Neither-Nor

In The Ascent To Mount Carmel, St. John of the Cross gives a dire warning to his readers. He cautions that while a contemplative’s direct experience of God may produce bodily and emotional effects, it would be a grievous error to use them to justify the validity of the experience itself. Moreover, it is equally wrong to use them as a gauge as to whether the experience is even good or evil. That the one who esteems them as such errs greatly and places themselves in great peril of deception. Furthermore, the more one even comes to rely on either exterior corporeal practices or interior validation, the less certain they can be that these things are of God.

This is a critically important observation. It is equally neither the interior joy and exaltation nor the discipline of the exterior practise itself that matters. What matters are not the circumstances of the experience, and much less of what one feels in response. What really matters is what actually takes place in the very real bonding between the finite created human person and the infinite person of God. It is this pure experience of love itself, and it alone, that is the actual substance of a contact that transcends both the circumstances of that experience and the feelings it produces.