The Spiritual Blahs

Rejection or Invitation?

By George A. Aschenbrenner, SJ

Nothing happening! Just a waste of time! Prayer and our life of faith seem dry as dust. This reflection explores that painful, empty, dull experience and finds, finally, more than we might at first imagine.

A Spiritual Numbness
     For some people, spiritual boredom is not painful. They are so distracted by exciting pleasures and challenges in daily life that an interior emptiness, smothered by all the excitement, is not bothersome to them. They do not even seem to notice. Though they have not overtly denied faith and God, they have become unimportant realities, rarely experienced in any lively personal way. This is a sign, a sad sign, that both their sensibility and their deeply personal desire have been numbed. Something might snap them out of their stupor, but, until it does, life just rushes on.

Crisis of Interpretation

     For many of us, however, the effect is very different. The inner boredom is painful. It discourages and stings with frustration. Beneath all the busy concerns, and even the quick superficial pleasures, something seems stale, drab. There must be more to life. How to ignite the fire?
     The issue is a matter of interpretation. Before knowing what to do, we must honestly feel and face the interior boredom. We must appreciate what it means, what it is saying to us. A quick automatic interpretation rises in the face of this dulling pain: Nothing is going on so why waste time with prayer, with usual signs of devotion; this isn’t our time. This instantaneous interpretation, though understandable, is often misleading, incorrect, even dangerous. A more mature and helpful interpretation requires more time and faith-filled reflection.
     Once we let the quick emotional explanation pass by, we can look more deeply at a larger array of possibilities. In the first place, this may be happening to us because we have not been very serious, very personal, about our faith and have not prayed much. In such a case this festering frustration serves as a wake-up call to get more serious about our relationship with God and not to settle anymore for careless and heartlessly mumbled words. This may be a call to a more lively personal relationship, a call to pray in our own words beyond the traditional ones, a call to listen more openly and interactively to God’s Word in Scripture and throughout our whole life. If we are undisciplined and out of shape spiritually, some hard work at tuning up our spirit will be required before the dismal “nothing’s happening” lethargy will lift.
     On the other hand, if the dreary dry condition is not caused by our negligence, then a whole new and more serious possibility presents itself. In this case, we are not out of shape spiritually, nor stuck in complacency with numbed, untended desires. We have personally known God’s love. We have been stirred, consoled, emotionally touched by that love and have fashioned our daily life accordingly. Recently over days and weeks, that has changed; a smog has settled in and contaminated the sunny enthusiasm of our faith. It sure seems as though nothing is happening now. And the temptation to abandon our prayer life stares hauntingly into the eye of our soul.
     Seriously misleading however, this temptation beckons to exactly the wrong decision. In the awareness of no personal negligence on our part, we must carefully turn to God in faith for appreciation and interpretation of this malaise. This crisis of interpretation is an important point in the spiritual life of the mature believer. The invitation turns our hearts away from the emotional discomfort (oh, how boring and dull it all feels!), to what God is really saying in and through it all. This always involves a second look of reflection beyond the spontaneous disheartening emotional response. In this dark, dreary dryness, God, whose love is as personally present as ever before, is inviting us to draw closer by entering a deeper part of our faith relationship.

Invitation to a Deeper Faith

     Even though the emotion of God’s love can be precious grace, this felt sensation of love can easily turn into a golden calf, an idol, a false god for selfish worship. Without intending it and sometimes without even noticing it, we begin to presume on the presence of this emotional grace and cannot imagine life without it. But such emotional experience, grace though it is, registers on the superficial unpredictable level of our person. God, whose desires for each of us are all embracing beyond our imagining, is inviting us to an ever more profound and, therefore, more intimate, more personal union.
     Development of such a union always involves a purification, a stripping away of selfishness, of too much “me.” And, put starkly, this stripping always hurts. In this interpretation, which is critical to a deeper, more personal relationship with God, the dry, stale emptiness of our faith is not a mistake, a negligence on our part, but rather a call from God, our lover extraordinaire. We are being invited to believe beyond our feelings, to enter a realm of profound faith. Though it may not emotionally involve lots of fun and intense pleasure, our relationship with God at this level is more trustworthy, more foundational, more dependable than any simply emotional sense.
     This profound interpretation of God’s loving presence does not downplay the emotional, even exciting, experience of God’s love. The truth here pushes deeper into our soul than the level of feelings. We see the same truth in our human interpersonal experiences of love. Though the emotional excitement of falling in love can be intense and wonderfully endearing, such goose-bump experiences of love cannot endure forever. No, these beloved emotional experiences must be rooted in a more profound dimension of our relationship.

