When the Baptismal Life Has Not Yet Become Fully Operative
Jean Khoury
Summary: There is a pastoral reality that deserves much more attention in the Church: the person who is not a bad Catholic, but a good one. Such a person may be honest, upright, generous, faithful to his duties, regular at Mass, committed to prayer, obedient to the commandments and sincerely concerned to live according to the Gospel. There may be little that one can legitimately fault in the person’s external behaviour. Yet, at the same time, that person may not have entered into the profound personal relationship with Christ and the Holy Spirit which constitutes the deepest dynamism of Christian life.
This situation should not be confused with the absence of grace, nor with mortal sin, nor with the technical theological category of “dead faith”. The word “dormant” can serve here as a spiritual and pastoral description. The supernatural life has been planted by God; the Holy Spirit is present; Christ is not absent; grace is continually offered. Yet the supernatural dynamism of this life may remain largely unawakened and insufficiently operative in the person’s conscious existence. The problem is not principally on God’s side. God knocks; the human person has not yet learned how to open.
The distinction is therefore not simply between a bad Catholic and a good Catholic. It can be between a good Catholic who lives principally from his own reason, will, moral effort and acquired habits, and a Christian who increasingly lives from Christ and under the particular action of the Holy Spirit. St Teresa of Avila’s description of the third mansions offers a remarkable spiritual-theological lens through which to examine this reality. Her third-mansion Christian is serious, ordered and virtuous, yet has not necessarily crossed into the more explicitly supernatural mode of prayer and divine action that she begins to describe from the fourth mansions onwards.
The pastoral consequence is profound. The Church cannot be satisfied merely with producing morally respectable Christians. Formation must teach Christians not only what to believe and how to behave, but how to open themselves to Christ, how to ask, seek and knock, how to surrender themselves to God, how to recognise the action of grace, and how to correspond to the Holy Spirit. Christian formation must help the seed of baptismal life break open, take root, grow and finally bear fruit.
Introduction: The Catholic Who Seems to Need Nothing
There is a Christian who presents no obvious pastoral problem. He is honest. He is upright. He is kind. He is generous. He fulfils his responsibilities. He goes to Mass. He observes the commandments. He tries to pray. He respects the Church. He may defend the Catholic faith intellectually, study theology, practise apologetics and sincerely regard himself as a committed Catholic. If he is compared with the surrounding culture, his life may appear exemplary. What, then, is the problem?
The answer is uncomfortable precisely because there may be no obvious moral fault to identify. The person may not be living in grave sin. He may genuinely possess virtue. He may be sincerely committed to God. Yet it remains possible that his Christian life is operating largely within the horizon of his own reason, will, moral effort and religious habits, without the profound personal interaction with Christ and the Holy Spirit that should progressively become the principle of his existence.
This is not an accusation against such people. It is a pastoral diagnosis of a possibility within Christian life. Indeed, it is precisely because the person may be good that the situation can remain hidden. A person who is obviously sinful knows that something is wrong. A person who is morally serious may have no reason to suspect that there is a deeper dimension of Christian existence which he has not yet discovered.
The question therefore becomes much more radical than, “Is this person behaving well?” It becomes: Who is actually the principle of this person’s life? Is he merely living according to what he understands Christianity to require, or has he learned to live from Christ?
Pope Benedict XVI gave the fundamental Christian principle in memorable terms: “Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person.” He immediately adds that this encounter gives life “a new horizon and a decisive direction”. For Benedict, therefore, Christianity cannot be reduced to ethics existing alongside faith. Faith, worship and ethos belong together because they take shape in the encounter with God’s love.
This provides the starting point for examining the phenomenon of the “good Catholic” whose supernatural life may nevertheless remain largely dormant.
