(The active night of the senses — stripping lower attachments to reach God)
Chapter One The Journey Begins The Active Night of the Senses If you are ready to make the radical choice to do whatever it takes to obtain the high calling to total transformation in Christ (divine union), then take note that the first step will be painful. But the “pain” will be purifying and ultimately will end in sweetness, interior stillness, freedom, peace and repose. As mentioned in the Introduction, a “beginner” for Saint John of the Cross is one who is all in, so to speak, and has already established a life of prayer, but has not yet surrendered fully to the will of God. If that is you, then it is time to let God draw you deeper into a life of prayer so as to enter through what Saint John calls the “night of the senses.”
This first dark night, the night of the senses, is divided into two parts: active and passive. This chapter will attempt to present Saint John’s teaching for beginners on the active night of the senses.
Summary of the “Active Night of the Senses” The goal of the “active night of the senses” is to free your soul from the lowest forms of pleasure, so that you can more fully seek God who also produces within you the highest form of spiritual delight, resulting from the perfection of divine union with Him.
In this step, the person must engage in intentional acts of self-denial and must also seek to know God in a new and deeper way through the prayer of meditation. Selfishness must be stripped away, and all the deceptive pleasures flowing from sinful attachments and unhealthy desires must be eliminated. The reason for this is that we are easily deceived about that which is good for us. In the beginning of our spiritual journey, we still cling to the pleasure that comes from sin and from the many other things of this world. We may still believe that the things that satisfy us are money, sensual delights, excessive food or the satisfaction of other disordered cravings. And while those things do produce a certain form of temporary delight, the end result is slavery and bondage. Therefore, God wants you free. So this first step involves you making specific choices to turn away from these deceptive attachments and desires while, at the same time, you grow in your knowledge of the glorious truths that God wants to reveal to you.
This life of meditation, inspiration and consolation is the way that God initially nourishes the soul as if it were a small infant. The infant is fed pure warm milk, caressed, carried, and treated with delicate care. All of these delicacies and consolations are from God and assist the soul during the active night of the senses.
as to obtain freedom from all of your attachments to inordinate pleasures you have formed by giving in to your sensory appetites and desires.
(Natural and voluntary appetites — how attachments form and enslave)
It’s how you were made. The key to understanding your appetites is to realize that you always desire that which your appetites perceive as good. It’s impossible to desire something that you perceive as bad. Even if the desire you have is, in fact, bad for you, you will not desire it because you perceive it as bad; rather, you will desire it because your appetites are confused and perceive the object of your desire as something good. Another important distinction to make regarding the various appetites we have is that there are natural appetites and voluntary ones.
The voluntary appetites, however, are the ones that are more concerning. These are desires we have that originated because of some decision we made, such as choosing a sin, or choosing to give in to a natural appetite in an indulgent way.
The truth is that another dose of heroine is not good for that person. But nonetheless, the person who is addicted to heroin desires the drug because the appetites are enslaved to this drug and the appetites are drawn to the satisfaction that comes from the euphoric feeling of pleasure the body receives when taking the drug.
It only comes after you willingly tried it out. Thus, it is a voluntary appetite. More will be said on this shortly in the section entitled “voluntary.”
The problem is not that you do or do not have money; rather, the problem is being attached to the desire for it. Other examples include the appetite for a certain kind of food, entertainment, satisfaction, pleasure, and so on. These become attachments when you allow your appetites for these things to form habits within you. Though you may start with a natural appetite for something (such as a particular food), you become attached to it when you voluntarily choose it in an indulgent way. You can also become attached to immaterial things, such as the praise and honor others give you or fail to give you. When you desire the praise of others, and then continually act in such a way so as to receive that praise, you become attached to the praise.
An attachment weakens your ability to freely choose in a voluntary way. You act out of habit rather than freedom, just like animals. This applies to every habit you form. If you habitually use foul language, speak gossip, desire money, or form any other habit, you become less and less free to make voluntary actions. However, as a human being with a free will and intellect, you can always work to undo the habitual attachments you have voluntarily formed.
(Worldly pleasures as dust — God’s delight is the higher order)
God wants you happy. Happier than you could ever imagine! He wants you fulfilled. To a greater degree than you desire for yourself! He even wants you to take great delight in every aspect of your daily life.
Furthermore, there has to be a discovery of the essential spiritual truth that the passing pleasures of this world are like dust in comparison to the delights that God wants to bestow upon you. Therefore, any purgation of a lower form of “pleasure” will ultimately result in the enjoyment of so much more.
Think about the worldly image of the hedonistic “pleasure seeker.” This is the person who lives for the moment, lives the high life, is always seeking greater adventures or new experiences that the world can offer. Well, the truth is that when a person makes it their goal to seek every pleasure the world can offer, they may end up obtaining just that! And that is a sad result! Why? Because the pleasures of the world, even if one were to be able to indulge in all of them, are like pure torture and filth compared to the incomprehensible joys of a life lived in the transformation of divine union. There is simply no comparison. So, does God want you to enjoy life and take pleasure in it? Most certainly. But He wants your pleasure to be of the highest order, the order for which you were made, the eternal delights, the spiritual delights. He does not want you to selfishly indulge in passing and finite pleasures that never fully satisfy and always leave you hungry for more.
In other words, if a person were to obtain everything the world holds up as beautiful, good and wise, what they actually obtain is misery, wickedness and ignorance when compared to that which God wants to give them through divine union. If that is difficult to understand and accept, don’t get discouraged just yet.
Even if you were to obtain the greatest material wealth, enjoy the best entertainment, daily eat the finest food, be greatly esteemed by the world, learn every bit of knowledge humanly possible, etc., you would still be absolutely miserable in comparison to what God wants to give you.