Belief in the Presence of God’s Love

     How easy it is to get stuck in these emotional traps. We want always to feel the fire and comfort of God’s love. Because God is so jealous as to desire all of us in relationship, our divine lover must pry loose our emotionally fierce grasp, must wean us away from the wonderful, but undependably fluctuating, emotional satisfaction. This purification of our experience of God calls us deeper into our person beyond the realm of emotion and feeling. This deeper invitation does not kill and bury forever the emotional part of us. But the pain of temporarily letting go of this sensual dimension of our relationship with God hurts — and is risky. What will be left after such a letting go? For this reason, such purification invites and requires grieving. These tears at the apparent loss and absence of God can sting and burn, and should honestly be shared with God. But the tears and ache are soothed finally in a dawning realization: God is more than emotional spontaneity. Such a loving God is our very life. Far beyond any emotional impulse, God’s love, intimate and uniquely personal, is profoundly and ineradicably present at our very core, intentionally loving life into us breath after breath.
     This profound presence gives a peace, a harmony, a humble confidence beyond any intensity of emotion. Such an awareness can quiet us and synchronize us to the divine breath-giver’s artful creation of us in the immediacy of every moment. Simply to breathe is to be loved, just to exist is to be cherished beyond imagining. This realization is truly awesome: for me as I write this, and for you as you now read it. A centering such as this reveals a foundation, always there, beneath all emotional and spontaneous fluctuation.
     The apparent drying up, even death, of emotional fervor does not infer rejection. The belief in the core presence of God’s love blessing us with life reveals the emotional nagging dullness as invitation, not rejection, on God’s part. This appreciation of God’s kind and insistent invitation does not automatically deluge us with emotional fervor. Nonetheless, this felt sense of God’s love will always be part of our relationship, though now rooted in a more profound and personal dimension. In this deepened experience of God, our emotional sluggishness and lack of fervor reveals God’s intentional loving dynamic, if joined with other signs: a keen desire for prayer, for simply being with our loving Creator all through the day and for serving God’s will in everything. These signs demonstrate that the sensible dullness is not a matter of divine rejection, nor does it drain our energy for serious effort in response; rather it is a precious moment of loving invitation.

Acting as if...

     Activity, concretely imaginative and bordering on the heroic, puts our faith to work beyond any emotional stimulation. This is a time for “acting as if.” While we do not feel like believing, praying or serving in love, it is time to act, to act as if we do feel it. Why? Because we are loving, believing, acting out of a genuine experience of our loving God, but from a depth of ourselves more profound than emotional. But this “acting as if” can seem insincere, dishonest, even hypocritical. The insinuation of this type of interpretation reveals an evil, unholy spirit always eager to mislead and deter us. Rather than hypocrisy, we are here in the depths of incarnational, sacramental faith. To cling to and to kiss a crucifix when we don’t even feel like giving time for prayer, to reach out to the needy person when we rather feel like turning away in withdrawal are not acts of dishonesty. These can be heroic efforts, whether quietly private or publicly observable, to sacramentalize in hope our deepest center of faith and love. Without such quiet heroism, our faith, our intimately personal relationship with God, will not mature and persevere over the long haul of life.
     An important distinction, however, is at work here. We are not acting as if we believed what we actually do not believe. That is hypocrisy. Rather, we are acting in line with what we deeply believe, even though, at this moment, the emotional drive for such acting is absent. This is mature faith: to act as if we are always feeling what we deeply believe. The ability to believe and sacramentalize in action what we are not now feeling marks the serious believer. Often we are tempted, quite unconsciously, to identify faith and feeling. This always short-circuits faith, and though we enjoy the emotional intensity, such an identification of faith and feeling often precludes the permanent fidelity of a mature faith commitment. Couples, for whom the honeymoon is long past, know, live and act from a depth of love, mutual trust — and a more mature emotional caring for one another — developed over years.
     In the hit Broadway musical, “Les Miserables,” Jean Valjean, the central obvious Christ figure, promises to care for the daughter of the dying and poverty-stricken Fantine with these words: “I swear this on my life.” This promise cuts far below any momentary surge of emotion. And the beautiful climax of the show reveals Valjean’s fidelity to this promise through a great variety of challenges. Mature adult believers know the challenge and the blessing of acting what they believe, and acting it as if they felt what now, as a matter of fact, they are not feeling. This faith-filled acting is always blessed over time with an emotional fervor which, at certain times, in God’s mysterious loving ways with us, seems absent and lost.

A Presence in Faith

     A lack of accustomed satisfaction and felt closeness to God in our prayer and ordinary devotions when accompanied by a lively desire, on our part, not only to be with God but also to serve the justice of the Risen Jesus in our world, reveals finally a clear message of divine endearment for us. Beyond the realm of graced emotional intimacy lies a presence in faith sometimes too deep for words but more trustworthy and dependable than the fluctuations of graced feeling in our relationship. This is often a rather new land for many of us. It is a land where God is always with us inviting our trust. It is a land where our deepest identity, satisfaction and fire for generous service most deeply and personally reside.
     A spiritual staleness, when insightfully investigated, is always an invitation - never a rejection - an invitation to greater, more profound intimacy with God whose love in the Risen Jesus is serving us, at every moment, in a more charming fashion than we could ever fully realize before we die.

Fr. George A. Aschenbrenner, SJ, is rector at the
University of Scranton in Scranton, Pa.