Occasionally, I’ll have to put down a book because of a truth conveyed or the words used to paint a scene in my mind. Other times, rarer still, I’ll put down a book because it seems to be reading my soul. Recently, this happened with Carlo Carretto’s Letters from the Desert. Carretto (1910–88) was a Catholic activist in Italy, when in 1954, at age 44, he left everything and went to the African desert to follow in the footsteps of Charles de Foucauld. There, he wrote his letters and one, in particular, spoke to me. Here’s an excerpt from it:
Those who after their first steps in the spiritual life, throw themselves into the struggle of prayer and union with God, are astounded at the dryness of the road.
The more they advance, the more the darkness thickens around them. The more they go on, the more bitter and insipid everything becomes. They derive little comfort from the recollection of times past when God seemed to make their spiritual path easier…
Instead of consolation he sends boredom, and instead of light, darkness. Right there, halfway along our road, we don’t know whether we are going backwards or forwards…
We are beginning to discover what we are worth: nothing, or little. At earlier stages we thought we were generous; we now discover that we are egoists. We thought, under the false light of religious aestheticism, that we knew how to pray; now we find that we no longer know how to say “Father.” We were convinced that we were humble, charitable, obedient; now we find that pride has invaded our whole being, down to the deepest roots. Prayer, human relationships, working to spread the Gospel, all these seem thwarted…
With the exception of those privileged souls who understood right from the beginning what the problem really was, and who immediately set out upon the true, rough road of humility and spiritual childhood, the greater part of humankind is called upon to undergo a hard and painful experience.
This normally occurs around the age of forty.1
I am forty.
And perhaps I’ve never been more uncertain about things. By now, I’ve tried enough of my own projects. I’ve watched a lot of them fail. I’ve made decisions — some right, most wrong. I’ve gotten all strategic, only to get lost in my own abstractions. I’ve gotten tripped up by my idealistic vision of reality, only to slam into the real thing. I’ve overpromised and underdelivered. I’ve failed to count the cost and have bit off too much. Veered out of my lane. Over and over. I realize I’m a broken record in the confessional. I’ve had to deal with being disillusioned with myself as vices I thought I buried surface or sin I thought I stamped out sneaks in. Then there’s the complete surprise when I say something stupid or respond uncharitably in situations and in ways I never imagined. My soul has become aware, as Carretto puts it, “there is no sin which it has not committed, or which it does not feel truly capable of committing.”2 I’m capable of both high highs and low lows.
I have a lovely wife and eight beautiful children, and all the time feel my insufficiency. I sense my shortcomings. They’re right in front of my face everyday. All of it is, as Carretto puts it, “a hard and painful experience.” Our kids range in age from ages sixteen to one, leaving me feeling like I’m doing the mental splits each day. Teenage problems combined with a three-year-old who only knows how to yell makes me maniacal. I’ve been finding myself actually scratching my head in front of situations lately. I always thought that just happened in cartoons, but I guess not. My prayer has become more and more: “Help me to not mess this up;” or “Jesus, please let me be a better dad today than I was yesterday.”
I’m not at all depressed about this. Anything like that you might sense up to this point is simply my melancholic temperament coming through. Really, it’s all quite sobering. And it’s good living in reality, even if it means slamming into hard truths about God, myself, others, and the world around me. To encounter one’s limits and to learn to live well within them, I find peace there.
Hearing God’s Voice
In addition to moral considerations, Carretto raises spiritual ones. Desolation. Dryness. Boredom. Darkness. Confusion.
This whole midlife thing and the spiritual dryness has made me call into question whether or not I know how to hear God’s voice, if I have ever heard it, if what I was so certain was God’s voice in my young adult years really was, and so forth.3
In my youth, not that long ago, I’d feel some sort of inspiration or have an exciting thought, sit with it for about, oh, five seconds, and act on it. Or I’d have an “image” in prayer or receive a “word” in worship, and if it wasn’t immoral or against Church teaching, I believed it must have been of God and move on it. No hesitation. Brief discernment. Just thought and action. Or sometimes, action, then thought. Hmmm.
