Can you direct me on some more info about these?
Thanks for your, as always, informative and charitable post.
There is great book that we all start with called The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James. He approaches religious experience from the clinical perspective. What he does is setup a system to separate that which is mentally unstable from that which is rational. This is extremely important. One of the basic questions that one must ask when evaluating religious experience is “Does this make sense?” When a theologian or a trained spiritual director asks this question, he’s does not mean, “Do I understand it?” He doesn’t have to understand it. Most of Teresa of Avila’s spiritual director’s did not have a clue what God was communicating. We understand the message only in hindsight. Once her life ended, we look at the Gestalt and we can then see and say, “This is what God is saying about man and about himself.” However, when the person is alive and in your presence, you have to ascertain whether the experience is pathological or truly religious.
You see, no matter how obscure God’s messages may be, they are always rational. Never confuse obscure with irrational. As the old saying goes, “God writes straight in crooked lines” or some such thing. We see this in scripture. God makes many statements and requests many things that leave the hearer perplexed. However, the hearer is not imagining it. Abraham didn’t have a clue why he had to sacrifice Isaac. Mary didn’t have a clue how she was to conceive a child while still a virgin. Peter didn’t have a clue why Jesus had to die. However, these people were perfectly rational. They would pass any psychological projective test, even though what they said was outside of human understanding: a God who orders you to kill your son; a conception without a biological father; and a savior who is going to die. You have to separate the pathology from the rational. That which is rational is not always within human understanding. We usually understand it after the fact. James grapples with these questions. His system is certainly very useful.
There is another great work called Spiritual Passages: The Psychology of Spiritual Development “for those who seek” by Benedict J. Groeschel. Father B does two things in his book. In the first half he walks you through psychological and spiritual development so that you can understand how the two go hand in hand. In the second part he walks you through the three ways of spiritual growth: purgation, illuminative and unitive. If you follow the questions that he asks and the answers to the questions, you come out with a pretty good set of questions that should be raised when looking at religious experience from the perspective of a spiritual guide and the answers that you’re looking for.
You have James, who delivers the questions and answers necessary to determine whether the experience is genuine or pathological. He does not try to do theology. He leaves that up to the theologian. All he tries to do is separate the healthy from the unhealthy. Then you have Father B who delivers questions and answers that help us understand when God is using human development and the human mind for his purposes.
The good thing about both of them is that neither goes into this occult stuff. They’re not concerned about that. I don’t really know if James even believed in that stuff. I know that Father B certainly understands it. But the purpose of good Spiritual Theology is not to delve into the occult, but to delve into the work of grace in the soul and God’s activity in human experience.
Those are just starters. One can go deeper and read the collected works of John of the Cross, especially the Dark Night and the Ascent of Mt. Carmel. John is going to walk you through God’s intimate activity within the soul. He does not formulate questions for you to ask. However, if you’re a strong student of philosophy, you can extrapolate the questions that he asked in order to write the answers.
Another great source is St. Teresa of Avila. There are two writings of hers that I always like to read and reread, Interior Castle and The Way of Perfection. What I truly like about the latter is that she give you a road map. When you’re doing spiritual direction, you can listen for certain key points and you can connect the dots, in a manner of speaking. You can say, “Aha, this goes in this part of the way of perfection,” or “Aha, this is not part of the way of perfection.”
Again, this is not something that I encourage anyone to try on themselves or their acquaintances. One has to be trained to do this. This takes several years of study and a lot of practice under very careful supervision.
Good spiritual directors come in one of two wrappings. There are some who have a natural gift for guiding souls, such as Francis de Sales and those who are scholars in the matter such as St. Ignatius of Loyola.
