Book of All Saints by Adrienne von Speyr

Author:Adrienne von Speyr [Speyr, Adrienne von]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9781586171926
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2011-04-07T16:00:00+00:00

JOSEFA MENENDEZ (1890-1923)31

I see her prayer, which God, so to speak, takes over from her, while she gives herself and prays in an attitude of the greatest surrender. And this prayer, which contains everything that makes up her life, which is like a recapitulation of everything that happens and a testing of all these events in God’s presence, an examination of conscience, a reception of God’s instructions, so that everything is perfectly purified for him: this prayer changes with time, as the ordinary and small things slowly disappear into the realm of great love and she herself casts forth light toward God like a burning torch, immediately out of the love that God brings forth to her. And now the prayer becomes like a storm: it sweeps over her, over everything that was hers and not perfect, so that only what is worthy of God would be left behind. It is not reflections that purify her prayer, not the practice of virtue that brings her gradually to this purity, but it is God’s grace, which burns and cleans and leads forth and carries away. This prayer is her ideal and rest, and out of it grows what she must do: her prayer must be as God expects it; it must radiate in the way God wishes; it must help in the way people require.

But in addition to this there is a sort of anxiety, which nearly takes the form of scruples. There are whole periods in which she feels herself to be so unworthy, in which she becomes so hesitant, so full of doubt—not about God’s existence, not about the claim he has on her life, but about the way she responds. She is anxious that she entered the cloister out of pride, that she maintains her constant resolution to be pure out of pride, anxious that she is living too much closed up in God, that she accepts all the graces he gives her, the visions and voices she receives, in an all too personal sense, so that she now doubts their reality. On the one hand, she is convinced that everything is true, that she must remain in obedience, in order to please God. Indeed, even more: she does not raise the question of whether she pleases God in order that she might be even more obedient. On the other hand, she suddenly becomes anxious that she is exaggerating or that, by means of a power that is no longer a human power (neither is it the power of her sisters in the cloister nor that of her confessor), she sneaked in through a kind of training that perhaps makes real prayer impossible. She worries that her visions are figments of her imagination, that her voices are the sound of her own heart, that her prayer is a prayer full of pride. And now she attempts to take a step backward, in the midst of this anxiety, and here she plunges into the anxiety of the Cross, which is different from the initial anxiety.

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