1. The Good Catholic Is Not the Bad Catholic
The first clarification is essential. We are not describing a person who has rejected Christ. Nor are we necessarily describing someone in mortal sin. Nor are we saying that the person’s moral goodness is unreal. A person can possess genuine natural virtue. Aristotle’s analysis of moral virtue already shows that human beings can acquire habits of justice, temperance, courage, generosity and self-control through reason, education, repetition and disciplined action. Christian revelation does not abolish this natural moral order. The Ten Commandments likewise provide an objective moral structure that can be understood and, to a considerable degree, observed through human reason and will. Indeed, Scripture itself gives examples of people described as righteous in a genuine sense before God. Zechariah and Elizabeth are described as “righteous before God” and as walking blamelessly in the commandments (Luke 1:6). Such passages must not be reduced to “mere natural morality”. The biblical notion of righteousness is real. Nevertheless, the New Covenant introduces a deeper reality. The Christian is not merely called to observe a divine moral law from outside. Through Christ and the Holy Spirit, the person is introduced into divine life. The Catechism describes grace as “a participation in the life of God” and says that through Baptism the Christian participates in the grace of Christ and receives “the life of the Spirit”. Sanctifying grace is the gratuitous gift of God’s own life, infused by the Holy Spirit, while actual graces refer to God’s interventions in the course of conversion and sanctification. Thus, external conformity to Christian morality cannot by itself be the ultimate criterion of spiritual maturity. The question is not merely whether the person does what Christ commands. The question is whether the person has progressively come to live with Christ, in Christ and from Christ.
2. The Old Man Can Be Morally Respectable
This is where the Pauline distinction between the old and new man becomes important. The “old man” should not be identified simply with obviously immoral behaviour. Paul can speak of the old self as a mode of existence centred upon the former life, while the new life is participation in Christ. Romans 6 connects baptism directly with Christ’s death and Resurrection: the Christian is buried with Christ so as to “live in newness of life”, and the “old self” is crucified with Him. Consequently, the old man can become remarkably respectable. He can learn good manners. He can be honest. He can become disciplined. He can acquire natural virtues. He can attend Mass. He can study theology. He can defend the faith. He can fulfil obligations. He can even perform many genuinely good actions. None of this is bad. The problem is deeper. The question is whether the person has passed from merely organising his life according to Christian principles to allowing Christ to become the living principle of that life. St. Paul expresses the latter reality with extraordinary simplicity: “Christ lives in me” (Gal 2:20). He does not merely say that he believes propositions about Christ. His claim is existential: his old manner of living has been transformed by Christ’s life within him. Likewise, 2 Corinthians 5:15 describes the purpose of Christ’s death and Resurrection in terms of those who “might no longer live for themselves but for him”. The next verse says that anyone who is in Christ is “a new creation”. The Christian vocation is therefore not simply to become a better version of the old man. It is to become a new creation.
3. The Paradox of Morality
This produces a paradox. Morality is necessary, but morality is not the whole of Christian life. A person can be morally upright without having entered deeply into personal communion with Christ. Conversely, a person can have a profoundly sinful past and nevertheless be seized by grace and radically converted. St Paul is an extraordinary example. Saul possessed religious conviction, zeal and an intense attachment to the Law, yet he persecuted the followers of Christ. His encounter with the risen Jesus did not merely add another item to his existing religious framework. It shattered his existing horizon and reorganised his whole existence around Christ.
The Book of Acts describes the dramatic event on the road to Damascus: the persecutor becomes the one who asks, “Lord, what do you want me to do?” The decisive movement is not simply moral improvement. It is encounter, surrender and a new obedience.
The conversion narratives of the Desert Fathers similarly preserve stories of people whose lives had contained serious sin, violence, theft or disorder, followed by an extraordinary intervention of grace and radical conversion. Such accounts do not make sin irrelevant. They demonstrate something else: God’s grace is not restricted to people who have already made themselves morally worthy of being touched by Him. This means that moral respectability is neither a substitute for grace nor a guarantee of spiritual maturity. The decisive question is whether the person has encountered and received the divine initiative.
4. What Does “Your Faith Is Vain” Mean?
This brings us to one of the most striking Pauline texts in the whole argument. In 1 Corinthians 15 Paul is discussing the Resurrection of the dead. His argument seems at one point to shift unexpectedly from the future resurrection of believers to their present spiritual condition: “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is vain; you are still in your sins” (1 Cor 15:17). The USCCB’s current lectionary preserves the phrase “your faith is vain” and immediately connects it with being “still in your sins”. Strictly speaking, “dormant” is not the lexical meaning of Paul’s word mataia. Paul means that faith would be futile, vain or without effect if Christ were not risen. The Resurrection is therefore not an optional confirmation added to Christianity. Without it, preaching collapses, faith collapses and the Christian remains in sin.
