The Roadmap to Spiritual Perfection
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What does the path to perfection look like?
You exist to enjoy perfect union with God. That’s the reason for you. It’s your purpose.
So how does that happen? How do get to the point where you’re perfectly united with God?
Roughly, there are three phases to the journey. First, you have to prepare yourself to meet God. Then, you actually meet God and get to know Him. Finally, He makes you perfect so that He can enjoy you perfectly, and you can perfectly enjoy Him.
Now many people will spend their whole lives on the first step. In this life, they are just preparing themselves to meet God. Then, when they die, they actually meet God in the particular judgment. Finally, they go to purgatory, until they’re made perfect, and ready to enjoy God’s company.
But the saints have assured us that it’s also possible, by God’s grace, to go through these three stages here.
So what does that process look like?
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Step One: Preparing Yourself to Meet God
Most of us don’t start out having profound mystical experiences. Many of us have never had a really radical, intense perception of God at all. Which is fine, because we know what we need to do in the meantime: we need to get ourselves ready to meet God.
That means faithfulness to prayer. As St. Teresa says, “Don’t let anyone deceive you by showing you a road other than that of prayer” (Way of Perfection, ch. 21).
And it means working really hard to love others, which doesn’t mean to have good feelings about them, love means to do good for them, regardless of how you feel, and to forgive offenses, to do thankless tasks.
It means growing in humility and detachment from physical comfort, which Teresa calls the two, “inseparable sisters” (Way of Perfection, ch 10).
It might be an embarrassment to meet God if he came to us while we are in the state we’re in. So if He delays from revealing Himself to us directly in prayer, then now is our opportunity to make ourselves presentable when he does come.
This is the primary work of the first stage of our spiritual journey.
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Step Two: Meeting God Firsthand
Whether in this life or at our judgment immediately after death, God is going to show Himself to us.
Normally, that only happens in this life after we have taken the time and effort to prepare ourselves for meeting him by the commitment to daily meditation and a resolution and working on virtue and detachment. Usually, it’s only then that the Lord begins to let us experience Him by mystical insights, mystical delights, a powerful sense of God’s presence, a divinely granted stillness, and even perhaps supernatural images or communications are imparted to the soul.
Now God is showing Himself to the soul and the soul is amazed by how wonderful God is. The soul begins to “taste and see the goodness of the Lord.” And as the soul gets to know God through these glimpses, it begins to be filled with an overwhelming desire to be with God perfectly and permanently.
St. John of the Cross describes the process as being wounded by the experience of God, a wound that fills the soul with insatiable desire for the Lord (See Spiritual Canticle, stanza 1, #16-19; stanza 9).
Meeting God, and encountering His goodness in these intermittent, fleeting ways, makes the soul want more than anything to be with him always. And this desire strengthens the soul to go through the final process of being made perfect.
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Step Three: The Final Purgation
We cannot fully be with God, we cannot fully enjoy God, until all our selfishness, all our sins, all our disordered thoughts and feelings are finally taken away. And to some souls, God offers a purgatory on earth, a time of intense spiritual and perhaps physical suffering, that acts as a kind of detox and finally removes all the things that prevent us from uniting ourselves to God.
St. John of the Cross calls this purification the dark night of the spirit, and says it’s a “frightful night” (Dark Night, bk 2, ch. 1).
St. Teresa says that the suffering of contemplatives is “intolerable,” and that more active, busy people “couldn’t endure one day of the kind a contemplative endures.” (Way of Perfection, ch. 18).
But it’s worth it. Because at the end there is peace, tranquility, perfect integrity, and a sense of God’s presence that is steady and uninterrupted. (See Teresa, Interior Castle, 7th mansion, chap. 2).
Once you reach this point of bliss, the transition from Earth to Heaven is as simple and straightforward and easy as tearing through a thin veil. As John of the Cross says, “the death of such persons is very gentle and very sweet,” and as easy as walking through a very thin veil. (Living Flame, Stanza 1, #30, #36).
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God’s schedule, not ours
Now it’s up to God when He decides to reveal himself in stage two, and when He decides to put us through the final purification.
He may do it soon, He may do it later. He may do it in this life, or He may decide to take us from this life soon and finish the process in the next life.
St. Teresa reminds us that God is not on our schedule, “God considers a soul’s advancement and progress, but takes no account of time. One soul may have achieved more in six months than another in twenty years, since the Lord gives at His own pleasure, and to him who is readiest to receive” (Life, ch. 39).
She reminds us that our job is to keep preparing ourselves as best we can, “Be sure that if you do what lies in your power, preparing yourselves for contemplation with the perfection mentioned, and that if he doesn’t give it to you (and I believe he will give it if detachment and humility are truly present), he will save this gift for you so as to grant it to you all at once in heaven” (Way of Perfection, ch. 17).
So do what lies in your power.
Pray every day, serve others, forget your reputation, grow in humility, and detach yourself from physical health and comfort. And then when God comes to you in His own good time, you’ll be ready to receive Him.
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