DISTRACTIONS AND THEIR REMEDY TAKEN FROM GROWTH IN HOLINESS by Father Frederick Faber, D.D. TAN BOOKS With Eccles. App., 1855 It is usually said that prayer has four enemies: distractions, scruples, dryness and desolation. ...  It remains now to say something on the subject of distractions, which the soul in the progress of the spiritual life finds one of its most obstinate and most tiresome impediments: tiresome, because it takes the smoothness, sweetness and facility out of all devotion, and obstinate, inasmuch as it appears to acknowledge the power of no specifics, but to be irritated and worsened by the very application of remedies. For there is nothing which looks so much like our own fault as distractions, and I fully believe that no impediment of the spiritual life is more often without any fault at all. In most cases it is an unavoidable mortification, and the fault it leads to is not want of attention at prayer, but want of patience at having our prayer teased, embittered and dishonored. Distractions are said more particularly to infest beginners; and they contain two things, the wandering or removal of the mind from the subject of prayer, and the occupation of the imagination by impertinent and irrelevant ideas. Hence it comes to pass, from their very definition, and while they greatly injure vocal prayer, they do not spoil it altogether; whereas mental prayer is destroyed by them; for in mental prayer we pray while we are attending, and no longer; no matter, say St. Isidore and Alvarez de Pas, how long we may remain upon our knees. Even when they are quite inculpable, St. Thomas their shrillness more often than they pierce with their bites. We strike them and they yield; but it is in vain; the pliant cohorts form again still more closely serried ranks and pipe on a higher note than they did before. Where we go, they go; and it is only the thin air of the high hills of mortification or the coming on of the grateful deep night of contemplation which can effectually draw off from us these irritating tenants of the twilight. We must then begin our inquiry into this subject by laying to heart the doctrine of the Abbot Moses in Cassian, namely, that it is impossible for us to be altogether free from distractions, useless to attempt it, and foolish to be dejected, because we have not accomplished that impossibility. Conscious and deliberate acquiescence in and retention of distractions are of course our own affair; for it is in our power to withhold them; but the indeliberate occupation of our minds by them it is not in our power to prevent. Nothing can hinder, says the Abbot, bitter thoughts from disturbing us, wrong thoughts from staining us, and vain thoughts from disquieting and fatiguing us. The first sort of distractions he calls sand, the second pitch, and the third straw. The author of the treatise on the love of God, among the spurious works of St. Bernard, seems to countenance the doctrine already laid down, that they accompany us to the mountain of contemplation, and leave us there; for he compares them to Abraham's young men, while he likens his body to the ass, and his reason to Isaac, and he says, "You cares, you anxieties, you toils, you pains, you slaveries, all you distractions, stay you here with the ass, the body: I and the boy will go with speed as far as yonder, and after we have worshipped, will return to you. Thus there is a sort of parallel between distractions and venial sins. We cannot avoid them at all; but let us take them in detail, and we can avoid them one by one. Thus, to anyone who has made up his mind entirely to cure himself of distractions, I would say, "You will never succeed." You are aiming at a state which is only transient, even with the Saints, and belongs to contemplation. Your strife will increase your malady; and your want of success will plunge you in self-vexation and pusillanimity. Every reason I gave you to be quiet with your faults tells with greater force in the case of distractions; for they are much more inevitable than faults. A complete and final cure is out of the question. So well-aware is the tempter that distractions are one of the unavoidable infirmities of our nature, and at the same time one of the most vexing and annoying to the human spirit, that he often tries to delude spiritual persons into taking the diminution of their distractions as the test of their progress in the spiritual life. He gains many objects by this one stratagem. He calls off their attention from real faults, especially those of the tongue and misuse of time, and from the means of advancement, where their attention would be profitably employed; and he fixes their eyes, and aims, and desires, on an object, as hopeless as the unprofitable labors which are put among the punishments of the heathen Hell. Forever to be rolling a stone up an impossible hill, and forever to be filling at the fountain the vessel that leaks, this is what these poor souls have condemned themselves to do; and as they have taken it as the measure of their progress, through what anxieties, and strainings, and forced marches, and discouragements, and swamps of sadness, will not the Will of the Wisp lead them! To resolve to be altogether quit of your distractions is to keep and to pay a standing army of them; and in the end they will be the sovereign, not you. Despots have slaughtered Janissaries whom they could not disband, and have broken