This is not to say that there’s nothing to the Christian imagination or the gift of prophecy or what have you. I simply mean to say there’s a precariously thin line between discerning God’s will and mine. Anyone who’s spent any time in discernment knows it can be a murky space (and, yes, I am aware of St. Ignatius’s rules, have been practicing them for decades, and have even taught them). Sometimes I discern rightly. Other times wrongly. Sometimes when I follow my will, things work out. Other times they don’t. Sometimes when I follow God’s will, things go according to plan and there’s fruit. Other times, everything seems to fall apart and I’m left wondering if I did something wrong or if apparent failure was his will all along. How can one know?
I’ve found great consolation in Thomas Merton’s prayer that appears in his Thoughts in Solitude:
My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following Your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please You does in fact please You. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that, if I do this, You will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust You always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for You are ever with me, and You will never leave me to face my perils alone.
Over the years, as I’ve gotten more experience in life and in ministry (and, I suppose, as I completed my doctoral studies), as I’ve gotten to know myself better, I’ve become less sure of myself. This has nothing to do with some deeply rooted insecurity, though I do think original sin and actual sin and the problem of death all have something to do with the kinds of existential insecurity we all face if we let ourselves think about it for a few seconds. If anything, over the years, I’ve gotten more comfortable in my own skin and have settled into a deeper awareness of being a mere creature, and one who has been blessed by a sacred adoption and everything that comes with it. By saying I’ve become less sure of myself, I mean I’m less foolhardy. I’ve come to realize the gravity of my words and actions quite a bit more. I can see, at least a little more clearly, the ripple effect of me in this world, for good or for bad — and I’d like to see it become more good than bad. Yes. Maybe less foolhardy and realizing just how sensitive the human soul is and how quickly you can capsize it with rash and unkind words. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about a line from Flannery O’Connor: “I am becoming convinced that anybody who gives anybody else any advice ought to spend forty days in the desert both before and after.”4
I also want to be clear that I’m not becoming a nihilist. In fact, I believe more and more in the inherent meaningfulness of all reality. However, I’ve come to realize that when left to my own devices, I often fail to recognize that meaningfulness or I fail to grasp its depths because I don’t allow myself to be taken into its mystery.
So, I question my own ability to discern. If I’m honest, I think I can be fairly hard of hearing when it comes to God’s voice, and I probably have my hearing aids turned up too high and tuned in too much to my own voice. As I engage in midlife, I’ve found myself reflecting on how I can have any bearings at all as I try to navigate all the gray hues of our lives that just aren’t as black and white as we’d like them to be. Are there any paths out of my own head? Is it possible to hear God, or am I just, always hearing myself?
As I look back, I can see that as I’ve grown older, I’ve been keying in on several elements of the Catholic tradition more and more, and veering away from trying to figure things out so much in my own head and relying, perhaps too much, on my feelings or pious and zealous sentiments. I’d like to mention just a few of these briefly:
Jesus. God is logos and the logos took flesh in Jesus Christ (the Logos). Jesus is, therefore, the subject who is the object of Christian faith. He is the key to understanding the meaning of all there is and the way to God. I follow Jesus because he’s been good to me and is the answer to the infinite longing of my heart. I can come into contact with him in and through the concreteness of the Church and her Sacraments.
The Ten Commandments (and Church Teaching). I’m not smarter than the Church. I’m just not. This pushes against the prideful and autonomous streak that runs through our culture and right through my own life. I might recoil at the thought of submitting to a master, of being a disciple, being a follower. I might find it repulsive not being lord of my life. But is it not the case that I’ve come to Christ because I need Our Lord to help me live? To make me into a real human? Is it not the case that I’ve come to the Church as Mother and teacher to show me the way? On my own, I surely didn’t find it. Who am I to tell the Church how she ought to be? Who am I to try to get her to bend toward my will and justify what I want? Who am I to tell God what he should do and when he should do it? Who am I to try to fashion God after my own image and likeness, rather than being conformed to his?