But this Pauline sentence opens a fruitful spiritual-theological question: what happens when the Resurrection of Christ is objectively true, baptism has actually communicated divine life, faith has genuinely been received, and yet the supernatural dynamism of that life has not become sufficiently operative in the person?
Here the word “dormant” becomes useful as a pastoral and spiritual-formation term. It does not mean “dead” in the technical theological sense. It does not mean that the person possesses no faith. It does not mean that the Holy Spirit has abandoned the person. It does not mean that Baptism has failed. It means that the supernatural life received from God has not yet become sufficiently awakened, operative and fruitful in the person’s lived relationship with Christ.
This distinction is important because the tradition has a precise vocabulary concerning faith. The distinction between fides informis and fides formata should not simply be replaced by the word “dormant”. Rather, “dormant” describes a pastoral phenomenon that requires more precise theological analysis. The word is useful because a dormant seed is not a dead seed.
5. Baptism: Resurrection Already Begun
The New Testament gives us a powerful foundation for this understanding. Baptism is not merely a ceremony expressing membership in the Church. Paul says that Christians were “buried with him through baptism” and “raised with him” through faith in God’s power. Romans 6 makes the same point: baptism unites the Christian with Christ’s death so that the Christian may “live in newness of life”. The Resurrection is therefore not merely something Christians await at the end of time. The future bodily Resurrection is anticipated and participated in now through the new life in Christ. Colossians goes even further: the believer has already been raised with Christ in baptism, and Paul therefore exhorts Christians to live from this new reality.
Romans 8 provides perhaps the most complete synthesis. Paul speaks of the Spirit dwelling in Christians, of life according to the Spirit, of the Spirit giving life, and ultimately of the same Spirit who raised Jesus giving life to mortal bodies. The Christian possesses already the “firstfruits of the Spirit”, while awaiting the final redemption of the body. There is therefore a profound connection: Christ’s Resurrection → baptism → reception of the Spirit → new life → transformation → future bodily resurrection.
Christian existence is an already-begun participation in the Resurrection. The pastoral tragedy we are examining occurs when this objectively given life remains insufficiently operative in the person’s actual existence.
6. The Holy Spirit Is Not Absent
This distinction must be stated with absolute precision. When one speaks in pastoral language of the Holy Spirit being “absent”, one must not mean that the Holy Spirit has disappeared, withdrawn from the world or ceased to dwell in a Christian who possesses sanctifying grace. The more precise meaning is operational.
The Spirit is not absent from the person in His objective presence; rather, His particular action may be insufficiently operative in the person’s present interior activity because the person has not sufficiently received or corresponded to that action.
The Catechism provides an excellent theological framework. Sanctifying grace is a stable supernatural disposition, enabling the person “to live with God, to act by his love”. It is distinguished from actual graces, which refer to God’s interventions in conversion and sanctification. Moreover, the Catechism insists that even the preparation of a person for receiving grace is itself already the work of grace. God precedes the human response. This is crucial.
The human person does not activate God as though God were an inert force waiting for the correct human mechanism. God always has the initiative. Grace precedes, prepares and enables the response.
Yet the human response is real. The Catechism says that when God touches the human heart through the illumination of the Holy Spirit, the person is not inactive: he can reject or receive that inspiration. Without grace he cannot move himself towards divine justice, but with grace his freedom is genuinely engaged. Thus there is a divine initiative and a human correspondence. The person is not generating the supernatural life. He is learning to receive it.
7. General Help and Particular Help
This allows the distinction we have been developing between what may be called a general help of grace and a more particular divine motion. The general help does not mean merely natural ability. It is grace. It enables, disposes, attracts and prepares the person for a deeper response. Even the desire to seek God is already situated within the mystery of grace. The particular help refers to a more direct divine motion by which the Holy Spirit touches, awakens, illumines, draws and moves the person in a particular way. These should not be imagined as two quantities of divine electricity, as though one possessed ten units of grace and another possessed a hundred. Grace is not a measurable substance. The distinction concerns the mode of divine assistance and the person’s reception and correspondence.