the stone turbans off their graves. You will have no such success with your distractions. When we proceed to examine the sources from which distractions come, we must bear in mind the definition of them and the two processes which it implies, the removal of the mind from the subject of prayer, and the occupation of the imagination by irrelevant ideas and images. With this definition for our guide we shall discover that this great Nile of distractions has five fountains: disordered health, the action of the Holy Spirit, the devil, inculpable self and culpable self. By disordered health I do not so much mean actual illness, when in all probability ejaculatory acts of love, of patience, and of conformity will form the whole of the sufferer's prayers, with a constant quiet eye on his crucifix, or some other emblem of the Passion. I rather mean the valetudinarian state which is now so very common, with its distinguishing bodily feebleness and daily tendency to slight headache, especially when, as is often the case, the feeling of fatigue is greatest at first rising in the morning. With many persons this is so distressing that they are quite unable to make a morning meditation. In these cases, bodily strength is wanting to keep off or to banish distractions. The greater the effort made, the greater will the vehemence of the distractions be, and the result of a violent effort will be ad inability to pray at all. Such persons must be quiet and tranquil, and try to keep God's presence lovingly before them with gentleness and without scruple. It will seem to themselves that they do not pray at all, and that their attempts are so many constellations of venial sins. But this is really very far from being the case. They must take the annoyance as they would any other consequence of ill-health, and learn humility as its endurance. If they are quiet, they will have a spot within where there is peace, even while distractions are raging without; but if they make vehement and ill-advised efforts, they will only surrender to the distractions that inward sanctuary also. The action of the Holy Spirit is another fountain of distractions. Just as persons in the higher stages of the spiritual life are supernaturally tried and purified by desolations and aridities, so those who are passing through the earlier stages, and along the more ordinary paths of perfection, are sometimes put into a crucible of distractions, in order to ground them in more solid devotion, to burn away the remains of sin, and to subdue the vivacity of self-love. It is not easy for a man to know when the distractions he is suffering from are supernatural. Perhaps the knowledge would interfere with their efficacy. Still it is a consolation to know that there are cases in which distractions are a divine trial; and that one probable sign of their being so is when we are unable to attribute their unusual inroad, or its perseverance, to any other cause or to any fault of our own. There is also another class of supernatural distractions, which must be noticed. These infest us when the Holy Spirit is calling us to a different subject of prayer, or to a higher state of prayer, and we are unconsciously or consciously misunderstanding and resisting the vocation. He will let us have no rest until we obey Him, and He sends us these distractions to harass us into obedience. Thirdly, distractions may come from the devil, and in a very great number of cases do so. It is obvious that devotion is fatal to his kingdom in the soul, and consequently must always be one of his main objects of attack. His distractions may be known, first by their torrent-like abundance, secondly by the vivid pictures which accompany them, thirdly by their disquieting the soul in a peculiar and disproportionate manner, fourthly by their disconnection with the ordinary engrossing actions of our state of life, fifthly---and in this respect they are the opposite of diabolical scruples---by their want of variety, and their always returning to the charge in the same shape, and sixthly, by their being of such a nature, as if dwelt upon will easily become sin. Reguera, in his Mystical Theology, tells us not to pursue distractions at all, but to treat them as a man does barking dogs as he passes through a street. This advice applies with peculiar force to those distractions whose origin we have reason to believe is diabolical. Inculpable self is the fourth source of distractions, or rather contains within itself four distinct springs of them. The first is the imagination, which is much more strongly developed in some persons than others, and much more susceptible of images presented to it. Thus there are instances of men unable to make what is called the composition of place in meditation, that is, the picture of the mystery, because the vividness of the picture so excites their imagination that it is a source of distractions to them all through their hour of prayer. The ruling passion is another of these springs. All ideas and objects connected with it seem to participate both in its domineering spirit and its tenacity. They are always seen as it were through a magnifying medium, and lay so strong a hold upon the mind that it is difficult to shake them off; and when, as in the act of prayer, other external objects are shaken off by the ordinary efforts we naturally make at that time, those which are connected with the ruling passion only seem