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These many reflections on John of the Cross and the breathtakingly beautiful union with God to which he bears witness have been ordained to stir up within us a spirit of wonder, delight, and desire, to help us to see and be encouraged by the beauty of what awaits us in heaven, and also to allow us to see more clearly just how good and loving is our God. But perhaps there has also been residue for some of us of feeling, “That is all beautiful, but it just makes me feel more worthless and unworthy, farther from God rather than closer to him.” I am nowhere close to the reality of which John speaks. And yes, the last stanzas we have explored spoke primarily of heaven, but John explicitly says that one can attain the spiritual marriage in this life, and taste already, if imperfectly, our eternal destiny. But what does this have to do with my life and my daily struggles here and now?
This is why it may be helpful to pause to draw out into the open a number of themes woven throughout these reflections which may not have received explicit focus. They will lead, hopefully, to a very beautiful and healing place. 1. First, the reality of our sanctification and transformation—just the like our justification and salvation—is entirely a work of grace. Yes, it calls for our “yes” and our humble daily cooperation; but it is God’s work far, far more than it is our own. We can never get there on our own, nor indeed can we even respond perfectly to grace. He is glad to work in the midst of all our limitations and struggles, our daily failures and faults, and indeed even in the midst of our sins. One of the things we learn clearly from the Gospels is that Jesus is not afraid of sin or sinners; rather, he is drawn to them, attracted to them, and seeks them out. And he says that there is more joy in heaven over one repentant sinner than over ninety-nine righteous persons who think they have no need of repentance. He sat at table with those the “righteous” of his day scorned. He was not put-off by tax collectors or prostitutes, but saw the beauty in them and indeed worked miracles of grace in their hearts. What God seeks from us is not, therefore, sinlessness or perfect performance, but simply openness to his mercy. This is, if understood deeply and widely enough, the only condition not only for our salvation but also for our sanctification. If we continue to open ourselves to mercy anew every day, and let it have its way within us, it shall do in us all that it desires. Even our faltering and imperfect efforts to change, buoyed up by mercy, open to mercy in every foible and fall, bear amazing fruit far beyond themselves, for mercy bears it within us. Just as in any good work of fiction, no matter how many mistakes and sins the characters fall into, as long as they continue to open themselves to a gift from the outside, the good ending shall come. And the opening itself, as well as its fruition, is the work of grace. That is the power of divine mercy. 2. The consummation of the spiritual marriage, of perfect union with God, occurs only in heaven, when the constrictions of this life are passed. Therefore all the beautiful mysteries of which we have been speaking should not be understood in a way that sets them apart from the concrete realism and imperfections of our daily lives. Rather, let us see these great mysteries, this great union with God, as something present here and now, ever at work, being wrought more deeply in our hearts with each passing day. This reality is real and true even if we do not see or feel it, for it operates on God’s level, and we come to apprehend it, to experience its fruition and the joy it brings, only little by little, as faith, hope, and love gradually pervade our faculties. And indeed, as we have seen, how much or little we are granted to experience tangibly depends upon God and his benevolent intentions for us. Let us not therefore think that feeling “weak and without strength in the practice of virtue,” as little Thérèse expressed it, is a sign that grace is not powerfully at work within us uniting us deeply to God. Our loving Father delights to hide himself in the smallest and most unlikely of places. So let us not be afraid to meet him there, to abide there in his cherishing and to cherish, in turn, him who in Christ has espoused himself to our littleness, so that everywhere—wherever we may be—we are his bride, and can become more so at every moment. 