9. You are likely to think that God is going to pay you back for your faithfulness in prayer by making you feel full in your soul, or by giving you a special sense of his presence or at least by providing you with a zest for the spiritual life.
Inner life Christian teachers from centuries ago refer to these good feelings and pleasant outcomes as “consolations.” It may strike you as very unusual that we would be warned against these consolations.
My own spiritual director once gave me this terse warming: “God ebbs, too, you know, Tim.”
It is true that some of our spiritual experiences feel good to us. That “full” or “close” feeling that we have with God is something that we should be free to enjoy. The point here is that many times our spiritual practices, our prayer life, and the tendencies of our spirit do not yield what we have come to know as “warm fuzzies.” In fact, many students of the interior life struggle often against a complete absence of consolations.
We are told by Spanish spiritual writer John of the Cross that the quest for consolations is an aspect of “beginners,” and will hold us back in our learning and in our growing such that we remain “feeble, like that of weak children.” “Their motivation,” he says of beginners, “in their spiritual works and exercises is the consolation and satisfaction they experience in them.” (Dark Night of the Soul, Book 1, Chapter 1, Part 3.)
As you become more resolute in your pursuit of God, your need for warm fuzzies will fall away. You will think your prayer life is getting stale and perhaps God has wandered off, but, quite the opposite is happening. You are growing.
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