Sometimes it sounds like the saints want to give up! Saint Paul talks about preferring to die than to live:
For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this tent we groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling… Yes, we do have confidence, and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord. (2 Cor 5:1–2, 8)
Or:
For to me, living is Christ and dying is gain. If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labour for me; and I do not know which I prefer. (Phil 1:21–22)
And not just Saint Paul. We could find such desires expressed in many saints’ writings and testimonies.
What explanation is there for this? Saint Edith Stein, quoting and discussing the teaching of Saint John of the Cross, explains like this:
When the spiritual appetite is purified of all things created and of all attachment thereto, then the soul has taken on divine qualities rather than her own natural ones and she now possesses and empty, prepared room. But since the divine is not yet communicated to her in union, the soul feels “pain that is worse than death, especially when a divine ray appears vaguely through some crevice and is not communicated to her by God. These are the souls who suffer with impatient love, for they cannot remain long in this condition; they must either receive what they long for, or die.” (Quoting Saint John of the Cross, The Living Flame of Love, St 3, #18)
In the sense of receiving what they long for, all of this is much like what Saint Francis de Sales says about these passages of Saint Paul: the soul is indifference and only wants to do what is God’s good pleasure. But whence does that good pleasure lead, and when will the soul know it?
And Edith continues:
And because God is profound and infinite, so in a certain fashion, [these empty caves made in the soul] have an infinite capacity, their thirst and their hunger both infinite, their languishing and their suffering constitute a death without end. Although the suffering is not yet as deep as in the next life, it still gives a living image of it since the soul already possesses the necessary disposition to receive the fullness of eternal life.
What suffering it would be! Empty caves waiting to be filled, already hollowed up through detachment from creatures and waiting for a communicated, filling, experienced presence of total union with the Beloved. A dark night suffered and complete: but no consummation of the marriage and no escape.
The underling reality, put in these terms, is understandable. It is simple. The marriage bed is ready, and the bride is tired and empty. But the bridegroom still sits at the door. Why does God leave some saints in such a state for greater or less periods of time? To store up merits for his Church? to teach them a compassion, not only in the simplicity of love, but in concrete experience? to show them realities that there are, which God does not wish for them to bypass? Could anyone say for sure? It is surely an affair of Divine Providence, who knows what he is doing.
Some related posts:
Contemplative in the Mud 