3. One common and easily-made misunderstanding of John of the Cross is that he encourages us to focus more on purity of heart than on love, more on the negative demands of detachment that on the attachment of the heart to the Beloved. But this is simply not true, even if his emphasis tends to incline in that direction. The true life of faith, even in the realms of asceticism, freedom from sin, and the practice of virtue, is wholly positive, ordained toward fostering what is good rather than fighting what is imperfect or evil. The point that I want to focus upon now, tying together the previous two points is this: The greatest thing to fear in this life is not sin, but the refusal of love. Let us try to unpack this a little bit. First let us note that once a heart comes to a deep realization of the evil of sin and its effects, it is common and understandable for a horror of it to grow within the spirit and the psyche. But this can lead to unhealthy things, for it can foster a rigid pursuit of pharisaic “righteousness” or a ritualistic pursuit of purity in religious practices or the Sacrament of Confession, or a closing off from others and from the full richness of life in the name of “avoiding the near occasion of sin.” In the name of seeking to grow in and deepen purity of heart, a person in fact closes their heart off to love and all the messiness of life that is necessary to grow in love. And this is also contrary to purity of heart, for true purity does not consist in an absence, but rather a fullness of love in the heart. And this capacity to love grows through living all the messiness of life and relationship—with both God and others—in docility to the Spirit who leads us, who works and matures love within us along the journey. If we are terrified of making mistakes or sullying our perfect image of purity, if we are too afraid to take the risk of authentic love, then our hearts will remain closed up, and they shall shrivel into cold hardness, not blossom into warmth, freedom, attentiveness, affection, and care. Our good Carthusian friend has some helpful words in this regard to which it would do well to attend. But first, let us listen to the wonderful words of Jesus, which should help us to see that the thing to fear most in this world is not sin, but rejection of love—for from sin love can be born anew far more beautiful and deep than if the sin had never occurred. Again: such is the power of divine mercy! Let us listen to Christ: “A certain creditor had two debtors; one owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. When they could not pay, he forgave them both. Now which of them will love him more?” Simon answered, “The one, I suppose, to whom he forgave more.” And he said to him, “You have judged rightly.” Then turning toward the woman he said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? I entered your house, you gave me no water for my feet, but she has wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You gave me no kiss, but from the time I came in she has not ceased to kiss my feet. You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment. Therefore I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much; but he who is forgiven little, loves little.” (Lk 7:41-47) One can struggle much with sin and feel unable to break its hold, but this does not mean that love is not growing, that one’s heart is not seeking God and drawing closer to him. Indeed, sometimes a persistent sin or struggle can be more fruitful in deepening our reliance upon, openness to, trust in, and union with God than can freedom from the same. When freedom does come, it shall be the fruit of God’s grace at work in our poverty, and in and beyond our own inadequate efforts. It is the beautiful seal upon the journey that perhaps appeared to us as countless repeated failures, as misery, but which for God is pierced through by beauty, and made all beautiful by his healing love and mercy. Saint Augustine said something powerful about this whenever he wrote about the verse from Romans where Paul says, “Everything works together for good for those who love God” (Rom 8:28). He added: “even sin.” Yes, even sin. God integrates everything into our journey if only we are open to allow him to do so, if we let our hearts be drawn to him and drink from the fountain of his mercy and goodness. Our Carthusian says the following in this regard: Just as there is a deepening humanity, a more loving heart, that the happy do not suspect, but that suffering alone can hollow out, so also there is a special quality, a particular intensity to surrendered and grateful love, that only forgiven sinners are able to know. The purity of a restored heart, the purity of heart of the Magdalene, has its own kind of richness What it lacks in the exquisite clarity and spontaneous joy of the purity of innocence it has gained in humility, gentleness, and humanity, because it better understands the fragility of the human heart and it does not demand its ‘rights’ before God—it doesn’t have any and it knows this only too well. Christ loves to gather these people around him who are poor in virtue. … But when it [the pursuit of purity of heart] is a mere refusal to love, when its sole preoccupation is maintaining an icy and implacable defense of its exterior virtue, it can be deeply wounding to this reality, without which it has no meaning, namely, love. … try to I want to explain an intuition of my own that is very difficult to put into words. In the first place, rarely is a human actions so absorbing that it engages the entire person. Rarely is a person entirely absorbed in either sin or virtue. The truth of the self is always somewhat hidden until the moment of death. This is perhaps the most profound meaning of death in as much as it speaks the definitive word about our entire life.