This explains the paradox: God may be offering Himself while the person remains largely closed to the fuller operation of what He is offering. God can give Himself fully while the human person receives Him imperfectly. Matthew 7 gives the corresponding language of human response: “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.” Jesus then assures His disciples that the Father gives good things to those who ask. The Christian therefore has to learn how to ask. Not merely to ask for favours. Not merely to ask for the solution to problems. But ultimately to ask for God Himself. The profound prayer is: “Jesus, I want You. I give You my life. What do You want from me?” This is an act of surrender, not merely petition.
The Holy Spirit in Spiritual Life, Articles
The Particular Help in St Thomas Aquinas
The Particular Help of the Grace of God in St Teresa of Avila
8. “I Stand at the Door and Knock”
The image of the door is therefore extraordinarily powerful. Christ says in Revelation 3:20: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock.” He does not say, “I have gone away.” He does not say, “I have abandoned you.” He knocks. The human person must hear and open. The immediate context is the message to the Church of Laodicea, so this verse should not be detached from that ecclesial setting and turned into a simplistic formula about conversion. Yet its spiritual imagery is profoundly consonant with the reality under discussion: Christ calls for a deeper reception and communion. The tragedy is therefore not divine absence. The tragedy is human non-reception. Christ is not waiting because He lacks the desire to enter. He is waiting because God has chosen to involve human freedom in the reception of His grace. The Church therefore has to teach people how to open the door.
9. Teresa of Avila and the Third Mansions
This is where St Teresa of Avila provides an extraordinary spiritual-theological description. The third mansions are not populated by wicked people. Teresa describes people who, by God’s mercy, have made considerable progress. They are serious, disciplined and ordered. She can speak of them as having persevered through many struggles and reached a relatively secure stage of the spiritual journey. Indeed, Teresa’s description makes the pastoral paradox more striking because these people may appear to have everything in order.
Yet Teresa does not simply congratulate them and stop. She wants them to progress. She observes that many souls can live for years “apparently, a regular and well-ordered life” while still remaining burdened by the limitations of their present mode of existence. She describes the third mansions as a stage in which self-renunciation, humility and detachment remain essential, and she explicitly contrasts the consolations of the third mansions with the more distinctive divine consolations described in the fourth.
Then comes the extraordinary transition. At the beginning of her treatment of the fourth mansions, Teresa says that “henceforth they begin to be supernatural”, and she asks the Holy Spirit to help her speak about what she is going to describe.
This must be interpreted carefully. Teresa is not saying that the first three mansions are devoid of supernatural grace. That would contradict the whole architecture of Christian spiritual life. Rather, she is distinguishing modes and degrees of divine action, particularly the movement from a more active mode of prayer and ascetical cooperation towards more explicitly gratuitous and infused divine action.
This is exactly why the third-mansion Christian is so important for pastoral theology. He or she may genuinely be Christian, genuinely be in grace, genuinely possess virtue and genuinely love God. But there remains an enormous horizon of development. The danger is not wickedness. The danger is satisfaction with an incomplete horizon of Christian existence.
10. Reason as Horizon
Teresa’s insight can be expressed through the language we have been developing: in the earlier stage, reason remains largely the horizon within which the person operates. There is nothing wrong with reason. Christianity does not ask us to abandon reason. Grace does not destroy nature; it heals, elevates and perfects it. The problem arises when reason, acquired virtue, willpower and religious discipline become the practical horizon beyond which the person does not know how to go. The person can know what is right and decide to do it. He can understand Christian doctrine and defend it. He can organise his prayer. He can fulfil his obligations.
But divine love has not yet sufficiently taken him beyond this mode of operation. Teresa’s movement into the fourth mansions therefore marks not the abandonment of reason but the emergence of a more directly gratuitous divine action that reason cannot produce by itself. This is why she speaks of supernatural realities that are difficult to describe. The person is entering a mode of receiving that cannot simply be generated by effort.
11. The Wound of Love
St. Teresa’s later description of the “wound of love” gives another dimension to the same reality (the expression is not hers, it is of St. John of the Cross, see Spiritual Canticle, first stanza). She describes God as awakening an increased longing for Him through delicate operations that the soul itself may not even fully discern. This resonates profoundly with St. John of the Cross’s language of the wound of love: divine love touches the soul and awakens within it a new movement towards God. The image is therefore not one of the person manufacturing spiritual life. It is God touching the person. This is the point at which the “shell” begins to break. The person who had been satisfied with knowing about God begins to hunger for God Himself. The person who had been doing things for God begins to ask what God wants to do in him. The person who had lived according to Christian principles begins to desire that Christ Himself become the principle of his life. The person becomes wounded by love and begins to seek the One who has wounded him.
