Allowing Grace to Perfect Nature - Spiritual Direction

The ever popular notion that one discovers their true identity in and/or by Nature tantamount to navigating a very slippery slope. Maybe the best way to come at this is to simply say that in Nature there is an instinctual level of communication yet the reality of human existence does not take form until something else takes place; meaning and our ability to symbolize our experiences rather than simply respond to it.

The Word and thus, naming reveals the mystery of reality. Mystery in this sense is not so much as unknown but unfathomable, something like love, there is so much more to be appreciated. So something other than communication happens here and language is our way of bringing meaning to our existence. Stumbling blocks akin to slippery slopes are often examples of our fallen relationship with another, a teacher or model where, by a knee jerk tendency in naming something, we explain it away rather than to find a way to rest in the tension of the mystery of naming something so to grant access to its wonder bringing us into a deeper relationship. 

Therefore the idea or image that some have that Nature is a mother to us just does not work - a sister, yes, but not a mother. G.K. Chesterton observed:

The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister. We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire, but not to imitate. This gives to the typically Christian pleasure in this earth a strange touch of lightness that is almost frivolity. Nature was a solemn mother to the worshipers of Isis and Cybele. Nature was a solemn mother to Wordsworth or to Emerson. But Nature is not solemn to Francis of Assisi or to George Herbert. To St. Francis, Nature is a sister, and even a younger sister: a little, dancing sister, to be laughed at as well as loved. - Orthodoxy, pg. 168-169

In the wisdom of St Thomas Aquinas:  "Since grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it, natural reason must be subject to faith, just as the natural tendency of the will is guided by charity."

This is so important when we discern certain orientations as they brush up against matters of faith and of being human. Again it is necessary to rest in the mystery of naming something to find how Grace is working in our nature. Pope Benedict XVI wrote in Caritas in Veritate:

“One aspect of the contemporary technological mindset is the tendency to consider the problems and emotions of the interior life from a purely psychological point of view, ... In this way man’s interiority is emptied of its meaning and gradually our awareness of the human soul’s ontological depths, as probed by the saints, is lost. The question of development is closely bound up with our understanding of the human soul, insofar as we often reduce the self to the psyche and confuse the soul’s health with emotional well-being. These over-simplifications stem from a profound failure to understand the spiritual life, and they obscure the fact that the development of individuals and peoples depends partly on the resolution of problems of a spiritual nature.”

To contemplate on this spiritual nature that Benedict refers to we must accept the challenge to heighten our religious sensibilities. This doesn't necessarily mean a more complex study like I love to meander through, but one can take a page out of The Story of a Soul from the mystical heart of St. Thérèse's Little Way, where she explains that Jesus does not demand great actions from us but simply surrender and gratitude, the keys to human freedom. Contrary to any notion (or rather myth) of freedom in Nature, where in reality we are reduced to reciprocal-response creatures, St. Thérèse's Little Way illuminates a relational model of being where we are predisposed for the other and God. Here, freedom in Christ, a surrender and gratitude brings an openness and willingness to journey with God exploring the numerous and varied voices operating on us and to reach beyond those 'other' voices to discover the portal that leads to Christ, who is our fulfillment. With our Baptism in the Holy Spirit we find our being in Christ so to relax into (graciously surrendering the controls to God) into an imitation of Him whose self-donating nature allows us to reach out to our sisters and brothers in a state of meaning, purpose and solidarity. 

Without God, the Transcendent Other however, and to the degree we reject or even neglect God, we are swayed toward an atheism of indifference and relativism, oblivious to God and are at risk of becoming oblivious to the values sustaining life. Caught in something resembling a soap opera or grade-B movie, our life without the breaking-in of something-larger-than-we-are is emptied of any inner peace and our relationships become frail and often filled with resentment. Our soul becomes parched and very quickly, emptied of our sense of worthiness - our lives becoming mere shadows of a self not able to substantiate between a real or a virtual existence.

Nature is perfected in Grace, so too the human nature must be perfected through on-going spiritual formation. This unfathomable mystery of formation is actually found in its simple signposts directing us toward becoming fully human. The signposts of spiritual formation are: induction, habits, and time. So breaking free from the soap opera life of a tit-for-tat existence we are led by others into something over time. Hence, Grace perfecting nature.

Formation needs to be nourished by a diet of study and piety that fuses into apostolic action. Like most diets spiritual formation is a struggle where temptations that are distracting and demeaning blind us from our goal. So it is important to remember our need to go beyond reason to where we surrender to faith that sustain us. 

Fidelity, fidelity, fidelity is the key to spiritual formation. A great source to help stay true to God's meaning and presence in one's journey is a spiritual director. They can help one stay focused in Christ always mindful that the journey is relational. The service of spiritual direction fosters a spaciousness, a width and breath in order to build up our nature in the communion of Christ.

Allowing Grace to perfect nature.