* (By the way, it is possible to say that one of the fruits of guarding the heart and of the monk’s gradual growth into freedom is that one is able to be engaged more and more deeply in appropriate activity, and the capacity for such absorption expands more and more to encompass the whole person.) But there is also a sense in which a person remains innocent even in the midst of sin. I know this is paradoxical, and without going any further than the Russians, above all, Dostoyevsky, who loves to extol the holy prostitute, it seems to me that this corresponds to a human reality. One could dismantle the paradox and distinguish between the sins of the flesh that arise from the undisciplined energy of the passions and that can leave a certain virginity intact, and the sins that are the fruit of a deep interior malice that is cold and that sullies the heart more completely. But the Russians, and perhaps the poet Rimbaud also, want to go further, I believe, and they perceive a kind of innocence that is born precisely from the profound and utterly real experience of the misery of fallen humanity that opens it to the redeeming grace of Christ. For these people, the way to heaven passes through hell—at least in certain worst case scenarios. I don’t know if they are right. In any case let us not flatter ourselves too easily that we have fully understood the mystery of the cross of Christ or of its power to give birth to new life where there is less than nothing. We must never judge anyone; we must never lose hope, never; we must never compare purity with purity. We must never lay claim to the grace of Christ; we never assume it, proud and complacent in ourselves. In the end, all is grace, for the Virgin and for the Magdalene. And in practice, in each of us, we are both at once. Purity of heart is purity of love. We are pure in the measure that we love. Love is always pure. Because God is love, love is purity itself. Everything that springs from love is good and holy. Everything that does not spring from love is not good. But even in this case, what we do seeks to take on the name of love; and to some extent there is always a certain love that motivates all of our actions. Except that this is love gone wrong, shackled, distorted; a love that disproves Love, because it doesn’t want to accept the ordering of love by which each specific love finds its true place in relationship with substantial Love. Love originates all true love; cut off from Love, love is nothing but a body without a soul, an obliterated face, a non-love. Purity of heart consists in loving conformable with Love, that is to say, conformable with God. Note well: it consists in loving.i This should be adequate for our purposes. If you wish for the full treatment—and many other beautiful meditations besides—I would recommend getting a copy of the book for yourself. It is one of the best. None of this is meant to justify habitual sin or a permissive attitude in our lives, but rather to direct our hearts to what is central, to the love without which nothing has meaning, and to help us understand the struggle against sin only in this light. Here lies true freedom and peace, a life bathed in the perpetual mercy of God that meets us here and now in all of our messiness, and buoys us up, fills us, and cherishes us. God is not scandalized. Rather, he is drawn to our misery, and he delights to lift us up, little by little, until the definitive elevation to the consummated marriage of heaven. And when he looks upon us already now, remember that he is outside of time, gazing from the bosom of his own eternity, and so he sees us already bathed in the radiant light of our final destiny, our ultimate perfection. Let us rest in faith in this seeing of God, and lean into his work that makes us a little more, at every moment, the “me” that we shall be when we are immersed in Christ at the end of our life. Here sin shall be no more, and here all closure to or threat to love shall be obliterated, as all shall be consumed in the fires of God’s loving heart and rendered transparent to the joy of his own life. Here we shall be united to the Son eternally in the bosom of the Father, sharing their kiss and breath of the Holy Spirit, and here we shall find full freedom and joy, a freedom and joy that were unfolding in us, often unseen, through every moment of our earthly life. *** NOTE *** *In the light of our reflections on John of the Cross, we can affirm that John’s whole treatment of the spiritual marriage truly reflects the “anticipation of death.” It does this in that one’s whole being becomes more and more fully harnessed in a single act: in love. “My every action is now love.” And thus it comes to press against the veil separating this life from the next, giving already in some way, in this life, that final “word” of death and eternity, or rather allowing God to give it in us. John’s theology is thus revealed at its inner heart: it really is about the Paschal Mystery of Jesus Christ and our participation in it, our sharing in his death so as to share in his Resurrection. i. The Way of Silent Love, 42-45. There you will show me
