Spiritual melancholy
Of the many struggles I have in the spiritual life, I believe perhaps my greatest is that of what I call spiritual melancholy. This is the most common form of darkness for me, and it frequently produces a certain tepidity of soul, where in my heart there is no fire for God, no strength in my desire to please Him. Part of this I believe is the result of my heavy reliance on the “experience” of God. Having lived the sort of life I did for so long, a life of moral decadence and almost indifference to the existence of God, it took a very powerful experience of God’s majesty to truly awaken me from my slumber. In the early months after my conversion God blessed me with certain spiritual consolations that I believe were given to me to nourish me, strengthen me in faith for the times when His consolations would leave me, and I would be required to walk on my own two feet in the dark night of faith. Many people who have certain mystical experiences of God consider them to be some sign of righteousness on their part, or a signal that they have somehow arrived somewhere. I do not see it that way. I regard the experiences that I had early after my conversion as signs of my weakness, and indications of just how far God was willing to go to ensure that I did not abandon my faith this time, that my walk with Him would now be secure.

Since then I have had only one other period in my life when I was blessed with this sort of spiritual consolation, this sort of heightened experience of God’s presence, and that was in the immediate days after my diagnosis of cancer last year, and the few weeks following the surgery. During that time God touch my soul in some powerful ways in prayer, but again, that was only to provide me with the necessary strength to allow me to persevere through the darkness that was forthcoming as the result of my physiological problems associated with the surgery. In this case, unlike before when I believe God came to me as He did because of my weakness of faith, this time I believe He came to me because of the fact that this trial was to be a particularly heavy burden.

But back to my main point. The downside to having had these sorts of experiences of God’s majesty and God’s closeness is that it is very easy to rely on them, even to seek them out, and this can only lead to deception. In fact, it can even open the door for Satan, who himself can appear as an angel of light. If Satan is aware of a person’s desire for visions, locutions, or other such mystical experiences, he can take advantage of that desire and produce such effects on his own, for such belongs to the power of an angel, which Satan is. Fortunately I have not had such an encounter, but nonetheless I have been victimized by my own desire for the “experience” of God in mystical sort of sense. By that I mean that I frequently have far too much of Thomas in me, and when God allows me to touch Him, only then to I drop to me knees and proclaim, “My Lord and my God!” This is not always the case with me, and normally I get along just fine with my faith, and in fact frequently my faith is quite strong. But when these periods of spiritual melancholy afflict me, I find myself longing for that jolt to awaken me from my slumber, and having witnessed what kind of fire an authentic mystical experience of God can produce in a lackadaisical heart, I sometimes await for that sort of external motivation for faith instead of being motivated by the simple reality of Who God is.

What’s worse, when I enter into this spiritual melancholy, I am much more likely to fall into sin. It is no surprise that sexual sins have been my greatest struggle in life, because sexuality is a way to experience something transcendent, and that is what I seek when I seek the experience of God. I am seeking the ultimate transcendent reality, and when I am unable to feel that reality, I seek a different sort of transcendence in the deception of sin.

My real problem is one of steadfastness. I suppose one of the things I never paid proper attention to after my conversion is how disordered my own desires really are, and how important it is for me to purify them. Even though the object of my desires was changed to something holy, to the source of all that is holy, the desire itself is still disordered. I am not desiring God, I am desiring some specific experience of God, which in reality is a way of settling for something far less than what He is offering. Even in my spiritual life now I am the victim of the same weaknesses from when I had no spiritual life whatever. This is why I so easily fall back into my old sins, because my desires themselves have not been purified, and I still go about the transcendent experience in all the wrong ways. Instead of seeking to “experience” God in this life, I instead need to learn to seek to please God for no other reason than He is God, and leave everything else in His hands.

Turn thou to me, and be gracious to me; for I am lonely and afflicted.
Relieve the troubles of my heart, and bring me out of my distresses.
Consider my affliction and my trouble, and forgive all my sins.
Consider how many are my foes, and with what violent hatred they hate me.
Oh guard my life, and deliver me; let me not be put to shame, for I take refuge in thee.
May integrity and uprightness preserve me, for I wait for thee. (Psalm 25:16-21)