Tempest in the Sanctuary

The Fury of the Clinging Soul

There is a fire in the early soul, and it is not yet holy. It burns hot and quick, like a lamp fed by cheap oil—flaring easily, dying just as fast. This fire is not the flame of divine love, but the flicker of self still clutching the sacred. And the saints, if you read them closely, warn us: the beginning of the spiritual life is not peace. It is restlessness. It is anger.

St. John of the Cross does not soften the truth. He speaks of beginners—those newly drawn into the orbit of prayer, those who have tasted sweetness in God—and how quickly they sour when the sweetness fades. “Because of the strong desire… for spiritual gratification,” he writes, “they usually have many imperfections of anger… they become peevish… and occasionally they are so unbearable that nobody can put up with them.”

It is a brutal mirror. But it is accurate.

The anger of the beginner is not always loud. It wears the robes of disappointment, the sigh of spiritual fatigue, the subtle turning away from a chapel that once thrilled the soul. It is the sharpness in the voice after morning prayer, the irritability that blooms like a rash after a week of “holy effort.” We light the candle of devotion and are furious when it flickers in the wind.

There is, too, the subtler fury—the kind John names with chilling precision: that “indiscreet zeal” that lashes out at the sins of others. The soul, drunk on early consolation, suddenly sees itself as guardian of virtue, savior of the monastery, corrector of the impure. It is the righteous rage of the convert, quick to preach and slow to listen, ready to denounce and reluctant to kneel. Teresa of Avila saw it, too, and warned her sisters gently: “God deliver us from sour-faced saints.”

It is the same anger that turns inward when, having failed to conquer our faults, we condemn ourselves with a severity that masquerades as virtue. “They want to become saints in a day,” John writes, “and the more resolves they make, the more they break, and the greater becomes their anger.” There is no humility in this impatience—only the ego, dressed in spiritual ambition, stomping its foot in God’s silent hallway.

And yet—this is not a condemnation. The anger, the zeal, the holy irritability—they are symptoms, not sins. The soul is still an infant, newly weaned from sweetness, crying out for the breast of consolation. It is not yet ready to eat the bread of dryness, to drink the wine of silence. It wails. It sulks. And God, with the patience of a mother who knows her child must learn to hunger rightly, does not always soothe.

This is the fire that must be tempered. Not extinguished—God does not kill desire—but purified. St. Isaac the Syrian wrote that “the knowledge of God is borne in tears,” and it is true that some of those tears come not from sorrow but from the frustration of loving badly.

We have all prayed with clenched fists. We have all promised heaven by morning and broken by nightfall. We have all walked away from the tabernacle disgusted not with God but with ourselves.

What heals this?

Time. Silence. Prayer. And the long, slow burning of the dark night.

Not punishment, but purgation. Not God’s wrath, but His hiddenness. For only when the soul is denied the pleasure of its own devotion can it begin to pray without self-interest. Only when it can sit in silence and feel nothing—and still return the next day—does it begin to love.

St. Gregory of Nyssa once said that “sin is a distortion of the good.” Anger, too, is a distortion—not of hatred, but of love still unrefined. The early soul loves poorly. But it loves. And that, God sees.

Perhaps this is why the mystics are so strangely tender with beginners. They do not flatter, but neither do they scorn. They remember. They know the soul must first lose its temper before it can lose itself.

So if you are in that place—if you kneel and feel nothing, if you snap at your children after prayer, if you are angry at your imperfection and ashamed of your anger—do not despair. You are not failing. You are simply on fire, and God has not yet begun to cool you with the waters of union.

But He will.

For the dark night always comes—not as punishment, but as mercy. It is the slow extinguishing of false fires, so that the true flame may one day burn. And when it does, it will not scorch or flicker. It will not flare in zeal or collapse in shame. It will burn steady, hidden, and holy.

It will be love.

And you will no longer be angry. Not because you have conquered yourself, but because you have forgotten yourself.

Then you will understand what it means to be meek—not mild, not weak, but fiercely gentle. A soul so emptied of its own ambition that it becomes a resting place for God.

And you will look back, perhaps with a smile, at the fire that once consumed you. And you will see that it was grace all along. A beginning, not a failure. A flicker of divine longing, learning how to become flame.

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