what my soul has been seeking, and then you will give me, you, my life, will give me there what you gave me on that other day: the breathing of the air, the song of the sweet nightingale, the grove and its living beauty in the serene night, with a flame that is consuming and painless. No one looked at her, nor did Aminadab appear; the siege was still; and the cavalry, at the sight of the waters, descended.12 After speaking of the wondrous gift that the bridal heart receives in sharing the wisdom of Christ, in contemplating with him the beauty of all God’s works, and most especially the marvel of the Incarnation of Christ and the beauty of his humanity, John continues his commentary on the stanzas of the poem. As he summarizes: “In the two preceding stanzas the bride’s song focused on the good the Bridegroom will offer her in that eternal bliss [of heaven]. That is, the Bridegroom will really transform her into the beauty of both his created and uncreated wisdom, and also into the beauty of the union of the Word and his humanity in which she will know him face to face as well as from the back.”3 In other words, she will know God both in the direct, unmediated vision of the Trinity’s essence—in sharing in the circumincession of the three divine Persons of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—and also in the ravishing contemplation of the beauteous humanity of Jesus Christ, forever united to the Person of the Son. Expressed more deeply, we see an order here: only through union with and transformation in the humanity of Christ are we made capable of entering into the life of the Trinity and sharing in it face-to-face, in unmediated vision and direct participation. The humanity of Jesus is our only access into the heart of God, and it is the work of the Holy Spirit to conform us to this humanity, to bring about in us what first occurred in Galilee two-thousand years ago: the wedding of divinity and humanity, the incarnation of the Word in human flesh and life, not now in two natures united in a single Person but in two persons bound together and made one in the reciprocity of love. And this reciprocity of love John of the Cross expresses beautifully in the text we are now considering. He writes: The reason the soul desired to enter these caverns was to reach the consummation of the love of God, which she had always been seeking; that is, to love God as purely and perfectly as he loves her in order to repay him by such love. She declares to the Bridegroom in this stanza that there he will show her that which was her aim in all her acts: to love the Bridegroom as perfectly as he loves her. The second gift she will receive there is the essential glory to which he predestined her from the day of his eternity.4 This is what the human person was created for—what each one of us was created for. It may sound impossible; it may stretch our capacity for belief. But anyone who has loved ardently and deeply knows that it is true. For no union of persons is consummate unless each person loves as much as they are loved, loves totally and entirely, and indeed knows the other even as they are know. Heaven will consist, therefore, in our knowing as we have been known and loving as we have been loved. This is what it means to share in the wisdom of Christ and in the love of the Spirit poured into our hearts. Such is the ardent desire of the love-ravished heart, restless with longing for God, and such is the ardent longing of God for each one of his children. We devote attention to this text of loving God with a love equal to God’s—namely with God’s own love within us—elsewhere in these reflections, so let us rather focus on something else at present. John writes: What the soul says he will then give her is essential glory, consisting in the vision of God’s being. But before proceeding we ought to resolve a doubt: Why, since essential glory lies in seeing God and not in loving, does the soul declare at the beginning of the stanza that her aim was this love and not the essential glory, and afterward request, as something of less importance, essential glory? There are two reasons: First, just as the ultimate reason for everything is love (which is seated in the will), whose property is to give and not to receive, whereas the property of the intellect (which is the subject of essential glory) lies in receiving and not giving, the soul