I wonder how many souls would be willing to cross a threshold from a kind of general friendship with God, in a life of grace begun and spluttering only sometimes in contemplative gazes and peace, to a life of either open or masked contemplation, in which the finding of God present in and behind the realities and persons that we meet is the daily bread that we accept.

Saint John of the Cross was insistent that every spiritual director should be experienced and able to recognize the signs that God’s general call to the most passive contemplative state had, for the person in question, become proximate and, so to speak, urgent. If a spiritual director only intended (or knew how) to keep a child of God begging and waiting on the portico and never open the door, the Mystical Doctor had no use for him.

Similarly, in The Spiritual Doctrine of Father Louis Lallemant SJ, clear words are written:

Contemplation is true wisdom. This it is the books of Wisdom, Ecclesiastes, and Ecclesiasticus recommend so much. They who dissuade others from it are guilty of a great error. There is no danger in it when we bring to it the requisite dispositions. True it is that there is danger of illusion in raptures and ecstasies, especially while grace is still weak, and the soul as yet unaccustomed to such things; but in contemplation [itself] there is no danger.

In the state of predominantly suffering divine things, there is no danger. (Beware, as John of the Cross insisted, on getting too attached to particular signs given by God. Beware, as Father Lallemant said, of the emotional aspects.) But beware of contemplation itself? never put a foot out to usher a friend, a sister, a brother, into that deep knowledge of God that is something more like experience or joyful suffering? never suggest that the door is open and that it might be time to let God carry us through?

No, that’s wrong. The possibility of suffering divine things can begin here below – though according to God’s schedule and not our own.

The maxim, true to the good news, must be that perfect love casts out fear. And the perfection of love for those of us not withdrawn from the world has some mysterious bearing to the Gospel parable about seeing him in, through, or behind the people that we meet, talk to, feed, clothe, care for, or visit every day. That is, in contemplation.