12. The Seed
The most fruitful image for this entire reality may be the seed. A seed can contain life without yet manifesting the plant. It can remain dormant under the soil. Under suitable conditions, something changes: the seed opens, roots develop, the shoot emerges, and what was hidden becomes visible. This is an extraordinarily apt image for baptismal life. The seed is not dead. The life is there. The potential for growth is there. The problem is that the seed has not yet broken open.
Likewise, the Christian may possess the supernatural gifts given through Baptism, yet the interior dynamism of those gifts may remain insufficiently awakened in the person’s lived experience.
The image should not be pushed biologically or theologically beyond its limits. Grace is not a biological substance, and the Christian life is not mechanically determined by environmental conditions. But the analogy beautifully expresses the distinction between possession of life and manifestation of life.
The Church plants the seed through Baptism. Catechesis teaches the person what the seed is. Moral formation teaches him how to protect his life from destructive behaviour. But spiritual formation must also teach him how to allow the seed to grow. This is why morality cannot be the whole criterion. The shell can remain intact while everything inside the seed is alive.
13. From External Morality to Interior Transformation
This is precisely where Pope Benedict XVI’s understanding of Christianity becomes important. In Deus Caritas Est, Benedict insists that Christian faith is fundamentally an encounter with a Person. He also explains that Christian love is not merely a command imposed from outside but an experience of God’s love received within and then communicated outwardly. This is the difference between morality as an external code and Christian morality as the fruit of divine life. There is nothing wrong with obeying the commandments. The commandments remain indispensable. But the Christian life cannot terminate there.
The Decalogue is fulfilled in Christ. Benedict explicitly said that the moral law is not abolished by the encounter with Christ but “is led to this fullness”. He describes Christ as the living and personal synthesis of perfect freedom in total obedience to God’s will. Thus the movement is not: morality → discarded in favour of experience. It is: morality → fulfilled, interiorised and transformed by love received from Christ. The person does not become less moral by entering more deeply into supernatural life. He becomes capable of a deeper morality because his action increasingly proceeds from charity. This is why Paul says that in Christ Jesus what counts is “faith working through love” (Gal 5:6). Faith is not simply an intellectual assent to propositions. It is ordered towards a life of charity.
14. Faith as Dormant Rather Than Dead
The preference for “dormant” therefore has a precise purpose. “Dead” is a traditional theological term with established meanings, especially in relation to faith without charity. It should not simply be discarded. But “dormant” describes a different pastoral concern. A dormant seed is alive. A dormant life has not ceased to exist. A dormant capacity has not been destroyed. The supernatural life given by God can therefore be spoken of, in a pastoral and formative sense, as dormant when it has not yet become sufficiently operative and fruitful in the person’s conscious relationship with God. This also prevents us from making a false binary between “Christian” and “not Christian”. The person may genuinely belong to Christ and yet have scarcely begun to discover what belonging to Christ means. The person may possess faith and yet have learned little about how faith is to become a living relationship. The person may possess grace and yet cooperate very imperfectly with its movement. The person may have the Holy Spirit dwelling within and yet have learned very little about being led by the Spirit. Romans 8 provides the vocabulary for the deeper reality: Christians are called to live according to the Spirit, to be led by the Spirit, and to put to death the deeds of the body “by the Spirit”.
15. The Tragedy of the Good Catholic
This is why the pastoral situation can be described as tragic without condemning the people involved. The bad Catholic knows, at least sometimes, that something is wrong. The good Catholic may have no such alarm. He may think: “I go to Mass. I pray. I am faithful. I do not commit serious sins. I try to be generous. I believe the Church is true. What more is there?” And the answer is: Christ Himself. Not another doctrine instead of doctrine. Not another morality instead of morality. Not another Church instead of the Church. But the living Christ encountered, received, loved, followed and increasingly allowed to act within the person through the Holy Spirit. The danger is that the person may become satisfied with the shell. He may know the Catholic religion without discovering the depths of Catholic life. He may defend the truth without allowing the Truth to possess him. He may work for God without learning to receive God. He may have a Christian ethic without having allowed Christian life to reach the deepest roots of his being. This is why Benedict’s insistence that Christianity begins in encounter is so important.
