This entire year, I have sought to pursue God's call to welcome and practice more silence in my life, and this has included quieting my emotions. As someone who has a melancholic-phlegmatic spiritual temperament, and generally experiences life and others through intuition and feelings, this continues to be quite a serious undertaking of self-surrender, renunciation, and receptivity to God's invitation and grace to enter into each present moment with calm, equinimity and detachment.
The spiritual greats in the treasury of our Catholic faith discuss at length the importance of becoming detached, purified and healed from our passions. The Catechism of the Catholic Church recognizes that, “The passions are natural components of the human psyche; they form the passageway and ensure the connection between the life of the senses and the life of the mind” (CCC 1764).
It goes on to explain that they are neutral in nature and can contribute to either good acts and the exercise of virtue or perverted by vices, and thus are to be governed by reason. This points to the necessity that the movements of the senses, passions and appetites become purified and ordered towards the good. [See CCC 1768]
This is done by the Holy Spirit, who "accomplishes his work by mobolizing the whole being, with all its sorrows, fears and sadness, as is visible in the Lord's agony and passion. In Christ, human feelings are able to reach their consummation in charity and divine beatitude." [CCC 1769]
St. John of the Cross dedicates a large portion of his works, specifically in both The Ascent of Mount Carmel as well as The Dark Night of the Soul to the importance of this process of letting go of our natural as well as any spiritual or supernatural passions, which he broadly enumerates as joy, hope, fear, and sorrow. These are beautiful gifts that we experience in our humanity, but we often struggle with disorder and serving these as false idols. That is why the dark nights of both the senses and the very roots of our soul/spirit are necessary to reharmonize these so that we are not slaves to our feelings and sensory experiences, but instead all is ordered towards God Himself as the Source of everything in our lives.
The following prayer was written from the depths of my heart's desire and within my abject poverty to be fully purified in my affectivity, so that my passions can be rightly ordered and I can purely love God as the center of my life and love my neighbor as myself.
My Beloved Lord Jesus,
In Your Most Holy and Powerful Name, through the Immaculate Heart and Womb of Our Lady, I offer you all of my emotions and affectivity that are known and unknown to me. I recognize all of my emotions as your gifts to me as your daughter and in the workings of my feminine genius, but also the need for these interior movements to be purified. I therefore give you all of my attachments and disordered feelings, and ask that you burn them away in Your Most Sacred Heart, the furnace of Your Merciful Love. I surrender to you all of my senses and appetites, including the six universal emotions of anger, fear, joy, surprise, sadness, and disgust, and all of the ways that I uniquely experience and express them, try to control them and any ways that they uniquely manifest themselves as patterns in my life.
I freely give to you all the ways that I do not fully understand myself, my responses and feelings, nor their role in my sacred journey and relationship with others. I place down before the foot of the Cross, my blindness, deafness, and ignorance pertaining to all of these hidden ways that I act out of these emotions and ask for your grace and healing.
I ask that you purify any ways that I express my sentiments in a disordered manner, either in the extremes of numbing myself or in hyper-emotionalism. I ask for you to reveal and illuminate through the Holy Spirit the manner in which these passions adversely impact myself and others, and most importantly how they hinder and create blockages in my relationship with You. I also ask that you bring to light any ways that my emotions are an attempt to manipulate or control others, or to create false idols that replace your primacy in my life and I ask profound forgiveness to you for this through your Most Precious Blood and Holy Wounds, Lord Jesus.
I pray that I may turn solely and only to You to be heard, seen, known and understood. May I be humble, hidden and balanced in my emotions, by avoiding over-sensitivity, emotional intoxication, dissociation and/or numbing. May I be attuned to Your Divine Presence, always listening for Your voice as the Good Shepherd. May I also be aware of the ways that you speak to me in the voice of conscience, and the subtle ways that my body provides me with signals regarding how I am responding in a given situation to people, places, and sitations. May I take care to listen deeply to my sacred story and to the ways that you are increasing self-knowledge and awareness within me so that I may better know and honor myself, to in turn better know and love You and all those you place upon my path. In doing so, may I receive the gifts of wisdom, understanding and knowledge, to better recognize any interior responses that are connected with my memories, be they either good or bad; as well as understand and integrate my attachment style, my spiritual temperament, and sacred journey with your grace.
Abba, Heavenly Father, I humbly ask that within my interior movements and passions, that I may recognize my inner voice as Your daughter, and be assured that You know me and call me by name and knit me together in my mother's womb. May I bring myself to You when I am experiencing distress or feelings of profound sadness, anger, abandonment, powerlessness, rejection or any other wound. May I receive You, Jesus, as my Savior and Redeemer, as my Divine Bridegroom, my Brother and my Friend by Whose stripes I am healed. May I always remember that you are Emanuel, God With us, and that you perpetually abide with me, most especially through the Eucharist, the Living Bread come down from heaven, to strengthen me and to slake my thirst. Holy Spirit, may I welcome you as my Divine Counselor, Consoler and Architect, and as the Sweet Guest of my soul, who leads and guides me on my journey back home to the Father. May I receive the gifts and fruits you wish to give me in your perfect pace, space, and place, and may I trust and abandon myself to the path you are calling me to follow without complaint.
May I receive the tender love, mercy and maternal protection of Mama Mary, who always accompanies me along with St. Joseph, her most chaste spouse. May I seek to imitate the equinimity of Our Lady of Sorrows, the Immaculata and Burning Bush standing at the foot of the Cross, who models pure affectivity. May I abandon myself to her as my Celestial Mother and Queen, Mediatrix and Intercessor of all graces, in complete confidence that she may mold and shape me in order to fully surrender and heal my emotions. I pray this through the intercession of St. John of the Cross, St. Augustine, and St. Therese of the Child Jesus and Holy Face for the glory of the Most Holy Trinity. Amen.
