After the Ascension, the Apostles of our Lord retreated to a house; they didn’t know for how long they would do so, but they stayed praying. In the end, after ten days, the Holy Spirit came down on them: it was Pentecost.
These moments have a special meaning for Saint Catherine of Siena. The meaning is something that comes back to her; it’s not a one-off interpretation of hers. Around this time last year, I wrote about how, in her Dialogue, she interprets the events Ascension and Pentecost. Actually, in a letter to a Dominican brother, she follows the same theme and pattern.
In that letter, Catherine recalls that there are many of us like or who should become more like
Saint Peter, who before the Passion loved Christ tenderly; but he was not strong, therefore he failed in the time of the Cross: but then, after the coming of the Holy Spirit, he separated him from the love of sweetness, and lost fear, and reached a strong love, and tried in the fire of many tribulations.
What, however, was the method by which this fear of Saint Peter’s was overcome?
Note the way that Peter took, and the other disciples, to gain power to lose their servile fear and love of consolations, and to receive the Holy Spirit, as had been promised them by the Sweet Primal Truth. Therefore says the Scripture [Acts 1:12–14] that they shut them in the house, and stayed there in vigil and continual prayers; they stayed ten days, and then came the Holy Spirit.
When came the Holy Spirit, “suddenly through love they lost their fear “. Gone goes the servile fear that coexists with our love of God! Only love, with a holy fear seeking no consolation or benefit, remains. And Catherine is very clear: yes, this is what happened to the disciples; it is also what should happen to us.
The way to arrive at perfection is that of the disciples… That is, as Peter and the others shut themselves into the house [after the Ascension], so those have done and should do who have attained the love of the Father, who are sons. Those who wish to reach this state should enter the house, and shut themselves in; that is, the house of the knowledge of themselves, which is the cell that the soul should inhabit.
It is by retreating into the house and progress in the spiritual life can be made. Why? It isn’t simply that we will know ourselves. It’s not a “self help” only. It’s about God:
Within this cell another cell is found, that of the knowledge of the goodness of God in Himself. So from knowledge of self the soul draws true humility, with holy hatred of the wrong it has done to its Creator, and by this it attains to true and holy patience. And from the knowledge of God, which it finds in itself, it wins the virtue of most ardent charity: whence it draws holy and loving desires.
And why retreat? Why a bit of “being kept apart”? Well, holiness is “kept apart”; that’s where the idea comes from. Saint John of Ávila has a similar view when he says, in an analogous spirit to Catherine’s,
The Paraclete who will visit us is so holy that He would not come even to the disciples until our Lord’s Body was taken from their sight, to show how utterly empty must be the temple in which He dwells.
The emptiness is what God will fill. Even any clingy dependence on the physical, sensible, tangible, easily consoling presence of Christ must be removed, if we are to be totally taken up in a Pentecost of sorts. When that consolation is taken away and a dryness enters, that hole – carved out by a divine Love that is careful, eternal, and providential – can be filled with the wine of the Spirit.
Retreating to the house, to the cell in our heart, is how progress can be made. Of course, for Catherine herself, the physical retreat to a house took place to such an extent that she lived as a recluse until she emerged to a truly action-filled, apostolic life. But individual stories vary, as Catherine herself was fond of insisting, due to God’s love of making a variety of flowers, weak and strong, large and small, different colours, to please him greatly together and each (this expression is not original to Thérèse, nor is she even the first Doctor of the Church to love it and repeat it often; that honour goes back at least as far as Saint Catherine). Some of us retreat greatly in physical terms, while others do not. But the important thing is the retreat in its spiritual nugget: the killing of self-will, the discovery of self-knowledge in both corporal and spiritual matters, prayer becoming ever more continual, and the deepening of the love of God. Or, as Saint John of the Cross would later say, the important thing is the dark night which leads into the fulfilling of God’s will.
Some related posts:
Contemplative in the Mud 