16. Saul: The Man Who Thought He Could See
The story of Saul provides an extraordinary biblical paradigm. Saul was not indifferent to God. He was zealous for God. He knew Scripture. He had a powerful religious identity. Yet he was persecuting Christ. Then Christ intervened. Saul was struck down and blinded. The man who thought he saw suddenly could not see. This makes the Damascus event a powerful image of spiritual awakening. The first movement towards deeper sight may be the discovery that one’s previous sight was incomplete.
This does not mean that every Christian requires a dramatic Damascus experience. God can awaken a person through Scripture, prayer, beauty, suffering, failure, illness, friendship, retreat, intellectual discovery, the witness of a saint, a pastoral encounter or a quiet interior grace. God is sovereign in the means He uses. The Church cannot manufacture a Damascus road. But she can teach people to recognise that they are on the road. She can tell them that there is more. She can teach them how to listen. She can teach them how to ask. She can teach them how to surrender. She can teach them how to correspond to grace.
17. God Can Use Anything to Awaken the Person
This is one reason suffering can sometimes become spiritually decisive. A person may be shaken by failure. A career may collapse. A relationship may break. Illness may strip away self-sufficiency. Bereavement may expose the limits of human control. A retreat may suddenly open the Scriptures. A word from another person may penetrate the heart. A period of prayer may produce an unexpected awakening. None of these things automatically produces conversion. Suffering is not itself grace in a simplistic sense. But God can use every circumstance as an occasion for grace. The Catechism’s language is important here: actual graces are God’s interventions in the course of conversion and sanctification, while even the preparation for receiving grace is already itself a work of grace. The question for the person is therefore not simply, “Why is this happening to me?” It can become: “What is God asking of me through this?” That question begins to move the person from merely enduring circumstances to discerning divine action.
18. The Church’s Pastoral Responsibility
This leads to the central pastoral question. If this reality exists, what responsibility does the Church have? The Church cannot assume that catechesis, sacramental practice and moral instruction automatically produce mature spiritual life. They are indispensable, but they are not sufficient as the whole of formation. A person can know the Creed without knowing how to live from Christ. A person can know the commandments without knowing how to discern the movements of grace. A person can attend Mass without learning how to enter into a personal relationship with the Lord. A person can pray without understanding how to receive God’s action in prayer. A person can defend the faith without having surrendered himself entirely to the One in whom he believes.
This is why spiritual formation is not an optional refinement for a small group of unusually devout Catholics. The Second Vatican Council’s teaching, echoed in the Catechism, is that all Christians are called to the fullness of Christian life and the perfection of charity. The Catechism explicitly states: “All Christians … are called to the fullness of Christian life and to the perfection of charity.” The Church therefore has to form people not only in Christian morality but in Christian spirituality. Not merely in Christian doctrine but in Christian life. Not merely in knowing about God but in knowing God.
19. Theoretical and Theological Consequences
The first theological consequence is that Christian formation must distinguish between objective possession of supernatural life and subjective operationalisation of that life. Baptism really communicates grace. The Holy Spirit really gives divine life. Faith is really given. But the fruitfulness of this life involves human freedom and cooperation. The Catechism explicitly describes justification as establishing cooperation between God’s grace and human freedom. The second consequence is that grace must never be conceived as a substitute for freedom. God initiates, precedes, prepares and moves, but the person is genuinely called to respond. The third is that the absence of obvious grave sin cannot be used as the sole criterion of spiritual health. Moral goodness remains essential, but the Christian vocation exceeds the avoidance of serious sin. The fourth is that the traditional distinction between sanctifying grace and actual grace becomes pastorally significant. The Christian possesses a stable participation in divine life through sanctifying grace, while God continually acts through actual graces to bring that life towards fuller development. The fifth is that “dormant” should be used as a carefully defined pastoral term, not as a replacement for the Church’s theological vocabulary concerning grace, faith, charity and sin. The sixth is that the supernatural life should not be reduced to extraordinary mystical phenomena. The awakening of the supernatural life does not require visions, locutions, ecstasies or other extraordinary experiences. Teresa herself warns against seeking such phenomena and insists that the essential issue is love and conformity to God’s will. The seventh is that Teresa’s mansions should be used as a map of spiritual development, not as a rigid classification of every Catholic. Her third-mansion Christian is not “not Christian”. Rather, Teresa provides a phenomenology of a genuinely Christian life that remains capable of profound development.
