You’ve many times told me that you feel tepid in your religious practice, you do not any more feel the fervour and devotion you used to feel before, you want to go back to fervent prayer, to living faith in all its intensity as you had always done. And I’ve many times answered you, and I do it again, that life changes, that the golden jubilee of a married couple is not quite the same as their honeymoon, that prayer is fervent and the whole hour passes in a jiffy for a novice while it may become boring for a professed religious, that mass is wonderful for a newly ordained priest and can become routine for a veteran, that Mother Teresa vibrated with religious emotion when she founded her congregation, while for the rest of her life she was “a block of ice” in her religious practices as she herself said.  

A good father provincial, in his yearly exhortation to our community, told us we had to revert to “the spiritual motions and emotions of our novitiate”. The average age of his listeners was 75. There were knowing smiles all round. Motions and emotions are fine at their time, but their time is not usually at age 75. And that is neither better nor worse. It is simply that life changes.

I learned that in India. Hinduism conceives God both as Saguna Brahman and as Nirguna Brahman. That is, God With Attributes and God Without Attributes, or the Concrete God and the Abstract God, and we are instructed that the way of the spirit leads us along our lives from the first to the second. For us in Christianity the Concrete God is Jesus Christ made man, our friend with whom we talk freely, before whom we complain, whom we entreat, who listens to our prayers and grants them, whom we receive in the Eucharist, whom we know and we deal with in all familiarity, whom we praise and whom we thank, and all that is very fine at its time. But that time does not last for ever. The Concrete God is the one of the first stages of the spiritual life, and that helps a lot, but this is a too anthropological point of view and it does not last for ever. It is what St Paul tells the Corinthians that at the beginning he gave them milk, and then solid food (1 Corinthians 3:2). The Abstract God belongs to an advanced spiritual life. The Absolute, the Dark Night of The Soul, the Cloud of Unknowing, the Not-This not-This, the Transcendent, the One Without a Second, the Wholly Other. As legitimate and as necessary as the Concrete God. And spiritual progress, we are told, lies in passing from the Concrete God to the Abstract God, as, again we are told, happens to the saints. Congratulations for having reached that stage. And we’ll shortly meet again as I’ll have to repeat it all over.