Student09:
I don’t know. I don’t really understand what God is doing in my soul. Can anyone help?
It’s like a building construction job. Suppose there’s an old shack built on a piece of property and a designer and company have in mind a vastly superior building, a shining house of high quality. They have to use a bulldozer or other mechanical instruments to knock down the old one so the new one can replace it. That’s what God is doing to you, knocking down what is old so He can build up something far better and new.
Student09:
As a catechumen I cannot go to Confession and be absolved. I don’t understand exactly what I am, really, or how I am supposed to be relating to God right now, since I am not baptized. Is it even possible for me to be in a state of grace? I know that God’s grace is working in my soul, because the desire I have for Him, and the effects of that desire on my behavior and will, could not be coming from me. But I suppose it’s a different kind of grace than that which comes after baptism. It’s confusing, because everything I have heard and read makes it sound as if spirituality and sanctity begins with baptism.
What you have in your heart right now is what the Council of Trent in 1563 defined as, “Baptism of Desire.” The heart desires baptism, so it is spiritually united with baptism. Through Baptism of Desire, you are united with baptism though not perfected in it through the sacrament. This is sufficient for salvation if through no fault of your own you were never able to receive the actual sacrament. However, it is a light guiding the soul to the one baptism the Church offers sacramentally.
Jesus is in you through Baptism of Desire, drawing your soul toward the completeness of what you spiritually have already become linked to. That is why you desire the fullness so much, and why it is deep pain to be without it. That is all because of the presence of Christ in your heart.
Student09:
I have read it, actually, or most of it. It seemed to me that it couldn’t possibly apply to me, because it is talking about people very advanced in the spiritual life.
Some parts of the book are, but others apply to younger followers of God. Sometimes God calls people into great trials in His service right after they first get to know Him. I suspect that what you’re experiencing right now is the “dark night of the sense.”
I can describe to you, somewhat, two dark nights that a soul on the road to sainthood undergoes. The first is the “dark night of sense.” During that period, a soul will be drawn away from material pleasures it used to delight in. It will have things or people it previously was deeply connected to stripped away, so that its security may become God alone. It will also often go through great interior dryness and pain during this time, at the same time as it endures suffering from exterior forces.
This dark night gives way in time to the Illuminative spiritual life, a time of great light, unity and joy in the Lord. During this time, the soul continues to withdraw more and more from its attachment to the world, until (if the soul is graced enough to reach such a spiritual height) after many years the Lord hits it with its most agonizing trial, the “dark night of spirit,” in which for a long period, sometimes years, the soul feels separated from God, hated by God and every thought of God is scorching agony. He is the soul’s only desire in the world, so the soul plunges into the torment of dwelling on Him and praising Him even though it is only crushed in response. It is an unimaginably painful interior trial that leaves very few marks on the surface of the growing saint, for the saint lives in incredible charity throughout that time. Mother Teresa of Calcutta endured this state for about 40 years, if I’m not mistaken. Some people recognized St. Faustina’s tribulations during a small portion of this period because she lost all appetite and grew thin and came to look desperate and haunted, though she continued to persist always in the highest charity and in her spiritual life she never could stop pursuing God.
Finally this trial gives way to the “Way of the Perfect,” the spiritual life that probably almost all of the canonized saints dwelt in, a state of unity with God so deep and complete that the saint is almost
completely without sin (only very rarely will a trace of venial sin pass through such a one) and lives in constant union with the Presence of God, doing all things for love of God and one’s neighbor.
I believe a lot of devout Christians endure the dark night of sense in their lives. The dark night of spirit is another level up there completely. It is interior and of the spirit, though often it might be combined with exterior trials too (while these will feel small by comparison to the interior anguish). But the “dark night of the sense” involves a deep feeling of dryness, often a feeling of separation from God, and it is in some way connected with exterior trials like damaged relations with loved ones or financial or other kinds of worldly loss for the sake of Christ. The “dark night of sense” is what I think you could very well be experiencing.
I suspect it’s not an infrequent thing for converts to undergo this first dark night during the conversion process. And I think it’s very possible that that’s what you’re experiencing.
