I was happy to make it to Confession this past Saturday. I try to go once a month. Typically, I leave the Confessional and am awash with a sense of renewal, so grateful for the love and forgiveness of the Savior, a kind of spiritual high that lasts a good while. This past time I went, however, I experienced relief and gratefulness, but it was not long before I got home that I started to feel really...afflicted. It wasn't doubt in forgiveness, or ungratefulness, or the opposite of any of those consolations received. It was, simply, a lack of consolation that is persisting still.
It's hard to recognize what's going on sometimes in the spiritual life when you are just an amateur Joe Catholic, not a professed religious or someone advanced. You can feel like a baby sometimes who has a fever but doesn't know what a fever is, who is coming down with something for the first time. The difficulties are somewhat compounded by the occasional intersection of spiritual and mental malaise, as it pertains to my particular situation.
Though I have had minimal symptoms in the past eight years or so, I am always cognizant of the fact that I have a clinical diagnosis and that my brain may be especially sensitive in ways other people's are not. It is a vulnerability, can be a target. So I have to guard it by due diligence in as much as I am able, and ask my guardian angel to stand watch when I am not able.
My fear has always been that authentic spiritual experiences (not that I go looking for them; I am referring to those I have had) would be offset or discounted on account of being a person who could be labeled 'mentally ill' and have the medical records to prove it. I could do without a "spiritual" experience for the rest of my life if only I was able to be faithful to God and do His will in all things. But that itself--resting and having the assurance of doing His will--is a consolation that is of supreme comfort.
So, my responsibility as a man, a husband, father, provider, etc, is to stay healthy, physically but especially mentally, and avoid to the best of my ability that which would compromise my mental equilibrium. Being in a state of grace and committed to prayer and spiritual exercises has really strengthened and fortified not only my spirit but my mind as well from malevolent influence. That has not always been the case in the past, as my mind is a vulnerable portal for the influence of the Enemy to get a foothold in. It can be scary, too, because if your mind turns against you, how can you fight? How can you fight your own mind, your own self?
Back to that topic of delegitimization of the spiritual on account of the mental. Like I said, I could go without spiritual experiences, but what's hard is when you're trying to discern between the two. My brother (who is not a believer) asked me one time when we were took a break in a shelter while hiking a snowpacked trail in the Green Mountains of Vermont--"how do you know when you're talking to God and when you're just talking to yourself?" Now this was maybe 15 years ago, but it was hard to answer. Today, too, I go back and forth: when am I flooded by the euphoria of grace and love, and when am I, in fact, gripped in a state of mania? When in the depths of the pit spiritually and when I need to make an appointment with my psychiatrist to help counter an extended bout of depression?
I strongly dislike when people who suffer from mental illness will conflate their experiences in these states with the mystical, calling their depression a "dark night of the soul." Depression may be a dark night, but it is a dark night of the mind not the soul. I have experienced, painfully, the former, but I am not mystic and my dark nights of the soul have been the relatively minor (but still painful) periods of desolation.
Desolation, a temporary darkening of the mind and disturbance of the will and emotions, is permitted by God to purify the souls of his followers. It may be caused by the evil spirit or brought on by a variety of other causes, but it is always purposeful, namely to withdraw a person's affections from dwelling on creatures and bring them closer to the Creator.
Prayer is, well, hard. Harder than usual. That doesn't mean you don't do it. My spiritual affect is lower. Fervor has died down to an ember. You're just kind of putting one foot in front of another. It's best, according to St. Ignatius and other masters of the spiritual life, to maintain trajectory and not make major decisions in such a state. I know it's not forever, that it's a period. My faith sustains me in those periods even when I can't feel it. It is a comfort because it is supernatural, from outside myself, not reliant on myself--unlike in depression, when you feel it will never end and you have no mental recourse to tell you otherwise. For great saints like St. Teresa of Calcutta, that period of spiritual desolation, the withdrawal of comfort and consolation, can last years and decades even. It is a proving ground, a furnace of white hot love that sears in it's seeming absence, especially for someone who has grown to rely on God in all things. When He feels as if He is not there, it can be excruciating.
But without desolation, consolation means very little. Without crucifixion, there is no resurrection. It is part and parcel of what we are called to as Christians. So, we have to go through it. We don't always know how long it will last, but that is up to God, since He uses it for His purposes. Our job is to remain faithful, even in our self-doubt about what we are doing and how we are serving Him, when the Enemy fills our head with negative thoughts and temptations, when he seeks to exploit our (my) vulnerable mind to get a foothold. Double down, even if the rituals of prayer seem like just that. Keep praying the rosary, despite the dryness. Keep going to Mass, every day if possible, when it's tough to get there. Keep the faith, when you don't know if you'll come out the other side.
I know there is a reason for this present period of temptation and desolation. I have something I'm dreading coming up next month that I am responding to out of obedience, to what I feel I am called to do by the Spirit, but I don't want to do it. There are little things, little "yes"s in our life, and there are big "yes"s too, and this feels like one of those big yes's. So, maybe this is God's way of preparing me and getting me ready, I don't know. All I know is I trust Him more than I trust myself, and just want to do His will and be faithful. This too will pass, I'm sure. But it's hard when you're in it--the loneliness and desolation, the doubt, the flat dryness, the effort it takes being compounded. Thanks be to God for it all.
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