to have the field more comparatively to themselves, and to subject the mind to a more rigorous tyranny. The third spring is what has been called the "ingenium vagum," the genius of dissipation, the turn of mind which makes a man diffuse himself over many objects, and turn away with repugnance from interior things. It is just the opposite of concentration. It has no fixity, no steadiness. It is a constitutional flaw in the mind, analogous to irresoluteness in the will. It loves novelty and change, and show, and sound, and hurry, and many things to do, and the luxury of complaining it has many things to do. Like all constitutional faults, it is full of the possibilities of moral evil, still it is itself constitutional, and so inculpable. ... there was a profoundly melancholy temperament which could nail itself so undistractedly to an object as to be mistaken for a supernatural gift of contemplation. The ingenium vagum is just the very opposite to this; and as the former is without merit, so is the latter without blame. The fourth spring is the unskillfulness of our spiritual director. Directors who drag their penitents rather than follow them to keep them in the way are necessarily the cause of habitual distractions, because the souls of their penitents are always in an unreal and forced state, and are not developing in the way of the Holy Spirit. Hence they are feverish, panic-stricken, obstinate, now querulous, now fantastic, one while dumb, another while loquacious, and a few years hence would have given up the pursuit of perfection altogether. The prayers of such persons are composed of two-thirds distractions and one-third petulant complaint of the distractions to God. Other directors have a pet method prayer, and will insist on all their penitents praying as they do. None are to pray lower. Perfection, say they, requires such or such a degree of prayer. None are to pray higher. It would be delusion. Such a director looks down upon his flock as on a lower level than himself on the mountain. He is piping up above. It does not strike him that he is ever to look up, sometimes with dazzled eyes and aching neck, at penitents above him. All above him are stragglers. He sends his dog for them, and they come precipitately down at the peril of their lives. Others pass their penitents through twelve or fifteen degrees of prayer in succession, like the stages of an operation, a manufacture, or a medical cure. They can tell as well where they are in prayer as they can show by a map how far they are on their road to a given place. The consequence, to the poor penitents, of all this narrowness and pedantry is their being devoured by wolves the whole time of prayer. To be in a state of prayer in which God does not will us to be is a kind of spiritual dislocation. We shall be easy in no posture, and recollection is impossible. These four springs together make up the source of inculpable self. The fourth and last fountain of distractions is culpable self. All distractions, from whatever source, are culpable, if we clearly perceive them and deliberately entertain them. They become culpable in the same way as temptations become sins, by advertence and consent. But beyond this, there is a class of distractions arising immediately from ourselves, and which are always culpable. They have two springs, the body and the mind. The body culpably causes them, when we practice no sort of mortification, and foresee that the result of that neglect will be distractions. Irreverent postures in prayer, and continual changes of position, and all want of outward modesty and propriety also give rise to distractions which are culpable. The remedy for these is of course as obvious as their cause. Then the mind is another prolific spring of several classes of distractions for which we have no one to blame but ourselves. We have debauched our own minds. We have disarmed our spirit and left it a helpless prey to those merciless distractions. Among our many faults there are seven especially, which not only indirectly, but directly, play into the hands of distractions. The first. is a carelessness about very minute sins, which, like the dead flies in the apothecaries' ointment, may be indefinitely small, and yet corrupt the purity of intention of all we do. They dissipate the mind, induce one or other of the forms of spiritual idleness, involve supernatural objects in a sort of fog and weaken grace at every turn. The second fault is tepidity, of which I shall have to speak in the following chapter. The third is curiosity, and especially a thirst for news, whether it be of the great world, the camp and the court far off or details of what our neighbors are saying, doing and suffering, or an inordinate love of writing and receiving letters, or the puerile magnifications and idolatries of domestic life and love. All these must be paid for, to the uttermost farthing, by these inexorable distractions. Shylock will not stick to his bond more pertinaciously than they. The fourth fault is going to prayer without due preparation. We walk in and out of the presence of God, without doing reverence or homage or observing any of the ceremonial of His august celestial court. There is no one perhaps with whom we are more rude than with the Incomprehensible God; and we are never really familiar with those to whom we are rude. Hence come distractions, which can breathe any air but that of holy