What happens when we hit the Center? Since there is no more junk left to hide the divine presence, I presume we are in divine union. Faith believes that God is waiting for us. Such is the meaning o£ the Divine Indwelling. If we just keep up our practice, the divine presence cannot remain hidden forever.

To understand this process in its vertical dimension, I like to use the analogy of a middle Eastern tell, that archaeologist's delight (see Diagram 6). It seems that in ancient times when a city-state would overcome an adversary, the military would burn it down and build their own town on top of the old one. As a result, we find one civilization built on another in the same place. Tells were ignored for centuries because people thought they were just hills. Now they are considered archaeological treasures.

Diagram 6

THE ANALOGY OF THE TELL AND
THE ARCHEOLOGICAL DIG

Detailed enlargement of the Tell

The first job for the archaeologists is to clean off the top of the tell and get rid of the weeds and rocks and unearth the last civilization that thrived there. They throw out the ashes and debris and send the mosaics and pottery to the British Museum. Then they take time off, enjoy the reward of their discoveries, gather together some graduate students from some big university, raise money from some humanitarian foundation, and come back and dig up the next city-state. The process takes many years. Level by level, the archaeologists work down, culture by culture, all the way down to the stone age. As a result of this research we have a much more comprehensive view of the literal meaning of the texts of Scripture. Archaeologists have discovered sacred writings as well as business transactions, enabling scholars to reconstruct many aspects of those early civilizations.

I suggest that the Holy Spirit, as the divine archaeologist, works in a somewhat similar mode. She picks us up where we are now, whatever our chronological age. The first thing is to heal the most destructive aspects of our present relationships and addictive behaviors. As a result, we enjoy a certain freedom in practicing virtue and doing good to others. A personal relationship with Christ forms. We may experience enthusiasm for Scripture. Our devotional life, the sacraments, the liturgy, spiritual reading, ministry, all begin to flourish. This period is often called "the springtime of the spiritual journey" I suppose born-again Christians have a similar experience. The mistake would be to think that the journey is over. It has not even begun. This is just the first stage. But this stage is so delightful that people are reluctant to let go of it.

At some paint, the Spirit may decide that the springtime has lasted long enough. In monastic life, we call it "the fervor of novices." The Spirit decides to dig down to the next level. Actually, the Spirit intends to investigate our whole life history, layer by layer, throwing out the junk and preserving the values that were appropriate to each stage of our human development. Without following an exact chronology, the Spirit seems to work back through the successive stages of our lives: old age (if we have arrived there), mid-life crisis, early adult life, late adolescence, early adolescence, puberty, late childhood, early childhood; infancy, birth, and even prebirth. The sequence corresponds in general to the emotional chronology of our psyche, in which the deepest and earliest wounds tend to be the most tightly repressed. Eventually the Spirit begins to dig into the bedrock of our earliest emotional life, where the feelings of rejection, insecurity, lack of affection, or actual physical trauma were first experienced. The most primitive emotions arise to consciousness because raw anger, fear, and grief were our only possible responses at that time. Hence, as we progress toward the center where God actually is waiting for us, we are naturally going to feel that we are getting worse. This warns us that the spiritual journey is not a success story or a career move. It is rather a series of humiliations of the false self. It is experienced as diminutions of the false self with the value system and worldview that we built up so painstakingly as defenses to cope with the emotional pain of early life.

This is a dynamic experience and cannot be captured exactly in these static diagrams, but there is one other diagram that might be helpful (see Diagram 7). The spiral staircase is a combination of the horizontal and vertical diagrams. The top of the staircase corresponds to our first conversion, the time when we first commit ourselves to a life of prayer. At that time we usually have to deal with some particular set of temptations, failures, addictions, or compulsions. The springtime of the spiritual journey lays that unmanageable situation to rest temporarily because of the new values that explode in a burst of spiritual enthusiasm. Flowers may cover a dung heap because of seeds that were dropped there. Our experience then will be of flowers rather than of what lies beneath. The movement from springtime into the real work of the spiritual journey takes place not on our initiative, because we probably would stay in our first fervor forever if we could. The Spirit as our loving therapist invites us to look at the next level of our life and to see if that, too, can be rescued from its limitations.

Diagram 7

THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE
(Combining the horizontal and vertical diagrams in their dynamic unity.)

Transforming Union
Purity of love.

Purity of heart
Transforming Union.

At this point, the initial graces that were given to our rational faculties and emotions are withdrawn--a classic experience in the spiritual journey known as "the dark night of sense." Our enthusiasm for various devotional practices and activities disappears because God no longer gives the grace that works through the levels of reason and emotion. God, too, seems to withdraw, to our great distress or consternation. Instead of being present during our time of prayer, God seems not to show up anymore; it feels as if God could not care less. This is especially painful if the former relationship was very satisfying, exciting, or consoling. The thought rises, "God has abandoned me!" When the dryness is extreme, Lectio Divina is like reading the telephone book and spiritual exercises are just a bore. We are irritable and discouraged because the light of our life has gone out. It took so many years to find God and now God has gone away. There is a constant temptation to think we have done something wrong, but we can't figure out what it was. Our tendency is to project onto God the way we would feel in a similar deteriorating relationship with another human being, namely, hopeless. This judgment is most unfair to God. At this point a lot of people throw in the towel and decide, "The spiritual journey is not for me."

As the transition to the next layer takes place, there may be a discouraging sense that all is ending, and in a sense, it is the end of our world: But our world is not the world; it is just one of them. God cannot possibly go away. It is true, our relationship with God, if we deliberately walk away, can be injured for a while, but God does not really leave us. If God did, we would just disappear or turn into a grease spot, since God is the very life of our being.

Creation is ongoing. What God has done in this situation is simply to "go downstairs" to a more intimate place on the spiral staircase, where he is waiting for us to join him at a new level of maturity and trust. If we are very quiet in the night of sense, St. John of the Cross writes, we may notice a delicate sense of peace and may even begin to enjoy the more substantial food of pure faith. As we let go of the level on which we formerly found satisfaction, we move to a deeper level of faith, which is far more reliable and much more strengthening for the journey.

The Fathers of the Church allegorized this basic experience as the journey from Egypt to the Promised Land. The biblical desert is the symbol of the purification of the various stages of our personal life history. Purification is never the rejection of anything, but the sifting of the wheat from the chaff. It is a kind of judgment in which the Spirit sifts what was good from what was harmful at each stage of our development and gathers the wheat into barns while the limitations that were built into each stage of our early development are left behind. Thus the awe and wonder of the infant is recaptured; only the ignorance and tantrums of the child are left behind. The adventurous spirit of the adolescent remains, but without the emotional turmoil and desperate search for self-identity that belongs to that period of life.

When we connect with the divine presence waiting for us on the level below, we experience freedom from the limited ideas we had of God, and our spiritual journey blossoms again; we have reached a plateau, a whole new spiritual perspective. Of course, we get over-attached to this place too, and so after a little respite, the Spirit suggests, "Let's look at the next level," and we are plunged into another transition or dark night.

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Excerpted from Intimacy with God by Fr. Thomas Keating

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