Spiritual Desolation

From Margaret Silf's book Inner Compass, some thoughts on desolation:

The epicenter of [consolation] lies in God and not in ourselves. The reverse is true of spiritual desolation. This is felt when our hearts are turned away from God. A common pattern of desolation may look like this:

Something happens in my life that upsets my kingdom. Perhaps a desire of mine is frustrated, or something wounding is said or done to me. I react to the event by focusing on my own pain. This has the effect of turning my attention away from God and onto myself. I then find myself, as it were, standing with my back to the light and seeing only my shadow. As a result the world appears dark and threatening. I can then all too easily imagine worse and worse consequences of the original negative event, and so I spiral down into deeper and deeper layers of desolation.

If we learn to recognize these patterns, we can turn the negative movement around. The same unpleasant event may occur, but we can choose to react to it by trying to focus outward, Godward, instead of inward upon our own pain.

It seems to me the key thing here is to be able to detach from the pain that external events may cause in us. Jesuits talk about consolation and desolation quite a bit, but they don't talk much about detachment. Detachment has always seemed more like a Carmelite practice, and if one extends outside Christianity it can be found as a central practice in Buddhism.

I've lived this experience of being hurt, focusing on the pain, and spiraling down into further desolation. I've also become better at detaching from that initial pain and keeping my focus on God instead of on my own hangups. It's not easy - it takes humility, self-awareness, courage, trust and presistence - things that much of our contemporary culture fights against. It's not easy, but it sure is liberating when you're able to pull it off.

Comments

[Rick]

This post is exactly the reason why I come here.

Thanks.

[Karen H.]

Hi Steve,
I just noticed this book on your site yesterday after I had been writing about my own compass and I was intrigued by it. Thank you for this excerpt.

I think that "detachment" is one of those words that needs to be reclaimed from a Christian perspective. Self detachment is a place of peace within and it allows us to re-attach to Christ.

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