When we try to enter into communication with the Lord, the first thing that we have to do is to give life to the presence of the Lord, after controlling and centering the faculties.
We have to be very sure that God is objectively present in our entire being, such that He communicates and sustains His existence and consistency within us.
We have to remember that God sustains us. It is not the case of a mother who carries her offspring in her womb but, rather, in our case, that God penetrates, envelops, and sustains us.
He is further and closer than time and space; He is around me and within me; and with His active presence, He is in the most distant and deepest areas of my interiority. God is the soul of my soul, the life of my life; He is the all and all-encompassing reality within which we are submerged; with His life-giving strength He penetrates all we have and all we are.
In spite of such intimacy, there is no identification or mixture but an active presence, creative and life-giving. This ultimate reality of humanity is expressed by the psalmist with an incomparably
poetic expression: “All find their home in you” (Ps 87). The slow recitation of some of the psalms at the beginning of prayer can serve to make us “present” to the Lord.
It is necessary to venture into the interior because only our interior perceives God. Speaking of the Dark Night of the Soul, John of the Cross tells us:
The wisdom of this contemplation is the language of God
to the soul, of Pure Spirit to the spirit alone… This wisdom
is secret to the senses; they have neither the knowledge
nor ability to speak of it, nor do they even desire to do so
because it is beyond words.
God, simultaneously human reality and a theater of divine activity, a very real universe, like the wall we touch, but whose general perception escapes us because we live on the outskirts; those in touch with their interior distinguish it and perceive it although they too are unable to translate it into words. In his Living Flame of Love, John of the Cross describes this situation in these words:
The soul’s center is God. When it has reached God with all the capacity of its being and the strength of its operation and inclination, it will have attained its final and deepest center in God, it will know, love and enjoy God with all its might.
How the soul is the bordered region between God and us is explained by the Saint in the following way: it amounts to saying that the depth of the soul is proportional to the depth of love. Love is the weight that tips the balance toward God because love unites the soul with God, and the greater the amount of love, the more deeply is the soul centered in God. For the soul to be at its center (which is God) it is enough that it has an amount of love. And the greater the amounts of love we have, in this same proportion, will we continue to center and concentrate ourselves in God. And if we arrive at the ultimate level of divine love, we will have opened ourselves to the ultimate and most profound center of the soul.
It may happen, then, that successive levels of the soul are penetrated. And at each level, the Face of God shines more, His presence is more patent, the transforming seal deeper, and the joy more intense. Understand this well: I must necessarily speak in metaphors. When I speak of penetrating new levels, I mean perceiving, distinguishing. The soul (as well as God) is unalterable.
In the way that faith, love, and interiority go on living, they point
out new areas.
Saint Teresa symbolizes this grandiose reality by the mansions of a castle, each of them deeper within the castle.
Because of this, Jesus says: “Anyone who loves me will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we shall come to him and make a home in him” On 14:23). And the greater the love, the more interior and intimate the home. In those profound regions within each one of us, we experience the active and transforming presence of God.
Extracted from the book “Sensing your Hidden Presence”, by Fr. Ignacio Larranaga