The Liturgy. And I’m distracted most of the time. But, liturgy is concrete and not revolving around itself in my own mind. It is it’s own thing and it’s outside of me. I bump into it. Or, like a river, I’m invited to jump into it. I don’t move it; it moves me. And this is a good thing.
My State in Life. I have a vocation comprised of a real wife and real kids, and they really mediate God’s love for me and I hopefully do the same for them. They also need things from me. In this way, I don’t need a religious vow of obedience to know what I need to do. I just need to listen to my wife and respond when she asks something of me, or get that thirsty kid some water at the dinner table, or pick up the other one from practice, or wipe the butt of the one-year-old — and to do it all charitably. No need to go searching for ascetical practices in my life, or to heap more and more on. I struggle enough to live out my own vocational call generously.
Lectio Divina. Ah. Now we’ve finally come to the reason why this lengthy post appears on this Substack. Lectio has become a kind of rock in my personal prayer. It keeps me focused and, like liturgy, it confronts me as an objective other. That it’s objective means it’s outside of me and I “bump” into it, so to speak. In prayer, then, I’m not just playing bumper cars with my own thoughts. I also don’t have to question constantly if something is from God or not. When I read prayerfully with Scripture, that is, when I pray in the mode of lectio divina, I can take it as a given that the words of Scripture are, in fact, God’s words. This gives my prayer more solid footing because I can start from a stable “given.” The given is that Scripture is God’s word spoken in such a way that we can understand it and, because it’s alive, it’s still speaking today. Through God’s written word I can learn how to listen for God’s voice. I can learn how to be present to God who is present to me, somehow, through his word. I’m not alone in this sentiment. Fr. Michael Casey, OCSO points out that “binding prayer to the Scriptures is an effective means of overcoming the obstacle of subjectivism and finding a way out of what had become a blind alley of blank spiritual experience.”5 I take Casey to mean the common experience had by anyone who prays and raises questions like: What am I hearing? Am I hearing anything? Is what I’m hearing from me? God? Someone else? How can I know for sure? However, I also think Casey’s getting at the problem of modern meditation that’s directed inward as a calming way of acquiescing with one’s own self. But, as Terrance Kardong, OSB says, “prayer turns outward to Another, not inward on the self.”6 Tethering prayer to Scripture gives prayer a concrete foundation and the person praying a concrete sounding board. I can know, by faith, I’m encountering God’s word, and through the inspired word, God himself. Scripture is real and really present to me. I bump into it as other, outside of my own thoughts, emotions, concerns, whims, and desires.
Since this post has become rather autobiographical, I’ll add one final note. My pursuit of Benedictine oblation at the Monastery of the Holy Cross in Chicago aligns with my journey so far. It confirms it and will help me move forward down this path that is the Christian life. For me, oblation and being affiliated with a real monastic community is part of the fight to get out of my own head and to get in touch with real things. I need that tether outside of my own subjective experience that can anchor me when I need to be anchored, and guide me when I need to be guided. Leaning into the Rule of St. Benedict and seeking conversion of life according to the monastic way of life as it’s lived out at the Monastery has been tremendously helpful at this juncture. I look forward to what the Lord has in store with all of this. It’s also been interesting to witness how my approach to parish ministry has changed with age and to see parishioners growing by embracing concrete encounters with Christ and each other.
I’ve meandered about enough in this post. To wrap it up, I’d say that on one hand it seems like I’m struggling to hear God speak as I move through the midway point on the journey of life. On the other hand, maybe I’m hearing him as clearly as ever — or clearer. I guess time will tell.
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Carretto, Letters from the Dessert, 59–60.
Carretto, Letters from the Dessert, 61.
Note that today the concept of “crisis” carries with it a rather negative connotation. However, etymologically, the word comes from krinein "to separate, decide, judge." It’s a time of seeing things and trying to make sense of them — making a decision and moving accordingly.
O’Connor, The Habit of Being, 241.
Casey, Sacred Reading, vii.
Kardong, “Work is Prayer: Not!”, 435.
You. Are.40.
At 80 I could write many of the same thoughts! Merton's prayer is as relevant for me today as it was at 40, when i hung it above my desk and carried it in my planner. Well done Brad