The contemplative life starts in desire. We desire to know and see and encounter Christ. We want to see his face. We love him. Yet desire, unavoidable though it may be for humans, is dangerous and often gets people into trouble. Desire is the root of many horrible sins and tragedies in our world. So, then, what are we to do with our passions, and how do they fit in with faithful contemplation? It’s a question I’ve thought about a lot because I live with and in passion. Ever since I was young, my passions seemed uncontrollable—as much a part of me as the color of my hair or the pigment of my skin. In playing sports, I “wore my heart on my sleeve,” as the saying goes. Nobody had to ask how I was feeling; they knew. I was distraught if we lost or ecstatic if we won. That was my authentic self. Later, when my passions overwhelmed me and those around me, I learned to push my passions down and never bring them up again.
In our modern world, passion plays an elusive role. Are my passions my truest self, the most authentic me? Should I express them no matter what and decide that it’s not my fault if others don’t like them? Or, like Elsa from Frozen, should I conceal, don’t feel, don’t let them know? Or should we let it go?
There’s something in Ignatian spirituality called “holy detachment.” We are born with passionate desire, yet to experience God we must put to death selfish passion and self-centered desire. In essence, holy detachment invites us to care only about the things that help us love God and love neighbor. In all other things we should be passionless, detached, in some ways indifferent to whole swaths of human existence. Desire isn’t to be rejected; it is to be discipled. This discipleship process requires a rejection of the self-directed and reactionary passions. As Rowan Williams puts it, “The holy person is one ‘free from passion’ because he or she is the person free from having their relations totally dictated by instinct, self-defense—reactivity, as we might say these days.”18 A free person is one who has passions but who is not controlled by those passions in a reactive cycle.
Imagine for a moment what it would be like if you stopped caring what other people thought of you. You may think that would be rude; part of a life of love is caring about people and their feelings. But imagine that you stopped trying to make good impressions, that you could walk away from an encounter and not play over in your mind how you came across. Imagine that you didn’t care about what your friends thought of you. What jokes would you not make? What posts would you make (or not make) on social media? Would you care about social media at all? How much do you currently do for others’ approval, to fit in? What do you refrain from doing so that your friends will still think you’re cool? What would you not post about if you weren’t concerned with being on the right side of an issue? What would it be like if you didn’t desperately care about what grade you earned? And maybe part of your motivation to earn the grade you’re striving for is really about appeasing your parents or teacher. Put all those passions aside.
How would you relate to a spouse or significant other if your passions weren’t primary, and you could see her as a gift in her own particularity, and you related to her as God relates to her? Being emptied of your preferences, what would it look like for you to love your children without trying to manipulate or control them, instead caring for them and seeing them as uniquely bearing the image of God in their own giftedness?
What would it look like for your church to live in holy detachment, to love others without interest in their own passions but, instead, for the mutual love of God?
What if we rejected our own passions in order to gain the passions that help us love God and love neighbor? Holy detachment does not mean that I’m passionless for my kids or wife or neighbors. But I lay down the demands my passions make and regard others as God sees them. I lay down my passions and take up the “passion”—in the other sense of the word, the sense of suffering—of Christ, which is the way of the cross.
This may sound like a quasi-Stoic or quasi-Buddhist ethic—the goal of life is one of detaching oneself from the world and from cares. The Buddha himself left his own family in pursuit of a detached life. Even the attachment to family was a hindrance to a holy life. But holy detachment does not veer into the unhelpful notion of placelessness and namelessness. It is not that God loves us without distinction. He loves the essence of us as it relates to his own essence. We share in bearing God’s image in unique ways with our unique personalities and makeup. In the same way, in Christ, adopted by God, we are to love others in their own particularity and from our own place. We are free to recognize the interconnectedness of all—that this person shares God with me through our mutual bearing of the divine image. Yet we still maintain a distinction of particularity in how each Christian displays the essence of God in themselves. Christians are like each other in significant ways, yet their own distinctions make them different in more profound ways. Those differences can be causes for consternation or reasons to rejoice. The call to love one another is a call to love people without reference to one’s own preference or affinity but rather in a way that reflects the indiscriminate love of God. God has a general love for the whole of humanity, but what makes God even more amazing is that he has a particular love for each one of us.
