Transcript of Abbot Clement=s Talk on Monday, July 12, 2004
One of the rhythms of the spiritual life is kind of sensing the presence of God richly and buoyantly and then experiencing his apparent absence, but God is obviously never absent. The master of this kind of rhythm who has reflected it and taught it well is Saint Ignatius and he sums it up in periods of consolation and periods of desolation.
In our present world there is a lot of desolation mainly because, to put it bluntly, the world reveals to us how to practice the capital sins. When people embrace the capital sins it means they abandon themselves as spiritual beings and therefore place themselves in the position of desolation. It doesn’t take much for the present world to move from desolation to psychological state of depression. They
=re not the same but they are sometimes overlapping in their experience. Maybe later I=ll talk about the difference between those two.Insofar as the church is not really beyond the notion of simply staying out of sin. If you are simply making the effort to stay out of sin then you are in and out of yourself as a spiritual person and struggling therefore and don
=t experience the spiritual dimension too often. The common person in the church may also be in constant or frequent desolation. Apparently this is so because a lot of people feel detached from or disconnected from their communities and they don=t feel buoyed out by their participation in their parish and maybe sometimes even in their practices. This is a very important thing to look at.Saint Ignatius reminds us that both consolation and desolation are indicators of our relating to God and both are ambiguous, that is, just because you are in consolation doesn’t t mean everything is fine and even if you are in desolation doesn’t mean everything should be abandoned, on the contrary. So desolation has a purpose.
The first purpose is if we are neglecting to really be dedicated to following Jesus, to take seriously our commitment, then we will experience desolation. It
=s a call, a summons, to examine our way of life; our prayer life, our practices, of how we are living faith, hope, and charity, worshiping and praising God, especially praising him. So it is the case, it is a gift to be able to once more orient yourself toward commitment. Another important reason is it also is an opportunity to realize that God tests us, that is, He gives us the opportunity to be more generous and to love more. Desolation is an opportunity to test that orientation. The ego has selfishness in it and a few other things that we need to overcome and desolation is the opportunity then to call forth a greater love from person.Finally, desolation has the capacity to teach us. Namely that our person is devoid of the capacity to deepen and enrich the spiritual life on our own power. Therefore desolation is given to us as a gift to enable us to see that everything is a gift from God and than we begin to orient ourselves toward gratitude and praise. So this is a very important dimension of the experience of desolation. Perhaps the quickest way to pray oneself out of desolation is to reflect and ask for the grace to really rejoice over Jesus
= joy and glory at the resurrection. After all when Jesus died and rose the first thing that was certainly a deep experience for him was complete union with the Father again and therefore he was intensely joyful. Also the glory he had from the beginning, that is from all eternity, was now being participated in his human nature. By taking the attitude of really rejoicing in this joy and glory in Jesus we are getting out of ourselves and moving precisely toward Jesus in praise, worship and thanksgiving.