The Truth Leads to Purgation If “purgation” sounds painful, difficult and depressing, that is because you have allowed yourself to be deceived by the world, the flesh, the evil one and your own misguided will. Do you want the truth, or do you prefer to live in a lie? That’s actually a difficult question to answer for many people.
Do I have to Give up EVERY Attachment? I’m happy to tell you that the answer to that question is absolutely “Yes!” Yes, you do have to be purified of EVERY single attachment, no matter how small, if you want to fully enter into the unfathomable joys and fulfillment of divine union. Not a single disordered attachment can remain (note that all attachments to things other than God are disordered).
But Saint John goes even further. He says that we not only have to overcome our mortal and venial sins, we also have to overcome every spiritual imperfection, no matter how small, if we want to enter into divine union. And in the coming chapters, he will take us even further than that!
but they will do so without those momentary sins becoming habits, or attachments to sin or imperfection.
This means that if an occasion arises in which you are invited to engage in gossip, but you have already overcome the perpetual habit of doing so, you are free to choose to enter back into gossip or not.
Though temptation is not a sin or imperfection (recall that even Jesus was tempted), voluntarily entertaining and considering the temptation keeps you from the perfection of divine union until the habitual desire is eliminated.
Love of God is what we are made for and He must become the single center of our lives.
Delighting in God with every fiber of your being is infinitely superior to sharing your desires with other lesser or disordered satisfactions.
This is a great mystery in that the only way to true love of others is to give yourself 100% to God. All means all.
Does Purgation Hurt? Yes, but sin hurts worse. The purgation of your senses, either in an active or passive way, will be painful. Severing the chains, cords or even the tiny strings that bind you to your appetites, attachments and desires will produce pain in your sensory appetites. So as to prepare you for the experience of being purified, Saint John of the Cross spends much time talking about the experience of purgation being like a dark night. He explains that as a person is fully purified of each disordered attachment and desire, there will be a feeling of loss, emptiness, nakedness and nothingness. Their soul is now “all stilled.”
Regarding pain, Saint John explains that disordered attachments and imperfections actually cause far more interior suffering than the purgation of the senses causes.
First, disordered attachments deprive us of the fullness or the Spirit of God, that is, they deprive us of full union with God. And that absence in our lives is painful. We may think that the agony we experience here or there is the fault of our circumstances or perhaps what someone else did to us, but it’s not true. Most of our interior suffering is caused by not being in full union with God.
Darkened: Attachments confuse a soul and cloud its intellect. It is no longer able to see the Truth of God clearly. The soul’s experience is like looking for the sun on a very foggy day.
(The seven capital sins of beginners — spiritual pride as the worst)
Spiritual Pride—Spiritual pride is the worst of the spiritual sins, and the “mother” of all of these sins. This sin arises when beginners have certain vain satisfactions and desires that come as a result of their engagement in many spiritual activities. The beginners admire themselves and even see themselves as holier than others.
They are never satisfied with their confessors, especially if their confessors do not praise them and tell them how great they are. So, they seek out other confessors who do praise them. They are pleased when people praise their holiness.
Their only desire is to do that which they want “for God.” In the end, they seek spiritual pleasure rather than the will of God. And when they fail to experience sweetness, they think they have not accomplished anything good. They are also very weak in journeying on the hard road of the Cross since they are so attached to sweetness. Their goal must be to become spiritually temperate by submitting to God in all things rather than doing what they want for God.
This next step, the passive night (purgation) of the senses, is a process of stripping you of all sensory pleasure you receive from spiritual things.
Your sensory appetites will long to return to the former consolations you enjoyed, but you will not be able to do so, no matter how hard you try. Of course, sometimes God will bring you back to the consolations of meditation, but then take them away again. You may find that this experience goes back and forth for a while between dryness and consolation.
(The passive night — dryness, loving attentiveness, and letting God paint)
You will no longer love God only because it feels good to love God; rather, you will have to now love God only because you do love God, even when He feels absent and there is no immediate sensory pleasure in that union.
Hobbies may be less attractive to you, relationships may not produce the same familiar delight they used to bring, and prayer will become dry and even unpleasant.
Simply keep yourself in a state of “loving attentiveness” toward God. That’s it. Do not try harder. Just remain at peace.
Saint John then offers an analogy to illustrate his point. He says that if you were posing for a portrait that an artist was painting of you, your only responsibility would be to sit still so that the artist could do his job. If, out of a desire to help the artist, you kept getting up to look at the painting, offering this suggestion or that, you would actually hinder the artist. God is the artist, and His canvas is your soul.
The Spirit of Fornication—This demonic spirit may be allowed to tempt you, in a very vile way, with strong images and desires for sensual pleasure. Though this will involve disordered sexual temptations, it is not exclusive to those specific temptations. Recall that spiritual lust involves not only sexual desires but also a lust for all sensual attractions.
One simple and straightforward message that could be gained is “STOP it!” Stop overthinking. Stop overanalyzing. Stop causing yourself undue anxiety about spiritual things. Stop being scrupulous. And stop thinking so much about yourself!
As a result, your will must be purified. It may feel awkward to allow God to motivate you rather than your passions. In order to let God do this in you, you must be willing to let your passions become stilled, quiet and at rest.
(The burning log — transformation as the soul becoming fire)
This is because there are impurities in the log, such as moisture and sap, that cannot properly take on the nature of fire. Those impurities must be burnt out. Also, the log becomes blackened before it catches fire. Eventually, when all the impurities are gone, the log actually takes on the properties of the fire all the way to its center, in that it glows, gives heat and is beautiful as it becomes one with the flame. And once transformed by fire, the fire cannot be separated from the burning log. The flame and log are one.