Why is my spiritual life like a rollercoaster?

[Nelka]

Over the years I feel sometimes that my spiritual life is very strong, I feel I am doing a pretty good job of it, I feel very connected to the Trinity and at other times I feel as if I am barely hanging on. Sometimes it is as if my whole heart and mind is taken up with Christ and other times it feels as though it is all very distant. I really feel like a rollercoaster, it never seems to plateau.

I know Satan attacks when we are spiritually healthy but why can’t I stop it from crashing so badly? Is it because I have been happy lately? Do I hold onto Christ more when I am unhappy? I don’t pray any less now than before so it’s not like I stop praying at times.

Do I become complacent?

 

[Tis_Bearself]

It’s normal to have ups and downs in any relationship, including our relationship with God.

I think we often do tend to run to God more when we are unhappy or having bad troubles. We are more likely to forget about God or just not be so intense about Him when things are going well. I also think this is one reason for giving us troubles and difficulties in life, as we get a very major reminder that we need the help of our Heavenly Father.

 

[PetraG]

I think this is a question for a spiritual director, but I can offer what I heard from mine: be very careful of becoming attached to spiritual consolations.

I cannot tell if you are talking about spiritual dryness, rather than spiritual “crashing,” which I would take as sliding into laxity or disobedience in what you do or fail to do. Let me also offer what C.S. Lewis had to offer from the standpoint of Screwtape, the senior tempter counseling a young tempter on the difference between how Heaven and Hell view spiritual dryness.

MY DEAR WORMWOOD,

So you “have great hopes that the patient’s religious phase is dying away”, have you? I always thought the Training College had gone to pieces since they put old Slubgob at the head of it, and now I am sure. Has no one ever told you about the law of Undulation?

Humans are amphibians—half spirit and half animal. (The Enemy’s determination to produce such a revolting hybrid was one of the things that determined Our Father to withdraw his support from Him.) As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation—the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks. If you had watched your patient carefully you would have seen this undulation in every department of his life—his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up and down. As long as he lives on earth periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness and poverty. The dryness and dulness through which your patient is now going are not, as you fondly suppose, your workmanship; they are merely a natural phenomenon which will do us no good unless you make a good use of it. (cont)

 

[PetraG]

To decide what the best use of it is, you must ask what use the Enemy wants to make of it, and then do the opposite. Now it may surprise you to learn that in His efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks; some of His special favourites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else. The reason is this. To us a human is primarily good; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense. But the obedience which the Enemy demands of men is quite a different thing. One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself—creatures, whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.

And that is where the troughs come in. You must have often wondered why the Enemy does not make more use of His power to be sensibly present to human souls in any degree He chooses and at any moment. But you now see that the Irresistible and the Indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of His scheme forbids Him to use. Merely to over-ride a human will (as His felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo. For His ignoble idea is to eat the cake and have it; the creatures are to be one with Him, but yet themselves; merely to cancel them, or assimilate them, will not serve. He is prepared to do a little overriding at the beginning. He will set them off with communications of His presence which, though faint, seem great to them, with emotional sweetness, and easy conquest over temptation. (cont)

 

[PetraG]

… But He never allows this state of affairs to last long. Sooner or later He withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all those supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs—to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be. Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best. We can drag our patients along by continual tempting, because we design them only for the table, and the more their will is interfered with the better. He cannot “tempt” to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles. Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger, than when a human, no longer desiring, but intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.

But of course the troughs afford opportunities to our side also. Next week I will give you some hints on how to exploit them,

Your affectionate uncle

SCREWTAPE

 

[0Scarlett_nidiyilii]

Because you’re a person.

Not an angel. Not an archetype. Not a character in a book.

Just a person.

 

[Dlee]

I think we often do tend to run to God more when we are unhappy or having bad troubles. We are more likely to forget about God or just not be so intense about Him when things are going well

Exactly, @Tis-Bearself. In RCIA this morning we were discussing the readings, particularly the Gospel on the Beatitudes. We get ourselves into trouble when we forget that everything we need, we find in God; when we forget and think we can do it ourselves/self-sufficient - woe unto us.

 

[Nelka]

But I hate the fact that it is like a rollercoaster, it makes me very sad

 

[0Scarlett_nidiyilii]

But there’s the thing about the spiritual life.
It’s not all about you.
Your relationship to God is a two way street.
Take the focus off you and look at God

 

[HeDa]

It is called life. Growing is sometimes painful and sometimes a great joy. Our spiritual life is just like our body´s physical growth. Painful when we grow a lot in a short time but great when we finally are big enough to ride a big bike by ourselves or reach the lock on the door and are allowed to have our own key to the house. Yet at the same time mom is angry because we have grown out of all our clothes and shoes for the next season and need to shop for new ones the next weekends instead of going to the amusement park.

Be careful so that you don’t make the nice fussy feelings God. It is very common to think that “I haven’t experienced God if I don’t have nice fussy feelings.”

 

[Dorothy]

I totally agree! It is when we do not feel consolation and we go on serving the Lord and praying to Him knowing that he hears us…that is when we grow in His grace.

Feelings come and go, it is in our will that we cling to right choices.