A Technique of Spiritual Liberation (II)

Extract

Three admitted facts of our actual times impose themselves on us more imperiously than the rest.

First is this need for experience which we touched on towards the beginning of this article. We have said that it needs to be kept within legitimate limits. Then everyone will take care not to be satisfied with notions which have no spiritual value, any more than with observances which are followed because they are prescribed or recommended but which are, in consequence, burdens: they must become the means of liberation. The actions of the clergy and of the faithful, the functioning of institutions should lead to an increasing experience of lucidity, coherence, control and peace. Every spiritual man knows, with an immediate intuitive certainty, that these are normally the criteria of an authentic spiritual experience. Let us put it that in other times one could leave the ‘spiritual senses’ in penance to the extent of opposing the effective and the affective, and imagining a charity which was not affective; today there could no longer be a question of living the Christian life without a certain sense of its success—success in its own order, which is, let us repeat, that of faith and hope, but which must no less, normally, be ‘palpable to the heart'.