After all, prayer is not about us. It is about God. When we express all our concerns to God, we call God to attend to us. There are times for that. But our goal is to be detached from our concerns so that we turn from our interests to the goodness and love of God. It’s only in prayer that we can start to lose grip on our own passions and become passionate about something beyond the self. As Rabbi Abraham Heschel commends, “The purpose of prayer is not the same as the purpose of speech. The purpose of speech is to inform; the purpose of prayer is to partake.”19 Those who have reached a holy detachment can care about the things that God cares about and can begin to partake of him.
TRANSFORMATION
In a fascinating article about bourbon and spiritual formation, art professor Matthew Milliner tells a story of his visit to Kentucky’s bourbon country. This isn’t to say that bourbon is helpful to spiritual formation, and in certain contexts and times, it may be detrimental to spiritual formation. But he compares the process by which we are formed with the process by which bourbon is produced, and he uncovers interesting parallels. Through his travels he had a realization: bourbon country is also God’s country. In Kentucky, spirits and the spiritual sit side by side. Historic basilicas and convents are located near modern distilleries. The sacred and the secular seem inseparable. Considering these twin realities, Milliner concludes that distilling bourbon requires the same steps as spiritual formation: purgation, illumination, union.20
PURGATION
The first step of transformation is purgation. Just as the corn for bourbon is harvested, crushed, and fermented in its own death, so a Christian spirituality requires a type of death. Saint John of the Cross writes, “I would not consider any spirituality worthwhile that wants to walk in sweetness and ease and run from the imitation of Christ.”21 In the Christian tradition, theosis, or partaking in the divine nature, starts with a self-emptying. Holy detachment is a kind of self-emptying; it starts with a right passion of mourning for the ways in which we’re not like God. It’s right to feel sorrow for the ways we’ve destroyed life and well-being in ourselves and those around us and, most particularly, for the separation from God that is the consequence of sin. As we’ve seen, the modern person attempts to discover their “authentic self” outside of conversation with God, which typically leads to exemplifying the false self—that self that seeks to win approval, to satisfy ego, to win at all costs. Thomas Merton comments that such people “try to become real by imposing themselves on other people, by appropriating for themselves some share of the limited supply of created goods and thus emphasizing the difference between themselves and other men who have less than they, or nothing at all.”22 In other words, modern people try to go within themselves by attempting to identify what makes them better than everyone else.
But the path of the authentic and true self is actually one of death by self-giving: “The renunciation of existing-for-oneself is man’s most authentically personal act and so also man’s most Godlike act.”23 Or as Thomas Merton posits, “To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the reason for my existence, for God is love. Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name.”24 To become divine, like Jesus, we empty ourselves of the passions that wage war within us and become nothing, so that, like Jesus, we can rise to life with God. The real authentic self is found in killing the alleged authentic self. Our ambition ceases as God becomes more in us.
Jesus compares transformation to a seed that goes into the ground to die so that it may rise to new life (John 12:24). But by being buried and dying, the seed becomes more like its true and ideal self, not less so. The same is true with humanity. We need to be purged of ourselves to become our true, redeemed self. Being like God starts with emptying ourselves of our passions that strive for dominance or control or manipulation. It starts with detachment. Transformation requires death.
ILLUMINATION
The process of transformation doesn’t end in death. If we stop at purgation, we become masochists. If we stop at purgation in the bourbon world, all we have is what distillers call “slop.” The slop is nothing. Making the slop into something requires heat. In the next step the slop is heated to induce the evaporation process, leaving only the truest, most authentic form of the grain or corn. Distillers call what’s left “white dog”—a pure and potent liquid.
