A New Charge to Keep: How to Advance Spiritually amidst Trials and Tribulations

Book excerpt: If your spiritual life seems to be dissolving into an arid desert of sameness or you are struggling to comprehend God’s apparent silence, despite your efforts to grow closer to Him, this book might be for you. It seeks to offer guidance on your spiritual path toward a place where knowledge ends, and charity begins (cf. Summa Theologica, II-II, q27, a4). This was the same kind of guidance offered by Edith Stein, who gleaned from John of the Cross what many generations of Christ’s followers have sought on their own spiritual journeys. She proposed that “they should do absolutely nothing other than ‘persevere patiently in prayer without any activity whatsoever; all that is required of them here is freedom of soul, that they liberate themselves from the impediment and fatigue of ideas and thoughts, and care not about thinking and meditating. They must be content simply with a loving and peaceful attentiveness to God, and live without the concern, without the effort, and without the desire to taste or feel him.’ Instead of doing this, because they lack competent guidance, they strive in vain, and possibly plague themselves with the thought that they are only wasting time with their prayer and ought to give it up,” (Edith Stein, The Collected Works of Edith Stein, Vol. 6, The Science of the Cross, ICS Publications, translated by Josephine Koeppel, OCD, Washington DC, 2002, 52).