Loving A Hidden God
FINAL PURIFICATION
Having completed the fifth stage in your journey where you drilled yourself diligently in love of your neighbor, filled now with hope and having all your powers unimpaired, you are prepared to enter the sixth stage in which you purge and clean the eyes of your heart so that you can come to see God by dying to this world. This dying is necessary because we are able to come to the vision of God only insofar as we die to this world. If we continue to live for this world, we will never be able to achieve that vision.
On Christian Doctrine, 2.7.11
In our search for the hidden God to love we have finally come to the stage of final purification. In our times of darkness and listening our concentration was on our self. Even though at the next stage (the stage of knowledge) we began to stretch out to a world beyond ourselves, our self was still the focal point. We were not so much reaching out to the world as absorbing the impact of the world on us. Knowing the world does not take us outside ourselves; it brings the outside world inside. Contemplation is a solitary activity, not a social venture. Entering the stage of fortitude, we began to consider how we should deal with the world. Once again, we were still mostly inside ourselves, deciding how to cure the evil in ourselves and deal with the evil encroaching upon us from outside, praying for the strength to prudently respond and patiently persevere.
It was only at the fifth stage of our journey that we opened up our lives to what was outside us, reaching out through love to embrace other human beings. Such loving concern for others was an expansion of our self-centered narrowness. This happened because love is not an intellectual exercise, a bringing what we love into ourselves so that we might ponder it. Rather, it is a going out to a loved one so as to become one with them outside ourselves, a union where there is no longer a Me and You but a new Us. In a mysterious way, while remaining ourselves and not destroying the one we love, we join hearts to form a new reality differing from but yet containing both ... a union of lovers in which two became one.
Finally discovering how to move beyond ourselves through love we must now move on the next phase of our journey. Moving towards God through this love of others, we must now purify and free ourselves of those things that hold us back. We must now complete the purification that has been growing all along, purifying our love for this temporal world but especially our love for other human beings.
The need for such final purification was clearly proclaimed long ago in the words of the ancient psalm:
Who can ascend the mountain of the Lord? or who may stand in his holy place.
He whose hands are sinless, whose heart is clean, who desires not what is vain, nor swears deceitfully to his neighbor.
He shall receive a blessing from the Lord, a reward from God his savior.
Psalm 24: 3-5
Such purification begins with the development of the moral virtues and reaches its perfection when we come to humbly accept of the graces of Faith, Hope, and Charity, those great heaven-sent gifts which provide the energy that will eventually bring us to the vision of God. (Letter 171A)
But first we must cleanse the eyes of the heart through which we see the world inside our spirit and the world above creation ... the world of the Divine Spirit. This cleansing is needed not because our hearts have been especially dirty up to this point. If we have made some progress in the first five stages in our pursuit of God we have become fundamentally decent people. But we are not perfect and the residue of our past actions still clouds our vision. Our situation is not unlike what my eye-doctor told me about my increasingly diminished vision. He said that I just had "old eyes", eyes that over time had accumulated a sludge that must be periodically swept away.
Augustine believed that the same sort of decay occurs in the eyes of our heart. The brilliance of God is in us and above us and below us and by our side. The only reason why we cannot always see it is because the eyes of our heart have become clouded, made opaque by cataracts growing on our spirit. As Augustine described it to the people in his congregation:
We want so see God, we are looking for ways to see God, we are on fire to see God. Who isn't? But notice what scripture says: "Blessed are the heart-pure, for they shall see God." To use an example from our daily life, why are you afraid to look at the sunrise with bloodshot eyes? Make your eyes healthy, and that light will be a joy; make your eyes unhealthy, and that light will be a torment. So too you cannot see with an impure heart what can only be seen with a pure heart.
Sermon 53, 6
The physical eye is made to be able to see the light of the sun but if an irritating speck flies into it, it is cut off from that light. The obstacle must be removed for sight to be restored. Though the light is present to it, it nevertheless turns away because in its inflamed condition the light is painful. The same thing happens when the eye of our heart is diseased. We turn our back on the Divine Light because we are too blind to see it or because looking at it is too painful. Looking at such divine brilliance becomes painful because we are forced to see how far we are away from the path to heaven, how empty our lives have become without some eternal root. And so we look away, immersing ourselves once again in the pleasures of the moment, in the trivialities of day by day life, concerned only about "staying in shape" as though our shapely exterior can be made to last forever. (Sermon 88, 5)
But what is it that so inflames the eye of the heart so that it cannot see? Augustine answers:
Greed, avarice, injustice, lust for the goods of this world, these are the evils that blind the eye of the heart.
Sermon 88, 6
He continues by noting sadly the different ways in which we react to our physical and spiritual blindness. People quickly rush off immediately to find a doctor who can remedy the blindness of their poor eyesight:
They run around, nobody rests, nobody puts the business off if so much as a piece of dirt gets in their eye.
Sermon 88, 6.
The same passion for a cure is not always so evident when it is the vision of spirit that is dimmed. Augustine continues:
You are greatly attached to these outer eyes, and thoroughly negligent of that inner eye. You carry it around all worn out and damaged.
