So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Matt 4:48)

Jesus tells us in no uncertain terms that we all are called to live a life of holiness, which means that we ought to intentionally strive to be saints daily. Of course, the temptation is to look at one's own life and think that obtaining the level of perfection and holiness of the Church's canonized saints is incredibly difficult, if not altogether impossible. If we decide we want to take this call to holiness seriously, we may still need help to answer it in the practical sense. Fortunately, the Church has a roadmap for our path to holiness called “The Three Ways,” which I will explain over the next three weeks.

The Three Ways is a classical spiritual path to holiness that progresses the practitioner through three stages of spiritual growth and maturity: purgative, illuminative, and unitive. The Three Ways have been fine-tuned over time, but still find their roots in the early Church. In early religious and monastic life, instruction in the Three Ways was part of the training novices would receive as they entered various orders. Still, it soon became evident that the process would also benefit the laity. Over time, many great saints, including St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Teresa of Avila, and St. John of the Cross, have added to the process with their own insights and experiences as reflected in their writings.

Because one’s holiness cannot happen accidentally, the Three Ways should be practiced deliberately and systematically. In some ways, the practitioner moves through the stages consecutively as they build on one another, progressing forward. After all, one can only exemplify exceptional holiness by first having gone through earlier stages. In other ways, the stages work concurrently because even someone advanced in holiness still needs to practice what helped the person reach that level. Practicing the Three Ways requires discipline and commitment, regardless of where one is at on one’s journey. With that, let’s explore the first of the three ways.

The Purgative Way

Once a person has decided to pursue a path of holiness, there will necessarily be a lot of weeding the garden, so to speak. In the early stages, we are still spiritually young and immature, finding ourselves succumbing to things of the world and being slaves to our particular vices and sins. So, as reflected in its name, the purgative way is the stage in which we work to purge our attachments to the things that prevent our progress in holiness. However, this won’t happen because of noble intentions alone but requires an active, two-pronged approach.

One side of the purgative way requires a person to ask for God’s grace and then cooperate with his grace to replace sin with virtue. Note that we are not just called to avoid sin, but also to grow in virtue. As we root out a bad tendency, we risk leaving a void in its place that Satan can tempt us to fill with some new bad tendency, so we must intentionally replace whatever it is we are rooting out with its opposite good virtue. Then, virtue becomes second nature through practice, much like sin was before. For example, to root out lust, one must practice chastity; to root out gluttony, one must practice temperance; and to root out pride, one must practice humility.

Actively seeking and praying for opportunities to practice certain virtues is crucial for their integration into one's spiritual life. Be warned that as Satan sees your efforts in your practice of virtue at the expense of his vices, the more temptations will come your way. Take this as a good sign and continue to ask for God's helping grace as you persevere in your fight.

The other side of the purgative way is active asceticism. Asceticism is a way of controlling or mastering the passions in your mind and body through mortification. Physical mortification involves means such as fasting and restricting our use of things that bring us pleasure or comfort in our bodies. Sensory mortification, more specifically, means depriving your five senses of the things that please them, such as looking away from certain images or turning away from certain music or conversation. Finally, mortification of the interior senses refers to things like memories or imaginations that interfere with spiritual growth, which also must be purged. So, for example, to fully detach from a particular sin, you must stop remembering or imagining yourself engaged in that sin and how much pleasure it brought you. The mortification of such things lies in the practice of putting them out of your mind (as often as they come up) until they've been mastered. All these various aspects of mortification decrease worldly attachments and increase focus on attaching ourselves to God as the ultimate source of true pleasure and comfort.

As we will see with each of the Three Ways, prayer is imperative, since there can be no progress without God. However, a particular hallmark of prayer in the purgative way should be noted. When we are spiritually immature, our prayer life reflects its immaturity, which is normal. In this first stage, we stay in the first and second grades of prayer: vocal and meditation (which you can read more about on my website). We grow accustomed to receiving consolations in our prayer life, which come in the forms of comfort, answers, blessings, and overall awareness that God is present, listening, and responding, which generally makes us feel good. However, if we are actively purging those things that make us feel good in a temporal or earthly sense, we must be purged even of our attachments to consolations so that our motivation for prayer is rightly ordered.

Very often, if not always, the hallmark for being advanced in the purgative way and ready to move on to the illuminative way is that the practitioner will experience spiritual aridity, meaning the person will stop feeling God’s presence and consolation. Rather than being a cruelty of God, it is a beautiful gift because it ensures that our prayer life is driven by our love of God and pursuit of holiness, instead of what it will do for us. If you experience something like this, it is important not to become discouraged. Rather, consider it a gift and a sign of your progress. Persevere in prayer through the dryness with the trust that God will not allow what you cannot endure with his grace.

There is one final important point to make regarding intentional spiritual growth. Having a spiritual director will be helpful at any stage, but the need becomes more and more critical the further one progresses through the Three Ways, beginning in the later stages of the purgative way. A spiritual director helps you to discern what the voice of God is saying to you in prayer and whether your mortifications are appropriate and rightly ordered. Your spiritual director can also observe your specific growth in virtue from an outside perspective. Do not rely solely on yourself, as Satan can and will take advantage, and do not move too far ahead without a trustworthy spiritual director to accompany you.

What worldly attachments do you hang on to? Perhaps it's a sin or even a comfort that may not technically be a sin but keeps you rooted in something worldly. Identify an opposite virtue and practice it as much as possible. Ask God for the grace to let that virtue become so second nature that you no longer remember the sin or worldly pleasure to which you were previously attached.

This week, meditate on the purgative way, knowing that you will always need to practice certain aspects of it to varying degrees on your path to holiness. Next week, we’ll look more closely at the illuminative way.

BACK TO LIST