We continue this week with a short selection from the book of Fr Robert Hughes Benson, "The Friendship of Christ": 

The soul has become "disillusioned," first with the frame of the picture, and next with the picture itself, before she has reached the original. She now has learned the last lesson of all, and become disillusioned with herself. 

And yet, if the soul only knew it, now is the very moment to which all the preceding stages have led. Now is the very instant in which the beloved soul, having learnt her last lesson of the Purgative Way, is fit to "cast herself into the sea"{John 21:7} to come to Jesus. And this she will do, if she has learnt her lesson well, and is conscious that it is exactly because she is nothing in herself, and because she knows it, that Christ can be her all. No longer can pride, whether whole or wounded, keep her from Him, for her pride at last is not wounded, but dead. . . . 

The way of the spiritual path is strewn with the wrecks of souls that might have been friends of Christ. This one faltered, because Christ put off his ornaments; this one because Christ did not allow her to think that His graces were Himself; a third because wounded pride still writhed, and bade her be true to her own shame rather than to His glory. All these stages and processes are known; every spiritual writer that has ever lived has treated of them over and over again from this standpoint or from that. But the end and lesson of them all is the same -- that Christ purges His friends of all that is not of Him; that He leaves them nothing of themselves, in order that He may be wholly theirs; for no soul can learn the strength and the love of God, until she has cast her whole weight upon Him.

​But this process is in itself little more than negative. There must follow, if the soul is to make progress, a gradual reclothing of her with the graces in which Christ desires to see her. She has put off the "old man"; she must now put on "the new." To this stage spiritual writers give the name of Illumination; and it will be convenient, in treating of it, to follow the same lines as those which have been followed in the treatment of the preceding stage; and to give what may be called specimen examples of the effects of grace, parallel to those by which the Purgative Way has been illustrated.

We continue this week with a short selection from the book of Fr Robert Hughes Benson, "The Friendship of Christ"

The soul begins then in this stage to learn her own ignorance and her own sin, and to learn her amazing self-centredness and complacency. Up to now she has thought to possess Christ, to hold Him as a lover and a friend, to grasp Him and to keep Him. Her previous mistakes came from this very thing; now she has to learn that not only must she relinquish all that is not Christ, but she must relinquish Christ -- leave, that is to say, her energetic hold on Him, and be content, instead, to be altogether held and supported by Him. So long as she has a shred of self left she will seek to make the friendship mutual, to give, at least, a fraction of what she receives. Now she faces the fact that Christ must do all, that she can do nothing without Him, that she has no power at all except what He gives her. What has been wrong with her up to now, she begins to see, is not so much that she has done or not done this or that, but simply that she has been herself all along, that she has sought to possess, not to be possessed . . . that that self has been hateful because it has not been altogether lost in Christ. She has been endeavouring to cure the symptoms of her disease, but she has not touched the disease with one finger. She sees for the first time that there is no good in herself apart from Christ; that He must be all, and she nothing. 

Now if a soul has come so far as this, it is extremely rare that sheer pride should be her ruin. The very knowledge of herself that she has gained is an effectual cure of any further real complacency; for she has seen plainly, at any rate for the time being, how utterly worthless she is. Yet there are other dangers that face her, and of these one at least may be pride under the very subtle disguise of extravagant humility. "Since I am so worthless," she may be tempted to say, "I had better never again attempt those high heights and those aspirations after friendship with my God. Let me give up, once and for all, my dreams of perfection, and my hopes of actual union with my Lord. I must sink back again to the common level, content if I can keep myself just tolerable in His sight. I must take my place again in the ordinary paths, and no longer seek an intimacy with Christ of which I am evidently unworthy."

Or her self-knowledge may take the form of despair; and it is a burden which before now has broken down even the mental faculties themselves. "I have forfeited," cries a soul such as this -- a soul which has lost the excuse of pride, but yet clings to its substance -- "I have forfeited the Friendship of Christ once and for all. It is impossible that I who have tasted of the heaveniy gift should be renewed again unto repentance. He chose me, and I failed Him. He loved me, and I have loved myself only. Therefore let me go far off from His Presence. . . . Depart from me; for I am a sinful man, O Lord." 

​And yet, if the soul only knew it, now is the very moment to which all the preceding stages have led.