In search of God in the dark, 30 days with Teresa of Avila
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30 days with Teresa of Avila, detachment
What are the depths of our hidden God we enter when we pray? The greatest saints have not penetrated into the depths of themselves, nor the greatest psychoanalysts, nor the greatest mystics or gurus. When we consider that we are made in the image of God and have immortal souls, we know that we have infinite capacity. This helps us to imagine how exponentially greater the proportion of our human heart or spirit that we do not know or never attack must be. In fact, we are a tom pitless robot! We know when we try to fill or fulfill ourselves. There is a deep place in us where God is most present. We come to know that place in knowing it. We never fully know that place; only God does it, because it is God who supports everything, knows everything, loves everything, from the inside out. So let's find out that God loved us first! It is not we who make room for God, it is God who makes room for us. If God is infinitely beyond us, only He can unite us with ourselves, and he does so by making us totally one with Him who is closer to us than we are ourselves.
Two of the things we don't like most about prayer are when we pray and hear nothing, or when we pray and it's all dry and dark. We feel that prayer is not good then, it doesn't work. In fact, these are two of the things that indicate that we are truly praying to God and connecting with Him who is hidden, and not just entertaining our thoughts and feelings.
In reality we should seek darkness and seek silence, do not try to avoid them! Since God is infinite, because he is not identifiable to be found or seen in space and time, he can only be seen in the darkness of my senses, both external (the five senses) and even internal (imagination and memory). God is hidden because he is greater than these and cannot be finely contained, localized or objectified, and is available only for the faith he sees in darkness, he sees in secret. Similarly, faith sees or hears only God hidden in silence and darkness.
Catholic doctrine has shown us that the existence of God is reasonable, but reason and concepts only give us indications of him, not his direct knowledge more than the five senses give us a direct perception of him. our imagination cannot grasp it. We can use the images of the imagination and the concepts of reason only to obtain a similar knowledge of Him, not a direct understanding. Dionysius said, "Since [God] is the cause of all beings, we should support and ascribe to [Him] all the statements we make about beings and, more appropriately, we should deny all of these statements, since [He] goes beyond all 'to be. "Only faith is able to know God directly, and this is in the darkness of understanding and imagination.
Therefore, reading about him, even in the scriptures, and imagining him can only lead us to prayer and deepen our faith. When faith is darker, then we are closer to understanding. God speaks in the faith which is favored by absolute silence, because in reality darkness is overwhelming light, infinite light, and silence is not the simple absence of noise but the silence of potential sound. It is not a silence that suffocates words, but a silence that makes sounds or words possible, the silence that allows us to listen, to listen to God.
As we have seen, God's pure gift of supernatural faith is based on our natural efforts. Since faith as a supernatural gift is infused or directly "poured out", the darkness in faith contains its maximum certainty. This supernatural faith is obscure because it is given in the darkness of the internal and external senses. It is certain because his certainty and authority rest in his donor, God. It is therefore not a natural certainty but a supernatural certainty, just as darkness is not a natural darkness but a supernatural darkness. Certainty does not remove darkness because God cannot be known or seen by anything other than supernatural faith, and therefore he is seen in darkness and listened to in silence. thus silence and darkness are not a deficit or a privation in prayer, but are the only way we can establish direct contact with God that only supernatural faith provides.
These are not word games or tricks. This is not taking refuge in mysticism and ignorance. It is an attempt to see why God is hidden. Demonstrate the contemplative mystical element of every prayer. It shows why saints and mystics claim that in order to achieve such a supernatural contemplation, one must enter a night of internal and external senses in which it seems that we are losing faith, because in fact natural faith vanishes when supernatural faith takes over . If nothing that can be seen reveals God or is God, God can only be seen by entering darkness or "not seeing". If God cannot be listened to in the ordinary way, he must be listened to in silence.