When the Well Runs Dry: Prayer Beyond the Beginnings

by Thomas H. Green

meditation/contemplation2 is not normally a lifetime way of praying, even for active apostles.

beyond meditation /contemplation is not a splendid oasis of Omar Khayyam filled with delights for the soul (which seems to be what most people understand by "mystic" or "contemplative"), but rather a vast desert of purifying dryness with, perhaps, occasional small oases to sustain the spirit.

chapters 8 to 10 of Book I of the Dark Night of the Soul, which I feel may well be the most important single thing ever written on prayers

Leonard Boase, S.J. His Prayer of Faith is really John of the Cross's "Dark Night of the Senses" in contemporary dress,

our goal is a personal vision of the way God works in those he draws to love.

I would now see three essential stages of growth in any solid interior life. These stages may vary in duration and intensity. They are, moreover, quite broad and allow for considerable variety in concrete experience.

The first stage is getting to know the Lord.

second stage of prayer. I have characterized this as the move from knowing to loving,

the time will surely come when the well of our imagination runs dry and we must either be convinced that God is not the image we have of him or else we will take the loss of the image for the loss of God himself-and we will be tempted to abandon prayer as a hopeless endeavor.

The mark of a good prayer life is not abundant consolation, but growth in the virtues.

that the time will come when our intellects, our imaginations, our feelings dry up and cease to be of help.

Teresa told him it was not at all surprising he has so few friends, considering how he treats the few friends he does have.

"From Loving to Truly Loving."

love which is strongly emotional is essentially self-seeking, concerned with its own pleasure and delight.

One sure mark of genuine spiritual growth, I think, is a growing preference for the ordinary days of our life with God.

our "work" at this time-we who now become the clay in the hands of the divine Potter-is really to learn to "do nothing gracefully"

"No one who drinks the water that I shall give will ever be thirsty again:

This, above all, sets Christianity apart from any religion in which the things of this world are illusory and spirituality is achieved in a flight from our concrete experience. The most ordinary things-like water-reveal God, if only we have the eyes to see.

meditation and contemplation are just the beginning of the Christian life of prayer.

In the prayer of quiet, where God works directly on the will, the understanding and the imagination are like restless children.

I have read Teresa's chapters XVI to XXII, where she discusses these ways, countless times-and each time I seem to understand them differently, and sometimes I decide I have never really understood them at all! My only consolation is that I suspect Teresa herself might have said the same thing.

One can accept the gospel demands or one can freely "go away," but one can never make them more popular, reasonable, palatable, and still follow Jesus Christ.

"When God calls man, he bids him come and die."

The real conflict, I believe, is not "God vs. no God," but rather love vs. hate.

love consists, not in the extent of our happiness, but in the firmness of our determination to try to please God in everything, and to endeavor, in all possible ways, not to offend him, and to pray him ever to advance the honor and glory of his son and the growth of the Catholic Church.

The genuine life of prayer is marked by growth in faith, in hope, and in love:

stubborn (oftentimes a survival mechanism for those of limited intelligence or opportunity),

Instinctual failings and flaws of personality are not necessarily or automatically uprooted by a genuine spirituality.

Meditation and contemplation are not prayer, they are normally a necessary preliminary to prayer: They are the "getting to know" the Lord which makes prayer possible. Prayer is the loving that flows from a deeper and deeper knowing.

the deep mystical meaning of our identification with Jesus.

We feel like Job; obviously we have offended God in some way, but we cannot discover how.

I don't think Job felt this way. He knew he hadn't offended God. That is what his argument with the others was about.

The cross of desolation is not just a whim of God, it is the only way we can truly learn to love.

The best proof that it is really God is that he is often absent when we seek him, and present when we are not seeking him or perhaps don't even want him present.

(This is why a retreat of less than eight days can be unsatisfactory for a mature Christian. If the time is shorter than that, we find ourselves just beginning to harvest the fruit when the retreat is finished.)

the call of God is not so much to do something as to allow something to be done in us.

Moreover, it is rare that we can find a guide who really understands what is happening to us.

any love, whether it be for God or for people, comes to maturity in the hard times.

"this night ... is contemplation."'

The cloud of unknowing is God.

It is dark because it is totally beyond our natural capacities.

The dark was a much more secure situation for me, because in that dark prayer there was nothing to gratify my self-seeking and to deflect me from centering wholly on the Lord rather than on myself.

How can we cooperate fully with the Lord working in us, so that the charring of the wood may gradually give way to the incandescence of the divine fire in us?

first, to have a good director and trust the Lord to speak to us through him or her;

Second, to abandon all attempts to meditate or to reach God ourselves and simply "allow the soul to...

a person in this state finds neither consolation nor support in any doctrine or spiritual director. Although his spiritual director

dismiss every clever or subtle thought, no matter how holy or valuable. Cover it over with a thick cloud of forgetting because in this life only love can touch God as he is in himself, never knowledge.

we should no longer seek to labor with our intellects and imaginations once our prayer becomes contemplative.

That is, until the three signs of the dark night (which we discussed at the end of chapter 4) are verified in our own prayer experience.