Study and learning are spiritual disciplines much esteemed in the Christian contemplative tradition (as they are in many religious traditions). When this discipline is being strengthened and purified to make the discursive mind a better servant of God, we become aware of a not-so-subtle tendency to show off how much we have come to know in all our reading and study. This need not be a public display; we can look down on people less well-read than we are in such a way that they don’t even notice it. When this form of pride or arrogance is being healed we are not only painfully aware of just how much we do this, but it can be painful to study in the way we did before. We find we cannot even read; for it hurts too much to see our intellectual arrogance so clearly.
It is common enough that a certain isolation infects our fidelity to the spiritual life in such a way that we look down on others for not having journeyed as far along the spiritual path as we have. We do not need any evidence to back this up with. We look down on others from nothing other than dint of mental habit.
Christianity proposes lofty values, which we interiorize and genuinely attempt to live out. We believe them with our whole heart. If this commitment is not balanced by an operative knowledge of how much we fall short of them, we will likely struggle a great deal with the fact that others fall short of the ideal as well. We do not see that under the veneer of our idealism we are judging other people. This judgment is usually based on our own ignorance of the basic fact that we do not know the inner recesses of the human heart, which only God can see. The person whom we judge may very well be doing better than we are. But this is not the point. The point is to convince ourselves that we are better than they are. We arrive at this conclusion pretty swiftly, precisely because we have very little in the way of facts to lead us to it.
When we become aware by the light of grace to what extent we flare our nostrils in condescension at how unadvanced other people are, the mental pain is so excruciating we can only take refuge in the Jesus Prayer, or whatever our practice happens to be. It is the one safe place.
These are just some of the mental habits that are involved in what St. John of the Cross calls “sharp trials in the intellect.” They are more painful than the garden-variety suffering we know when this very “loving light” illumines our gluttony, greed, or lust. We become aware of the mental habits of the intellect not because we are moving into darkness but, on the contrary, because of our increasing proximity to this very loving light. The initial result of this growth in humbling self-knowledge, initiated and consummated by grace, is the not-so-consoling sense that our life is falling apart with nowhere to turn. No logician, saint, or scholar can convince us during the years of these sharp trials that this is actually growth, for the evidence available to us suggests that we have gone way off course or else we would not be hurting the way we are at the sight of what we see in ourselves.
~Martin Laird, A Sunlit Absence: Silence, Awareness, and Contemplation