in the inebriation of love does not put first the glory she will receive from God, but rather the surrender of herself to him through true love without concern for her own profit. Second, the desire to see is included in the desire to love and already presupposed in the preceding stanzas, for it is impossible to reach the perfect love of God without the perfect vision of God. Thus the force of this doubt is resolved by the first answer. With love the soul pays God what she owes him; with the intellect, on the contrary, she receives from him.5 Now here is a place where I think a more thorough fleshing-out (and perhaps correction) of what John says might be helpful. He says that the soul’s primary desire is to love God as she has been loved by him, to love him fully and disinterestedly, to love him as he deserves. And this is only proper, for the ordo amoris, the order of love, always spontaneously expresses itself in such a way: the amor benevolentiae (love of benevolence) comes before the amor unionis (love seeking union) and in turn enfolds it and enables it. Or expressed differently, agape comes first, the gratuitous praise, service, and glorification of God with no self-interest, and the ardent seeking of the welfare of all his children. But this very agape not only frees eros to be all that it is meant to be, but deepens, expands, and intensifies its longing and its capacity. But as I think we all must learn eventually, though these two are distinguished in theory—and remain existentially distinct acts in the richness of human life and faculties—nonetheless they can never exist apart from each other without destroying themselves. And at root they are inseparable. I have written about this at great length elsewhere (in the reflection “The Union of Eros and Agape,” which I will include as an appendix to these reflections). John himself acknowledges this when he says that loving God is impossible without first seeing God; the receptive faculty of the intellect is the condition for loving God freely and totally with the giving faculty of the will. But we can go further and say that even love is characterized not only by giving—and by the desire to give—but also by receiving and the desire to receive. After all, the Son himself receives his very life and being eternally from the Father in the very heart of the Trinity, and only thus is he able to give it back in loving surrender to the Father. And the Father is not pure giving in regard to the Son, but also a loving and receptive presence--which is expressed biblically by the term “bosom”—in that he always holds the Son tenderly in his heart, cherishing him and delighting in him. The same is true for the receptivity and gift of the Holy Spirit in relation to the Father and the Son, and their relations in turn toward him. We can affirm, therefore, that in God himself reception and gift are so utterly intertwined that they are a single act: an act that is simultaneously knowledge and love, that is both seeing and surrender, that is at the same moment receiving and giving. This is what love means for God; it is an act both of mind and of will, of intellect and of heart (to speak in human terms). Thus while affirming that truth in what John says about the priority of giving over receiving—or rather of loving the Beloved for his own sake over seeking anything from the Beloved for myself—we need to affirm just as deeply that, in the last analysis, reception and gift become one single act. In the heart of the Trinity, and in our relationship with the Trinity, receiving love and reciprocating this love are indivisible. The Son’s belovedness before the Father and his love for the Father are not two distinct realities, or even two distinct acts, but only one, and thus he loves the Father equally by allowing himself to be loved as he does by loving the Father. So it is for us. God is equally pleased with our allowing ourselves to be loved by him as he is with the reciprocal gift of our love to him. They are both necessary aspects of the reality of love, two dimensions of a single movement that is reception and gift, that is our being taken up into the circulation of love between the Father and the Son and the Spirit. This this is what love is meant, and destined, to be for each one of us. As the ordo amoris brings order and harmony to our being--in large part through the experience of being gratuitously loved--all petty selfishness and clinging in our love is purified, and our hearts are liberated to love and seek God beyond all things without the constraints of disordered self-love. We are able to stand before him, to gaze upon him, and to simply rejoice with delight and awe that he is who he is. We are so established in faith, hope, and love that our great and abiding joy, beyond anything in this world, is simply that God is. We simply rejoice that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit exist in everlasting happiness, and that