God Enters the Soul that is Empty

Spiritual directors should reflect that they themselves are not the chief agent, guide, and mover of souls, but that the principal guide is always the Holy Spirit who is never neglectful of souls…  Thus the director's whole concern should not be to accommodate souls to their own method and ideals, but rather to point out to a person the markers in the road along which God seems to be leading them, and if that person does not yet know the road, leave them in peace and do not bother them.  A director should always work in harmony with the way God is leading a person, striving to lead them into a yet more profound solitude, tranquility, and freedom of spirit.  A director should give a person space so that when God leads them into this interior solitude they are free from the constraints of spiritual and bodily senses which might lead them to clutch at some object, be it in their external world of within…  For when the soul frees itself of all things and attains to emptiness and freedom concerning them, which is what it can do of itself, it is impossible that God will fail to do his part by communicating himself to us, at least silently and secretly.  It is more impossible for the sun not to shine on clear and uncluttered ground than for God to fail his people.  As the sun rises in the morning and shines upon your house so that its light may enter once you open the shutters, so the God who watches over Israel and who neither slumbers nor sleeps, will enter the soul that is empty and fill it with divine blessings.

– from The Living Flame of Love, by John of the Cross (1542–1591)

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