Illumination is coming to know and become one’s truest self, becoming comfortable in one’s redeemed skin. Robert Farrar Capon puts it this way:
It is Jesus who is your life. If he refused to condemn you because your works were rotten, he certainly isn’t going to flunk you because your faith isn’t so hot. You can fail utterly and still live the life of grace. You can fold up, spiritually, morally, or intellectually and still be sage. Because at the very worst, all you can be is dead—and for him who is the Resurrection and the Life, that just makes you his cup of tea.25
The heat of this realization creates an acceptance of the process that God is enacting. Dying is incomplete, but it’s the first step. Many Christians undergoing this refinement process find a growing comfort in it. God is working with you to make you something. You are God’s handiwork, poiēma (Eph. 2:10), created in Christ Jesus for good works.
UNION
The last step is union. The white dog must now sit in oak barrels for years. The barrels swell and shrink with the changing seasons. The wood expands under the humidity of Kentucky summers and contracts as winter winds blow. There’s an organic breathing process that occurs. After each season, more and more liquid evaporates as the oak seeps into the bourbon, giving it its brown hue. After many years the union of white dog and barrel is complete. The swelling of barrels creates a union of substance. They bleed into each other.
Milliner, drawing on Merton, concludes the parallel between bourbon and spiritual transformation:
“We must ‘empty ourselves’ as He did. We must ‘deny ourselves’ and in some sense make ourselves ‘nothing’ in order that we may live not so much in ourselves as in Him. We must live by a power and a light that seem not to be there. We must live by the strength of an apparent emptiness that is always truly empty and yet never fails to support us at every moment. This is holiness.”
Such is the paradox of bourbon: The less there is of it, the better. As a truly great bourbon reaches its peak, the amber liquid increases in richness, hue, and complexity while decreasing in quantity. The greatest sip of bourbon must therefore, necessarily, be the barrel’s last solitary drop. Emptiness is perfection.26
As we pour ourselves out in service, as we become detached from ourselves and attached to God, as we become less ourselves and more like God, we become our finest selves. Theosis is complete. We become the completion subsumed in God.
CONCLUSION
The rock band Florence and the Machine filmed a music video in Ukraine in 2022, during that country’s ongoing conflict with Russia. The song they perform in the video is called “Free.” Following Florence around is an actor, who serves as a symbol of her anxiety. This actor controls her and is a constant presence and burden. Her emotion, she sings, “picks me up” and “puts me down a thousand times a day.” She’s seeking freedom, but she seems bound by her feelings.
She reveals that some of her anxiety comes from living with the constant pressure of suffering and death. How is she supposed to keep singing with such raging emotions and anxieties? But she continues, “There’s nothing else that I can do except to open up my arms and give it all to you.” The identity of this “you” is ambiguous. But the song emerges from her anxieties, lifting her up and putting her down to the dancing refrain of “I am free.” She leans her head up against her anxiety. She becomes friends with her feelings. The actor symbolizing anxiety puts her arm around Florence. Florence is the mountain. She notices the anxiety, yet she’s free.
I think it’s a beautiful picture of the things we’ve discussed in this chapter. Where attention to the self and urges for control can be all-consuming, holy detachment invites attention to different concerns—namely, to those things that concern God. It requires a contemplative purgation, which leads to union. This union is perfect freedom, a receptivity to the world rather than an imposition of power upon it in an attempt to manipulate and manufacture the things we want. God transforms our wants. In such a contemplation we are, like Florence, free.
1. I use this example in an article on education and attention. See Sosler, “Attentional Arts and Beholding Beauty.”
2. Bell, Meaning of Blue, 84.
3. Boersma, Seeing God, 219. On the sacramental nature of the world, Boersma writes, “Christian contemplation, therefore, is a sacramental way of seeing: It means we approach creation and the Scriptures as filled with the presence of Christ” (Seeing God, 232).
4. Thompson, “To Inhabit the Earth.”
5. Wirzba, Agrarian Spirit, 115.
6. John of the Cross, “Maxim on Love, 88,” 674.
7. Garrigou-Lagrange, Three Ages of the Interior Life, 1:103–5.
8. The language of “paying attention,” which uses monetary terms, is interesting. It’s almost as if we owe certain things attention and we pay for it. Contemplation may cost us something.
9. As Thomas Keating has suggested, “the goal of contemplative prayer is not so much the emptiness of thoughts or conversation as the emptiness of self” (Keating, Intimacy with God, 125).