20. Practical Consequences for Pastors and Formators
Pastoral ministry therefore needs to change its questions. Instead of asking only, “Does this person attend Mass?” we should eventually be able to ask, “Who is Christ for this person?” Instead of asking only, “Does this person know the commandments?” we should ask, “Does this person know how to seek and receive God’s will?” Instead of asking only, “Does this person pray?” we should ask, “Has this person learned how to listen to God in prayer?” Instead of asking only, “Is this person morally upright?” we should ask, “Is this person increasingly living from charity?” Instead of asking only, “Does this person believe?” we should ask, with great pastoral delicacy, “Is faith becoming a living relationship with Christ?” The goal is not psychological introspection or a demand that everyone report extraordinary experiences. The goal is to teach people the objective Christian pathway: prayer, surrender, Scripture, sacramental life, obedience, purification, discernment, charity and correspondence with grace. The person needs to be taught that asking God for Himself is legitimate. He needs to be taught that “Ask … seek … knock” is not decorative language. He needs to be taught that Christian prayer is not merely the presentation of a list of needs. He needs to be taught to say: “Lord, here I am. I belong to You. What do You want from me?” That is where spiritual formation begins to become genuinely transformative.
21. The Role of Scripture
Scripture itself constantly points beyond external observance towards interior transformation. Jesus says that whoever hears His word and believes “has passed from death to life” (John 5:24). Paul says that through baptism we have entered “newness of life” (Romans 6:4). He says that if anyone is in Christ, he is “a new creation” (2 Corinthians 5:17). He says that Christ lives in him (Galatians 2:20). He says that faith must work through love (Galatians 5:6). He says that those who are led by the Spirit are children of God (Romans 8:14). He says that the Spirit dwelling in believers is already the firstfruits of what is to come (Romans 8:23). John says that we know that we have passed from death to life because we love the brethren (1 John 3:14). Christ says: “Ask … seek … knock” (Matthew 7:7). Christ says: “I stand at the door and knock” (Revelation 3:20). The biblical picture is therefore remarkably coherent. Christianity is not simply a moral code imposed upon the exterior of human existence. It is the reception of divine life and the progressive transformation of the human person from within.
22. From Seed to Fruit
The final criterion is fruit. A seed that remains in the soil forever without opening has not yet manifested what it contains. The Christian life is likewise ordered towards fruitfulness. Jesus speaks repeatedly of bearing fruit. The branches are to remain in the vine so that they may bear fruit (John 15). Paul speaks of the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22–23). The Christian life is meant to become visible in love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. The fruit is therefore not simply external morality. It is morality transformed by charity. It is action proceeding from communion. It is service flowing from love. It is prayer flowing from relationship. It is obedience flowing from surrender. It is mission flowing from union with Christ. It is the human person becoming increasingly transparent to the life of Christ within him. The seed becomes the plant. The plant bears fruit. And the fruit is ultimately the manifestation of the life that God planted.
23. What This Means for Christian Formation
Christian formation therefore needs to recover a central question that can easily be obscured by the legitimate demands of catechesis, sacramental preparation, moral instruction and ecclesial practice: How does a person actually begin to live from Christ? The answer cannot be merely theoretical. The person must be introduced into prayer. He must learn to listen. He must learn Scripture not simply as information but as the living Word through which God addresses him. He must learn surrender. He must learn discernment. He must learn how grace operates. He must learn the difference between his own psychological activity and the action of God. He must learn how to respond to particular divine invitations. He must learn perseverance. He must learn purification. He must learn charity. And he must gradually discover that the Christian life is not principally something he manufactures. It is something he receives, cooperates with and allows God to bring to completion.
This is why the Church needs spiritual formation in the strict sense. Catechesis tells us what the faith is. Moral theology tells us what is good and evil. Liturgy gives us sacramental participation in Christ’s worship. But spiritual theology teaches us how the life of grace develops in the concrete person. These dimensions must never be separated, but neither should one be confused with another.