familiarity with God. A fifth fault is our want of custody of the senses, not merely in the time of prayer but out of it. Distractions being an infirmity of our nature, we cannot purchase, I will not say immunity, but a sufficiently ample juris- diction over them, without a sacrifice on our own part. We cannot enjoy to the full our unshackled liberty of looking where we will and listening to what we will, even far short of sin, and not take the consequences which follow by the mere operation of the natural laws of mind. The manner as well as the amount of custody of the senses is different in each case; but without some manner and some amount we shall always be powerless over distractions. Our sixth fault is our neglecting to practice ejaculatory prayers. They are, so to speak, the heavenly side of distractions, thoughts of God which distract us from the world and interfere with the quiet possession which the world has taken of our souls. Ejaculations are our doing for God what distractions do against Him. They have a speciality to evict distractions. There is no better practice for bringing them under our control. Our seventh and last fault is our taking no pains to watch from what object it is that the thickest swarms of our distractions arise, and then mortifying ourselves in those very things. Obvious as this duty is, it is one very commonly neglected. Men look at distractions as unscientific people look at a phenomenon. It tells them nothing. It leads to nothing. They do not ask whence it comes nor whither it goes. It is simply a phenomenon. So here are these distractions. No matter whence they come; the question is what we are to do with them. Certainly; but it is just to find out this last, that we must know the first. If our imagination is fairly sinking at prayer in a sea of distractions, it is very well to work at the pumps, but it is something more to find out the leak. Attention to these seven faults will in time produce something like subordination in our distractions; and we shall never get much beyond this, until our whole state is higher and more supernatural. It is one of the essential and incurable defects of the state of proficiency, as compared with the state of the already perfect; just as there are essential and incurable defects in beginners which gradually disappear in proficients. Anything that helps to purity of intention helps also to the subjugation of distractions.   But the great thing to be borne in mind is that the time of prayer is not the time for the true combat with distractions. If we delay till then, even our very victories will be melancholy; for they will be won only by the loss of our prayer. How many persons complain of their distractions, and even look forward with a sort of dread to the time of prayer because of the mental suffering it will bring with it; and yet how few make it the business of their lives, out of prayer, to hinder the recurrence of these same distractions! I have already said, and I will repeat it, that when a man is not seriously directing his life out of prayer against the sources of distractions, prayer must necessarily be the most distracted of times. For we empty the heart of many things, and distractions gush in to fill up the void. We shall never get rid of distractions or get a decent mastery over them by fighting against distractions, but by fighting against something else, against the source or cause of the distractions; and our fight must cover the whole breadth of our daily life. There are two practices of interior spirituality which excellently accomplish this end; and they occupy the entire ground of life. One of them is the having a rule of life; and the other devoting our undivided attention to the perfecting of our ordinary actions. With regard to the rule of life, it is so completely a question for consideration in each particular case that I shall not enter into it at any length. It gives sanctity in the world a kind of shadowy likeness of sanctity in a convent, which acts sometimes well, sometimes ill. With some persons the captivity and bondage of it rapidly advance them in holiness. With others its arrangements only minister to delusion and self-love. In the case of some it meets their faults, and strangles them with a sort of slowly twisting bowstring. In the case of others, it ruins their delicacy of conscience; their attention is called off from real faults and even crying imperfections, and is so fixed on obedience to the details of their rules that their conscience comes soon to feel keenly the one, which is of little consequence, and be callous to the other, in which even questions of sin are often concerned. People will confess with real sorrow a breach of their time-paper, who forget even to mention that they spoke sharply to their servant, or discussed the character of an absent neighbor. Of all the appliances of the spiritual life there are none which can with less wisdom and safety be indiscriminately applied. Upon the whole, fewer can wear the yoke than not; or at least as many get injury as get benefit from this form of spirituality. Only, where it succeeds, it succeeds admirably. But in the case of persons living in the world, I believe rules have stunted more souls than they have advanced. But there are none to whom Our Lady's devotion, her shape of the spiritual life, cannot be applied with abundant blessings: I mean the attempt to do perfectly our