nothing can threaten or lessen this happiness. “O Beloved, how wonderful it is that you are!” And yet the other dimension of love is born from this first and inseparable from it. Yes, born from this very awe and wonder, this very gratuitous and selfless joy, is the deep desire to receive the love of the Trinity and thus to share in the life of the Trinity, to become a participant in the dance of the Trinity’s life, both already in this world and forever in the life to come. And the marvelous thing is that the greatest way to glorify God, to praise and adore him, is to be joined to him in love (in both receiving and giving), to be taken up into his life and made a partaker of his divine nature. In other words, my very divinization is my greatest glorification of God, and my own happiness is his greatest happiness in my regard! For God created me in order to share his happiness with me. He is therefore not content merely for me to stand at a distance and say, “It is good that you are!” Rather, he wants to sweep me up right into the heart of his own life—into the shared love of the Father and the Son, in the Spirit of their kiss—so that I can exclaim, in him and with him, “How good it is to be together! How good is this life that is yours and, by your gift, is also mine!” As we said, here reception and gift are one, seeing and surrender are united in a single act. Indeed, here knowledge and love are inseparable, as knowing is loving and loving is knowing, and the beatific vision of God is not just a contemplative awareness but a full participation in the flowing current of gift ever circulating between the Father and the Son in their one Spirit. And this is precisely what the bride expresses next in her song, as she speaks of the “breathing of the air and the song of the sweet nightingale,” which is precisely the shared breathing of the Spirit that is granted to her in the Father and the Son, and the voice of the Word, the Beloved, resounding within her. As we treat of the “breathing of the air” elsewhere, so too we pass over it here in silence, and shall conclude this reflection rather with the “song of the sweet nightingale.” The result of the soul’s breathing the air is that she hears the sweet voice of her Beloved calling to her. And she in this voice expresses to him her delightful jubilation and calls both voices the song of the nightingale. Just as the nightingale begins its song in the spring, once the wintery cold, rain, and changes have passed, and provides melody for the ear and refreshment for the spirit, so in this actual communication and transformation of love that the bride has now attained in this life, in which she is freed from and protected against all temporal disturbances and changes, and divested and purged of imperfections, penalties, and clouds in the senses and the spirit, she feels a new spring in spiritual freedom and breadth and gladness. She hears the sweet voice of her Bridegroom who is her sweet nightingale. Renewing and refreshing the substance of the soul with the sweetness and mellowness of his voice, he calls her as he would call one now disposed to make the journey to eternal life, and she hears this pleasant voice urge: Arise, make haste, my love, my dove, my beautiful one, and come; for now the winter has passed, the rains have gone far off, the flowers have appeared in our land, the time of pruning has come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land [Sg. 2:10-12]. The bride feels that this voice of the Bridegroom speaking within her is the end of evil and the beginning of good. In the refreshment, protection, and delightful sentiment afforded by this voice, she too, like the sweet nightingale, sings a new and jubilant song together with God, who moves her to do this. He gives his voice to her that so united with him she may give it together with him to God. This is the Bridegroom’s aim and desire, that the soul may intone to God with a spiritual voice of jubilation, as he requests in the Song of Songs: Arise, make haste my love, and come, my dove; in the clefts of the rock; in the hollow of the wall show me your face, let your voice sound in my ears [Sg. 2:13-14]. The ears of God signify his desires to have the soul sing to him with this voice of perfect jubilation. That this voice be perfect, the Bridegroom asks that she sing and let it resound in the caverns of the rock, that is, in the transformation into the mysteries of Christ. Since the soul rejoices in and praises God with God himself in this union (as we said in speaking of love), it is a praise highly perfect and pleasing to God, for a soul in this state of perfection performs very perfect works. This voice of jubilation, thus, is sweet both to God and to the soul. As a result the Bridegroom declared: Your voice is sweet [Sg. 2:14], that is, not only to you but to me as well, since through union with me you sing for me—and with me—like the sweet nightingale.6 Let us only say one thing