Mother’s milk
Spiritual writers often describe the progress of soul through the use of metaphors. Some of these images are so familiar that we tend to forget they are metaphors of all: We must follow the right path; we seek to ascend to the heights; we must enter into darkness or light; we must be centered. These are all representations in familiar images of something that is radically unfamiliar and unimaginable. We sometimes need to be reminded that these are representations, not reality, and a good way to accomplish this is through the use of an image that is unexpected. St. John of the Cross has an image that works in this way. Beginners in prayer are like babies at their mothers' breasts.
Babies want comfort, and sweet nourishment that is easy to digest. When we are the kind of beginners St. John talks about in The Ascent of Mount Carmel, we want spiritual consolations, the pleasant and gratifying feelings that reward a well-recited Rosary or a diligently completed novena. Those consolations tend to be the beginner's primary motivation in prayer.
Remember, the “beginners” the saint was addressing were Carmelite monks and nuns, people who already had a daily prayer discipline. So start by considering whether you are even a beginner. People not yet practicing daily prayer are not “beginners,” in St. John’s understanding, for the simple reason that they haven’t begun. If you are such a person, take heart, and get started. Just don’t start like I did.
From my youth, I had an interest in mysticism, in spiritual knowledge that penetrated through the appearance of things and revealed a more profound reality. Although raised Catholic, I was full of pride and bereft of formation in mystical theology. My desultory efforts were unrewarded, until my mid-20s, when I started trying to implement a different approach to prayer. I learned it, or at least attempted to learn it, from the Catholic writers of the 1960s through 1980s who sought to introduce prayer techniques from the non-Christian East, especially Zen. I’m not sure now whether they misled me, or whether I just misunderstood what they were saying, but studying these writings left me in a state of serious confusion. I thought prayer was primarily a matter of achieving certain mental states. I thought the value of prayer was to be measured primarily by my success (or, far more commonly, failure) in achieving those states.
I know now that this approach has nothing to do with Christian prayer. Christian prayer is primarily a matter of developing a personal, intimate, loving relationship with Jesus Christ, true God and true man. And it seems to me that the value of Christian prayer is measured not just primarily but SOLELY by the growth of charity towards others. Unfortunately, these priorities meant nothing to me at that time. I was a spiritual baby, and I needed the right kind of food. It wasn't mystical experiences.
I began reading The Ascent of Mount Carmel in bland ignorance of the real point of prayer, and in equally bland confidence that this book would show me the secret path to enlightenment. After a few chapters, I gave up.
However, our God is a loving God, and St. John of the Cross is a good spiritual father. Eventually, years later, I received the grace that encouraged me to began again. I still had the idea that spiritual progress meant having mystical experiences and receiving spiritual consolations. As I worked my way, slowly, through The Ascent of Mount Carmel, I learned that visions, locutions, ecstasies, and other extraordinary phenomena are fairly unimportant. Consolations like these sometimes might occur, but I needed a different form of nourishment.
For a person trying to achieve great heights of mystical knowledge, it is rather humiliating to see that these desires are unhealthy. What I really needed was a simple love for Jesus. Where I was trying to be ambitious and intellectual, I needed to be humble and vulnerable. I needed to learn to rest. "As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you," says the Lord Is. 66:13.
The image of mother's milk is apt: baby food is not poison. It has an appropriate purpose. It sustains and nourishes the young. An infant relies on it and grows strong.
Here is how St. John of the Cross draws us into the metaphor of baby food:
This is God's method of bringing a soul step-by-step to the innermost good.… The process depends on what God judges expedient for the soul, or upon the favors he wants to confer.… He begins by communicating spiritually, in accord with the person's littleness and small capacity, through elements that are exterior, palpable, and accommodated to sense.
Ascent II.17.4-5. God allows us consolations, in the forms and at the times that will do us the most good, considering the state of our soul. Yet we must understand:
[S]ensible things and the knowledge the spirit can abstract from them are the work of a child. Should a person always have attachment to them and never become detached, he would never stop being a little child, or speaking of God as a child, or knowing and thinking of God as a child.… [A] child must be weaned in order to accustom its pallet to a hardier and more substantial diet.
Ascent II.17.6
St. John of the Cross insists that consolations have a place in prayer. We sometimes need these sensible delights, feelings of closeness with God, tears of compassion at Christ's suffering, tears of joy at His resurrection. They will sustain us, as God is preparing our souls for greater things.