ordinary actions. This is the most excellent of practices, and walks in a clear air which delusions seldom can obscure; and our power over our distractions grows in proportion to our perseverance and our skill in this exercise. Methods for this practice abound in our most approved spiritual writers. I will select one out of many, because of its simplicity, clearness and spirituality. There are then two things to be regarded in every one of our ordinary actions: the exterior and the interior. The exterior is to it what the body is to the soul, as necessary and yet also as subordinate. Where outward discipline is wanting, interior perfection cannot be observed, says William of Paris. The religion of our exterior, says St. Bonaventure, excites the affection of our interior. The perfection of the exterior of our actions is attained by the presence of three virtues: fidelity, punctuality and modesty. Fidelity enables us to admit nothing, punctuality to procrastinate nothing, and modesty to do all things with gracefulness and edification. For the interior of our actions three things also are required: to do all for God, in the presence of God, and in the sight of Jesus. To do our actions for God is to refer them to Him by an act of intention. Many actions are done for a bad intention, such as the desire of praise; and then the act is vitiated. Many also are done with merely human intentions, as for the plea- sure of a thing, and then there is not merit. And alas! multitudes of actions of multitudes of men are done with no intention at all; and custom, precipitation and negligence devour what might have been the pure food of God's greater glory. Oh, what teeming years of human life are wasted through this unthinking absence of all intention; and we thought ourselves so good because after all we were not so bad; and now tears of blood will not weep them back again! When we are doing a great thing for God, we must momentarily collect ourselves before acting, and try to touch lightly with our intention the beginning, middle and end of each considerable action, and not throwaway, as fish too small for the table, the little actions of the day. Now I have said certain things here which will immediately turn to scruples in some minds, if I do not meet them by giving some signs which, without an absurd over-exactness of self-inspection, will enable us to know whether on the whole we are doing our works for God. Here is one sign: We are really working for God. If we could say yes, did anyone suddenly ask us if what we are doing is for God? Another is, if we are not uneasily anxious about the judgment men will pass upon our actions. A third is, if we are not wholly indifferent, but quite tranquil about success. A fourth is, if we take as much pains in private with what we are doing as in public before witnesses. A fifth is, if we are not jealous either of associating others with our works, or of their equal or greater success. We do our works in the presence of God, which is the second grace the perfection of our ordinary actions requires, when we practice the presence of God while we do them. There are six ways of practicing the presence of God which are given in books, and from which souls should select those which are most suited to them, but not try to practice more than one. The first is to try to realize God as He is in Heaven. The second, to regard ourselves in Him as in His immensity. The third, to look at each creature as if it were a sacrament having God hidden under it. The fourth is to think of Him and see Him by pure faith. The fifth, to look at Him as in ourselves, rather than outside of us, though He is both. And the sixth is to gravitate toward Him by an habitual, loving mindfulness of heart, a kind of instinct which is no uncommon growth of prayer, and comes sooner than would be expected, when men strive to serve God out of the single motive of holy love. The third requisite for the perfection of our ordinary actions is that we should do them in the sight of Jesus, that is, to use the words of the missal, by Christ, with Christ and in Christ. To do our actions by Christ is to do them in dependence upon Him, as He did everything in dependence on His Father and by the movements of His Spirit. To do our actions with Christ is to practice the same virtues as Our Lord, to clothe ourselves with the same dispositions and to act from the same intentions, all according to the measure of the lowliness of our possibilities. To do our actions in Christ is to unite ours with His, and to offer them to God along with His, so that for the sake of His they may be accepted on high. This is a good old-fashioned French method of perfecting our ordinary actions, and not so hard as at first sight it seems to be. To try and combat our distractions when the time of prayer has come is like speaking reason to a seditious multitude. What I have said is not perhaps satisfactory. It is hard to be told that we cannot shake off altogether a yoke so degrading and so wearisome. But will facts warrant me in promising more? No man short of a real contemplative will ever reign like a despot over his vast hordes of distractions. He is a happy man, and has done much, who has set up a constitutional monarchy among them. Forward takes you next sequential page of this series.   E-Mail HOME--------------------------THE SAINTS DIRECTORY www.catholictradition.org/Tradition/silence9.htm