in this regard, leaving the rest to the silence of contemplation. The spiritual marriage of which the bride speaks in the canticle, anticipated in this life and consummated in the life to come, is the fulfillment of the human person’s participation in the life of God and their total conformation to the Incarnate Son, Jesus Christ. After all, what does Jesus Christ—ascended into heaven after his victory over death—now do for all eternity? He breathes with his Father the one Holy Spirit whom they share. And he is spoken forth from the Father as his only Word in this one Breath (for without breath there is no word), and speaks himself ceaselessly back to the Father in reciprocal voice. And the human person transformed in God and elevated to the state of spiritual marriage—in other words experiencing the fullness of redemption, sanctification, and consummation—breathes in God with God the very breath that God breathes within her, and sings with the one Word in the single voice of love that is his, and which has now become her own. *** NOTES *** 1 . “The Spiritual Canticle” 38-40. 2 We will not devote a reflection to the final stanza, since it is (experientially) a step “back” in the soul’s rapt attention upon God. But it does teach us something important: namely that this union with God brings harmony and peace to the whole of our humanity, from our inner spiritual faculties to the passions, appetites, and senses of the body, which all in their own way share in this goodness of union with God. Indeed, only true transformation and intimacy with God can bring total peace, freedom, and order to the human person, as it is never something we can attain or preserve for ourselves of our own effort: for we are dialogical in our very nature, filial, ordered to relationship with Another, and only he, the Lover of our souls, can set right in us all that he has made and permeate it with his own presence, indeed ravish it in the ceaseless delight of the ecstasy of eternity that awaits us in heaven. Here is John’s summary of this stanza, which should suffice for our purposes: “The bride knows that now her will’s desire is detached from all things and attached to her God in most intimate love; that the sensory part of her soul, with all its strengths, faculties, and appetites, is in harmony with the spirit, and its rebelliousness brought into subjection: that the devil is now conquered and far withdrawn as a result of her varied and prolonged spiritual activity and combat; that her soul is united and transformed with an abundance of heavenly riches and gifts; and that consequently she is now well prepared, disposed, and strong, leaning on her Beloved, so as to come up from the desert of death, flowing with delights, to the glorious thrones of her Bridegroom [Sg. 8:5]. Desiring the Bridegroom to conclude this matter now, she sets all these facts before him in this last stanza in order to urge him the more to do so. In this stanza she mentions five blessings: First, her soul is detached and withdrawn from all things. Second, the devil is conquered and put to flight. Third, the passions are subjected and the natural appetites mortified. Fourth and fifth, the sensory and lower part is reformed, purified, and brought into conformity with the spiritual part. The sensory part not only offers no obstacle to the reception of these spiritual blessings but is even accommodated to them, since it participates according to its capacity in the goods the soul now possesses.” (40.1.; p. 628-629) 3 . Ibid., 618. 38.1. 4 . Ibid., 618. 38.2. 5 . Ibid., 619-620. 38.5. 6 . Ibid., 625. 39.8-9. The deepest and widest domain of God’s redeeming and saving activity is not the external world, the cosmos, or the history of humanity abstractly speaking—though he is certainly at work here, and we should not underestimate their importance—but rather the inner recesses of the human heart and life, and the communion of persons in the likeness of the intimacy of the Trinity. Here is where the history of humanity is truly decided, and here, paradoxically, is where the Church is most truly and beautifully a Mother, offering her breast for all of us to suckle in the place where the most intimate solitude of each one of us is both sheltered and expanded to become one in love with the community of all those who believe, who allow themselves to be inserted into the life of God at work in his mystical Body, preparing a Bride fit for himself in the Wedding of the Lamb.
