer becomes wearisome; the thrill of meditation, so exquisite at first, when every meditation was looking into the eyes of Jesus, begins to cease its vibrations. The sacraments, which, he has been informed, work ex opera operato (confer solid grace, that is to say, apart from the fervor of the soul’s own action), become wearisome and monotonous, and, so far as he can see, do not fulfill their own promises. The very things that were intended as helps seem to become additional burdens.

Or he sets his heart, let us say, on some grace or favor, some positive virtue which he knows it must be his friend’s will to confer upon him; he prays, he agonizes, he strives, he pleads – and there is no voice nor any that answers. His temptations are what they have ever been; his human nature, he perceives, after all is unchanged. He had thought that his newly formed friendship with Christ altered once and for all his old self, together with his relations with him; and, behold! he is the same as ever. Christ has cheated him, it almost seems, with promises he cannot or will not fulfill. Even in those very matters in which he trusted him most, those very provinces in which he must obviously be supreme, it seems that, after all, he is no more to him than he had been before he knew him so intimately.

Now, this stage is an infinitely more dangerous one than the preceding; for while it is comparatively easy to distinguish between Christ and, let us say, ecclesiastical music, it is not so easy to distinguish between Christ and grace – or rather between Christ and our own imaginative conceptions of what grace should be and do.

There is first the danger of gradually losing hold on religion altogether, during a long lapse of discouragement; of turning with bitter reproaches upon the silent friend who will not answer. “I trusted you; I believed in you; I thought I had found my lover at last. And now you too, like all the rest, have failed me.” A soul such as this passes often, in a burst of resentment and disappointment, either to some other religion – some modern fad that promises quick and verifiable returns in spiritual things – or to that same state in which he had been before he ever knew Christ. (Only, it must be remembered, a soul that has once known Christ can never be quite like one who has not known him.) Or there remains one further state more outrageous and unnatural than any – that state of a cynical and “disillusioned” Christian. “Yes, I too,” he tells some ardent soul, “I too was once as you are. I too, in my youthful enthusiasm, once thought I had found the secret…But you will become practical, some day, too. You will understand, too, that romance is not truth. You will become ordinary and workaday like myself…Yes, it is all very mysterious. Perhaps, after all, experience is the only truth worth having.”

Yet, if all goes well; if the soul is still strong enough to cleave to what seems now a mere memory; if he is confident that an initiation so bewilderingly beautiful as was his when the friendship of Christ first came to him, cannot, in the long run, lead to barrenness and cynicism and desolation; if he can but cry in his sincerity that it is better to kneel eternally at the grave of the buried Jesus than to go back and mix again in the ways of the world; then he learns at least one lesson when Jesus rises again (as he always does) – that he cannot hold him in the old way, because he is “not yet ascended to his Father,” and that, in one word, the object of religion is that the soul should serve God, not that God should serve the soul.

III

There follows, however, a third stage before the Way of Purgation is wholly passed. The soul has learned that external things are not Christ; that internal things are not Christ. He has become “disillusioned,” first with the frame of the picture, and next with the picture itself, before he has reached the original. He now has to learn the last lesson of all, and become disillusioned with himself.

Up to now he has always retained a belief, however faint and humble, that there was something in himself, and of himself, that attracted Christ toward him. He has been at least tempted to think that Christ had failed him; now he has to learn that it is he who, all along, in spite of his childlike love, has been failing Christ; and this is at once the real essence and object of purgation. He has been stripped of all his coverings, of his ornaments and his clothes; now he has to be stripped of himself, that he may be the kind of disciple that Christ wishes.

He begins, then, in this third stage, to learn his own ignorance and his own sin, and to learn, too, that which ought to have been wholly incompatible with his ignorance and his sin – his amazing self-centeredness and complacency. Up to now he has thought to possess Christ, to hold him as a lover and a friend, to grasp him and to keep him. His previous mistakes came from this very thing; now he has to learn that not only must he relinquish all that is not Christ, but he must relinquish Christ – leave, that is to say, his energetic hold on him, and be content, instead, to be altogether held and supported by him. So long as he has a shred of self left he will seek to make the friendship mutual, to give, at least, a fraction of what he receives. Now he faces the fact that Christ must do all, that he can do nothing without him, that he has no power at all except what Christ gives him. What has been wrong with him up to now, he begins to see, is not so much that he has done or not done this or that, that he has grasped at this or that…but simply this; that he has been himself all along, that he has sought to possess, not to be possessed…that he has been himself, and that the self has been hateful because it is not been altogether lost in Christ. He has been endeavoring to cure the symptoms of his disease, but he has not touched the disease with one finger. He sees for the first time that there is no good in himself apart from Christ; that Christ must be all, and he nothing.

Now, if a soul has come so far as this, it is extremely rare that sheer pride should be his ruin. The very knowledge of himself that he has gained is an effectual cure of any further real complacency; for he has seen plainly, at any rate for the time being, how utterly worthless he is. Yet there are other dangers that face him, and of these one at least may be pride under the very subtle disguise of extravagant humility. “I had better never again attempt those high flights and those aspirations after friendship with my God. Let me give up, once and for all, my dreams of perfection, and my hopes of actual union with my Lord. I must sink back again to the common level, content if I can keep myself just tolerable in his sight. I must take my place again in the ordinary paths, and no longer seek an intimacy with Christ of which I am evidently unworthy.”

Or his self-knowledge may take the form of despair; and it is a burden which before now has broken down even the mental faculties themselves. “I have forfeited,” cries a soul such as this – a soul which has lost the excuse of pride, but yet clings to its substance – “I have forfeited the friendship of Christ once and for all. It is impossible that I who have tasted of the heavenly gift should be renewed again unto repentance. He chose me, and I failed him. He loved me, and I have loved myself only. Therefore let me go far off from his presence…Depart from me; for I am a sinful man, O Lord.”

And yet, if the soul only knew it, now is the very moment to which all the preceding stages have led. Now is the very instant in which the beloved soul, having learned his last lesson on the Purgative Way, is fit to “cast himself into the sea” to come to Jesus. And this he will do, if he has learned his lesson well, and is conscious that it is exactly because he is nothing in himself, and because he knows it, that Christ can be his all. No longer can pride, whether whole or wounded, keep him from Christ, for his pride at last is not wounded, but dead….

The way of the spiritual path is strewn with the wrecks of souls that might have been friends of Christ. This one faltered, because Christ put off his ornaments; this one because Christ did not allow him to think that his graces were himself; a third because wounded pride still writhed, and bade him be true to his own shame rather than to his glory. All these stages and processes are known; every spiritual writer that has ever lived has treated of them over and over again from this standpoint or from that. But the end and lesson of them all is the same – that Christ purges his friends of all that is not of him; and he leaves them nothing of themselves, in order that he may be wholly theirs; for no soul can learn the strength and the love of God, until he has cast his whole weight upon him.

By Robert Hugh Benson, The Friendship of Christ, Chapter Three