Conclusion: The Door, the Seed and the Life Within
The tragedy we have been examining is therefore not primarily the tragedy of the bad Catholic. It is the tragedy of the good Catholic who has not yet discovered the fullness of what being Christian means. He may be honest. He may be kind. He may be generous. He may be faithful. He may go to Mass. He may pray. He may know the commandments. He may defend the Church. He may sincerely believe that he is living a good Christian life. And all of that may be genuinely good. But there may still be something missing: the deep personal interaction with Christ through which the Holy Spirit becomes increasingly operative as the living principle of his existence. The problem is not necessarily that the seed is dead. The seed is there. The life is there. The Holy Spirit is there. Grace is there. Christ is there. God is knocking. But the shell has not yet broken. The person has not yet learned how to open. This is why the Church’s task is so serious. She cannot merely teach people to protect the shell. She must teach them how to let the life within the seed unfold. She must tell the Christian that there is more: more than external observance, more than moral respectability, more than religious habit, more than intellectual conviction, more than apologetics, more than knowing about Christ. There is Christ Himself. And He is not far away. He is not waiting for us to become worthy enough before He approaches. He is already calling. Grace has already preceded us. The Holy Spirit is already at work. The Christian’s task is to learn to recognise, receive and correspond. The decisive movement is therefore not from “bad” to “good” alone. It is from good according to human effort to good transformed by divine life; from religious observance to personal communion; from knowing about Christ to living from Christ; from the old man to the new; from the seed hidden in the soil to the plant that bears fruit. This is why the Church must dare to say to the good Catholic: Do not stop here. There is more. Do not be satisfied merely because you are behaving well. Do not mistake moral respectability for the fullness of Christian life. Do not imagine that because you know the faith you have exhausted its reality. Do not think that because you pray you have learned how to receive God in prayer. Do not confuse the shell with the seed. Christ is calling you. The Holy Spirit is inviting you. Grace is preceding you. The door is before you.
Open it.
And then the life that God has already planted can begin to unfold.
Bibliography and Primary References
The Holy Bible: particularly 1 Corinthians 15; Romans 6 and 8; Galatians 2 and 5; 2 Corinthians 5; Colossians 2–3; John 5 and 15; Matthew 7; Revelation 3; Luke 1; Acts 9; and 1 John 3.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church, especially §§153–155 on faith, §§1987–1995 on justification and the interior life, §§1996–2005 on grace, and §§2017–2029 on justification, sanctifying grace and the universal call to Christian perfection. The Catechism is particularly important for the distinction between habitual or sanctifying grace and actual graces, and for its teaching that grace precedes and elicits human cooperation.
Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, especially no. 1, on Christianity as an encounter with an event and a Person, and nos. 17–18 on the relationship between encounter with God, love and Christian action.
Benedict XVI, Address to the participants in the Plenary Assembly of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, 10 February 2006, on the centrality of faith, the encounter with Christ and the danger of sterile activism.
Benedict XVI, Address to the Pontifical Biblical Commission, 27 April 2006, particularly on faith working through love and the fulfilment of the moral law in the encounter with Christ.
St Teresa of Jesus, The Interior Castle, especially the Third Mansions, chapters 1–2, and the Fourth Mansions, chapter 1. Teresa’s treatment of the third mansions is particularly important for understanding the genuinely good but still incomplete Christian life, while her opening of the fourth mansions marks a transition towards a more explicitly supernatural mode of divine action.
St Teresa of Jesus, The Interior Castle, Fourth Mansions, on the distinction between consolations and the more gratuitous operations of God, and on the fact that such graces cannot be produced simply by human effort.
St Teresa of Jesus, The Interior Castle, Sixth Mansions, especially the passages concerning the wound of love and the awakening of the soul’s longing for God.
St John of the Cross, The Spiritual Canticle, especially the opening stanzas on the wound of love and the soul’s search for the Beloved.
St John of the Cross, The Living Flame of Love, especially on the transformation of the soul through divine love and the progressive participation of the person in God’s own life.
St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, particularly the treatises on grace, the virtues, charity, the gifts of the Holy Spirit and human cooperation with divine motion.