Carmelite Father Marc Foley has written a terrific book that makes St. John of the Cross more easy to understand.

 

“The Dark Night: Psychological Experience and Spiritual Reality,” starts with challenges faced by beginners in prayer. 

 

One section seems written for our present day with all its frustrations and volatile tone: Father Marc’s chapter on Spiritual Anger.

 

Anger of all kinds is a reaction to frustrated desires, including spiritual frustrations. St. John identifies three kinds.

 

1 Anger as a reaction to a lack of consolation in prayer. 

 

When we begin to take prayer seriously, God gives us feelings of delight and fulfillment to help us keep praying. But at some point, our prayer will go dry. “Unhappy and peevish” is how Father Marc names the feelings that result. Those who indulge this anger often become unbearable and intolerable.

 

However, the imperfection of this and other kinds of spiritual anger resides not in the unhappy feelings, but in our reactions to them. Feelings do no harm spiritually, St. John says, if we accept God’s grace not to act on them. In this case, we keep showing up for prayer and doing the best we can even when we would rather be off doing something that feels fulfilling.

 

Bonus: such prayer attempts with no consolations are the greatest opportunities to grow in virtue!

 

2 Anger directed at others.

 

Some spiritual people begin looking for the imperfections of others. That active pursuit can distort their perspective, making others’ small faults and failings seem huge. These harshly critical people can be further deceived into thinking they are being virtuous, perfect and zealous for the Lord.

 

“Such blindness is frightening and can rob us of our humanity,” Father Marc says, adding that St. Teresa of Avila saw the result of such “zeal” as the “cooling of charity and love.”

 

3 Anger toward self.

 

We may realize we could do better spiritually, but when we can’t accept ourselves for who we are, when we make plans and resolutions that we can’t fulfill, we’ll become more and more frustrated and angry as we strive for imaginary, unattainable perfection. It can become a nasty, depressing cycle.

 

Father Marc quotes St. Francis de Sales on being willing to bear one’s own faults with patient humility. “We must suffer our imperfection in order to have perfection.”

 

All of these spiritual angers are, says St. John, “contrary to spiritual meekness and can only be remedied by the purgation of the dark night.” Although it is God who must complete the process, we begin the active dark night with our own efforts to become more meek and less angry.

 

What, precisely, is this virtue of meekness? Aristotle saw meekness as the midpoint between apathy and excessive anger. Father Marc quotes him as saying meekness is where we get “angry at the right things and with the right people, and also in the right way and at the right time and for the right length of time.” In other words, our anger doesn’t take over.

 

Meekness, Father Marc says, “is a part of temperance, the cardinal virtue that orders and harmonizes our passions and appetites with reason.” 

 

For extra motivation as we strive for meekness, we can try to step outside ourselves and recall how unattractive it is to lose ourselves to anger. Father Marc quotes St. John Chrysostom who says such behavior is being like “wild asses, kicking and biting. Truly a passionate man is not a graceful one.”

 

“If we are always losing our temper (with God, with others, with ourselves), the danger is that we can lose ourselves,” Father Marc says. 

 

But when we resist anger and the other spiritual faults of beginners — which are all manifestations of capital sins — we please God and grow in the virtues. 

 

Even better, God will notice and help our active-night efforts with His graces — and eventually provide a passive night to deeply purge and free us more and more from sin.