Sermon 88, 6
Once the eyes of our heart are damaged, we imitate Adam after his fall from grace. In the beginning he rejoiced to walk arm and arm with God in Eden, but after his disastrous sin he dreaded to look on the face of God. He fled into the darkness and the thickets of the woods, running away from the truth, clutching at shadows. (Sermon 88, 6.) And so too it happens to us. We continue to live in darkness or half-light because we are afraid to take the painful step of purification, a step which indeed can be painful because it demands a renewal of Faith, a brave leap into the darkness, hoping that there is something beautiful out there to see although as yet we are unable to see it. (Sermon 53, 10)
It is Faith that will purify the heart but before it can act we must sweep away those things that stand in the way. Perhaps we have never (or at least, not recently) given in to grave sins, but all of us have accumulated the weight of small sins piled up over a lifetime. These must be drained out of our life lest, like the sloshing bilge water in a small ship, they prevent our progress.
Augustine warns us about the debilitating effect of such "little vices":
Sins, after all, are not just those that are called serious offenses, adultery, fornication, sacrilege, theft, robbery, false witness; they are not the only sins. To pay attention to something you ought not to is a sin; to listen to something willingly which should not have been listened to is a sin; to think something that should not have been thought of is a sin.
You object: "But my sins are minor sins!" I answer: "How can they be minor, if they weigh you down, bury you?" What is more minute than drops of rain? But rivers are filled by them. What are more minute than grains of wheat? Granaries are filled with them. What! You protest that these little sins are minor and you do not see how many of them there are? Try counting them and you will find out!.
Sermon 261, 9-10
Big of small, past or present, our sins have clouded our spirit's eyes so that we cannot see clearly the road ahead and what we must do to move along it. To begin our purification we must heed Augustine's wise advice:
So clean up your heart as much as you can! Work at it! In order that God may come to help you clean up that place where he wants to stay do not be so proud that you will not beg for his help.
Sermon 261, 6.
Once our heart has been cleansed we can begin the next step in our purification: dying to this world. As Augustine says in the opening passage, we can see God only to the extent that we die to this world. If we continue to live in and for this world such vision is impossible. (On Christian Doctrine 2.7.11)
To die to this world does not mean that we cease to be involved in it. Rather we treat it as it is, a wayside Inn on the road home. I have lived in many motels in my life, even having parties and celebrations there, but I cannot remember ever becoming so attached that I cried when I left. I have never pined for a Holiday Inn, though I have spent some fine holidays there. As long as I stayed I enjoyed the people I met and took pains to acquire the necessities of life, but I took none of these when I left. I did not run away with a member of the staff nor did I steal towels (only an occasional bar of soap as memento).
To die to this world does not mean to ignore it; it only means not to become too attached. Of course this will often be difficult to accomplish because we are still "cracked". Only after death (the ultimate liberating experience) will we be free to look on the face of God. It is like finally coming home after a long journey. Only then does the "seeing" of the loved ones who wait for us become complete. Still on the road, we see them only through faith and hope as we look upon the old mottled photograph of them tightly held close to our heart.
The experience of "dying" to move ahead is found even in the ordinary times of our life. When we were children, we had to die to our childishness before we could become responsible adults. If we fell into a destructive "love" relationship, we had to die to it and put it behind us if we were ever to find our true love. If we had previously defined our life by our work but now have retired or been fired, we had to die to that old definition and redefine ourselves to face a future where we are no longer identified by our career. When we have reached old age, we must die to our youth to discover the full life that can be enjoyed as a senior citizen. If we have centered our life around our things or our old home, we must die to them to move into a future where our things will pass and the place where we shall live is still undetermined. If we have become sick or disabled we must die to that life of perfect health we enjoyed before in order to rise to the challenge of a new life where we no longer have great strength. If we have lived in love for many years but now our loved one has died, we must die to that life of intimate companionship in order to deal with a future where we must live alone.
At every stage of life we must die to what went before in order to continue our journey into the next phase of our life. So too we must die to this life in time by not being attached to it if we are to be free to move into the eternal life where finally we will have the perfect vision of God ... that Vision that is said to be truly Beatific.
Once our spirit has been truly purified, we will begin to acquire that simplicity of heart spoken of in scripture where it tells us to seek God "in simplicity of heart". (Wisdom, 1.1) Augustine adds that such simplicity can only be achieved by those who are "pure of heart". (Commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, 1.2.8) Once we acquire such purity we will achieve a simplicity of focus whereby we can face the God who is within, preferring him above all human loves and even our own selves. Suddenly our life becomes uncomplicated. Our passion for the truth that is God has come to dominate our lives. Through our single-minded desire to become one with God as our only delight, we are now even able to cheerfully manage the troubles of this life. As Augustine writes:
Such people will be so dedicated by the cleansing and simplification of their heart that neither misgiving about displeasing others, nor anxiety about life's reverses will ever turn them from the truth.
On Christian Doctrine, 2.7.11
The more perfect our purification becomes, the more free we become to fly to the heavens. Like a balloonist, we cut the ropes holding us to the earth and begin to float higher and higher into the clear blue sky. We are still interested in the world below. Indeed, we look down upon it fondly. As our vistas expand with our increasing height we are able to see more and more of this temporal world and to understand our own little place in it.
We have not rejected our friends, our work, our world but we are no longer attached. We have acquired the freedom to "let them go" if it comes to that. Through our detachment, we are free to turn our face to the heavens and to God. At last we are coming close to true wisdom and to loving the still hidden God.