Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that is taking place among you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you.  But rejoice insofar as you are sharing Christ's sufferings, so that you may also be glad and shout for joy when his glory is revealed.

Discipline yourselves, keep alert. Like a roaring lion your adversary the devil prowls around, looking for someone to devour.  Resist him, steadfast in your faith, for you know that your brothers and sisters in all the world are undergoing the same kinds of suffering.  And after you have suffered for a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, support, strengthen, and establish you.

What is this fiery ordeal except that interior disquietude and disarray that beset us on our inner journey of mental prayer toward ecstatic divine union?  This indeed is nothing strange and we can rejoice in that Our Lord, too, suffered great interior trials on his path of obedience to the Father.  But we will not be able to contain ourselves when his glory will be revealed in us, and we will see him in ourselves and shout for joy.

The devil is granted a degree of activity to try to prevent us from walking this road so that our faith may be purified of false human supports.  All the members of the faith undergo this trial but we have the promise that God himself will “restore, support, strengthen, and establish” us.

Our Lord wishes to test our resolve.  Are we really intent upon walking the same road as he?  Or are we simply enamored of the idea of following him?  Do we have any attachments to our own developing virtue?  Are we desirous of consolations?  These and many, many other impurities must be removed for our fledgling faith to develop.  We always have the example and support of Mary, Mother of the Silence out of which the Word was spoken.  Profound interior silence springing from humility will confound the lion seeking to devour, whose power over us lies in noise and agitation.  Praise to God the Father who allows us to mature in faith and follow the example of those who preceded us in the house of the faithful.

This, then, is the way in which modern man flees from the experiences of that existential anxiety which is but an early indicator of an entrance into that interior desolation which we will speak about shortly: he turns on the television, or the radio, he picks up the phone or a book, he runs out of a room or drives off in a car.  He is like the Israelites who, upon approaching the desert longed for the familiarity of their fleshpots and slavery in Egypt.  We, like them, must pass through the desert if we are to reach the promised land.

In our interior barrenness – and only there – we shall find a path.  “A highway shall be there, and it shall be called the Holy Way; the unclean shall not travel on it.  No lion shall be there.”  (Isaiah 35.8-9)  It is clear from this that the unclean, that is our idols, shall not be permitted there.  Our illusions and false self will be burned in the desert heat.  Nor will Satan, the lion, be permitted there.  This is the desert in which a place was prepared for the Virgin, away from the beast.

Why, then, does man not recognize the need to walk this path?  His inner life is a “city full of noise and chaos.” (Isaiah 22.2)  He believes his existence is contingent upon these things.  And so he sets up his idols and becomes prey to the lion.

It is “by waiting and by calm that we shall be saved.  In quiet and in trust our strength lies.” (Isaiah 30.15)

The natural reaction to all this, I anticipate, will be “are we, then, to never do anything?  No shows, no enjoyment of art, music or dinner with a friend?”  Of course we should.  Is not heaven a banquet?  It is a matter of motivation.  The reflective person will be able to tell instinctively the reason he steps forth.  And the fruit of our action will be most bountiful when done in accord with our nature.  However, it is only the sojourner of the interior wasteland who will be able to see this most clearly.

What we speak of is as far from Quietism, a love of silence for its own sake or casual interior solicitude as paganism is from Christianity.  It is Christ the Savior whom we seek by a continual act of faith.  It is the Spirit who leads us, just as He led Jesus into the desert and prepared a place for the Virgin in the wastelands.  And far from relieving us of the moral order and the law, out of this solitude we can most effectively help our brothers and sisters for the glory of God, the spread of His Word and the growth of his church.  If we have not this love we are a noisy gong.  Salt gone flat.  Watchers whose oil has run out.