The Way Of Prayer: Emotional Humility

Anyone practicing a steady prayer discipline can think of a time when the Lord seemed especially close. Those moments live on in the memory. Were you overcome with deep emotions, maybe reaching for the tissues? Or this might have been a moment of profound quiet, when you felt a great peace, knowing that God was simply saying to you, “Be still, and see that I am God.” Ps 45:11 (Douay Rheims)

And then there are the opposite experiences, when God seems to be elsewhere. We want to rest in Him, but find ourselves restless instead. It is like sitting in an empty waiting room, a place of boredom, frustration, and resentment. This is the silence of the desert, and it serves a purpose in the spiritual life, hard though it may be to endure.

Longing, disappointment, gratitude, joy–these and other emotions have an important place in prayer. We can’t be too proud to acknowledge our feelings. But we also must not be too proud of the feelings, even sincere and strong feelings that sometimes are stirred up in prayer. Exuberance is not a sure sign of progress, just as aridity is not necessarily an indication of backsliding. In dealing with these matters, we need the guidance of a good spiritual master, like Saint John of the Cross, to understand the proper place of emotional experiences in the spiritual life.

In The Ascent of Mount Carmel, he tells us that we must not put too much stock in either consolation or aridity. We are always tempted to judge the quality of our prayer by comparing it to a past moment when God seemed close. Then we might start running after the warm feelings, instead of running after Him. On the other hand, if all we encounter is an unwelcome silence, we might fall into self-absorption and start trying to deconstruct the desert, thus focusing attention on ourselves, when we should be looking at Jesus.

The antidote to both of these errors is emotional humility.

Humility! It truly is the foundation of prayer. Properly humble Christians are not in search of experiences.

If you consult Saint John of the Cross on the meaning of spiritual consolations, you will discover one reason why he might not be the most popular guide in the spiritual life. For he tells us clearly that consolations of this type are not a sign of holiness; they are, to put it bluntly, baby food.  AMC II.17.  In The Ascent of Mount Carmel, he writes that emotional encouragements may be “necessary to beginners.” AMC II.7.8. But “the soul must not want to allow these revelations to keep growing, although God offers them to her; just as a child needs to leave the breast, in order to make its palate stronger,” so must we prepare for more substantial food. AMC III.17.6. Spiritual union with God “consists not in recreations and pleasures and spiritual feelings, but in a living death of the cross, of sense and spirit, interior and exterior.” AMC II.7.11

Ouch.

We crave reassurances about prayer, not an admonition to disregard the very experiences that make prayer so comforting. But the problem is that the person trying to have experiences is too concerned with himself or herself. You may find yourself not just praying, but subtly slipping into the sense of watching yourself pray: What’s happening to me? Was that a touch of the Holy Spirit just now?

The attention begins to focus not so much on Jesus but on oneself. When we come to God with the expectation of receiving certain feelings–or when we turn away disappointed when the feelings don’t come–we might be sincerely trying to grow in genuine intimacy with God, but our motives are subtly selfish. Mixed in with our desires are cravings for what we can get from God: experiences, insights, even visions or locutions.

Our model should be the Bride in The Spiritual Canticle. She wakes at night and finds that her Beloved has left. She rises at once and goes out into the city, alone, seeking Him. Gone is all reserve, all propriety; her heart is aching for Him, and she is not too proud to admit it. No one is more humble than she is.

Nor does she begin to think too much of herself, or what she is doing here, or how brave and faithful she is being by going out to search for the Bridegroom. She brushes aside all the people and creatures she encounters. They offer her substitutes of various kinds, but she will have none of them. She refuses to be the hero of her own story. She is truly “in” love, inside it, and she will not be satisfied until her Beloved is there with her.

For some people, reluctance to let prayer become emotional is the obstacle. For other people, being overeager about experiencing emotion in prayer is a distraction. Perhaps men tend more to shy away from letting feelings loose, while women tend not to be so reluctant. It’s also likely that a person–male or female–in the early years of a prayer life will be a little too self-conscious about strong feelings during prayer and will wonder if anyone is watching.

The remedy is humility—not just intellectual humility, which reminds you of your lowly condition, but emotional humility, which keeps you from being preoccupied with how you feel when you pray. We must not be proud of our emotional state in times of deep prayer, or ashamed of it, or otherwise preoccupied with it in any way. Our attention must always be on the Lord, not on what we desire for ourselves, or on agreeable or disagreeable feelings.

In conclusion, we should consider well the counsel of our spiritual father, St. John of the Cross:

In the Exodus, God did not give them the delicious food of heaven until the wheat of Egypt ran short … One on the path to God must take care to put an end to and mortify the desires. … What was human will become divine, which is the state of union, in which the soul serves no other thing but to be an altar on which God alone is praised and loved.

AMC I.5, sec 3, 6, 7.

Further resources

Anyone who is regularly experiencing a flood of feelings in prayer should carefully read Book II, Chapter 11 of The Ascent of Mount Carmel. The saint’s good counsel is especially needed by anyone who is experiencing visions, locutions, or other extraordinary phenomena.

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This article originally appeared on SpiritualDirection.com