I think this explains also why at the high point of the Spiritual Canticle, John of the Cross does not lose himself in an amorphous “divine abyss” like so many of the mystics throughout history. He is not seeking the “divine” in any of the countless faces that we have given to it throughout history; nor indeed is he walking the uncertain ways of mystical prayer that have found expression in every religion—ways that often bear fruit in true moments of insight and contact with God, in true purity of life, in a true if inchoate knowledge of God, though his full mystery always remains veiled, for “only in Christ is the veil taken away” (1 Cor 3:14). Rather, John of the Cross is seeking the God who is revealed to us in Jesus Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, in the heart of the mystical Body that is the Church, the Bride in whom each one of us is bride. And indeed, he is sought by the Bridegroom first; we are each one of us sought first. And so at the height of the bridal heart’s union with her Beloved, he is able to have her exclaim: Let us rejoice, Beloved, and let us go forth to behold ourselves in your beauty, to the mountain and to the hill, to where the pure water flows, and further, deep into the thicket. And then we will go on to the high caverns in the rock which are so well concealed; there we shall enter and taste the fresh juice of the pomegranates.1 The mountain is the humanity of Christ, the perfect image of the Father’s glory, and the hill is the beauty of all created things reflecting the glory of God. Yes, she presses on—or rather she is led by her Beloved—to the place where the water flows, to the very caverns in the rock, to taste the juice of the pomegranates. In other words, she is led into the wound in the heart of Jesus Christ, to the living center of his humanity hypostatically united to his divinity, and here—here!—she finds herself united to God, to the Trinity, in fullness. And she delights to behold herself in the Beauty of her Beloved even as he delight to behold her beauty in himself, indeed to make her beautiful with his own Beauty which he bestows upon her. And together they eat and relish the pomegranates of the mysteries of the faith, of all God’s wonderful works in history from the creation of the world, through its redemption and salvation, to its definitive consummation. In the Trinity she is able to delight in all that the Trinity has wrought throughout time; from the perspective of eternity she contemplates with awe and gratitude the beautiful narrative of temporality, seeing the tapestry that before she had only beheld from “beneath,” now from “above,” and in fullness. She is able to read the “economy” from the perspective of the “theology,” to use the classical terms given to us by the living tradition of the Church. And as John of the Cross spontaneously—and quite uncharacteristically—affirms: “And this is by no means the lesser part of beatitude.” In other words, beholding the beauty of the humanity of Jesus, beholding the beauty God’s presence and activity in the world and in human hearts is by no means a negligible part of the delight that awaits us in heaven. But let us receive John’s own words in this regard: One of the main reasons for the desire to be dissolved and to be with Christ [Phil. 1:23] is to see him face to face and thoroughly understand the profound and eternal mysteries of his Incarnation, which is by no means the lesser part of beatitude. As Christ himself says to the Father in St. John’s Gospel: This is eternal life, that they know you, the one true God, and your Son Jesus Christ whom you have sent [Jn. 17:3]. The first thing a person desires to do after having come a long distance is to see and converse with a deeply loved one; similarly, the first thing the soul desires on coming to the vision of God is to know and enjoy the deep secrets and mysteries of the Incarnation and the ancient ways of God dependent on it. Hence, after expressing her desire to see herself in the beauty of God, the soul declares in the following stanza: And then we will go on to the high caverns in the rock which are so well concealed; there we shall enter and taste the fresh juice of the pomegranates. One of the reasons urging the soul most to enter this thicket of God’s wisdom and to know its beauty from further within is her wish to unite her intellect with God in the knowledge of the mysteries of the Incarnation, in which is contained the highest and most savory wisdom of all his works. The bride states in this stanza that once she has entered further into the divine wisdom (further into the spiritual marriage she now possesses, which in glory will be the face-to-face vision of God as well as union with this divine wisdom who is the Son of God), she will know the sublime mysteries of God and human beings. These mysteries are exalted in wisdom, and the soul enters the knowledge of them, engulfing and immersing herself in them. And both the bride and the Bridegroom will taste the savoriness and the delight caused by the knowledge of these mysteries together with the powers and attributes of God uncovered in them, such as: justice, mercy, wisdom, power, charity, and so on. And then we will go on to the high caverns in the rock The rock mentioned here, as St. Paul says, is Christ [1 Cor. 10:4]. The high caverns of this rock are the sublime, exalted, and deep mysteries of God’s wisdom in Christ, in the hypostatic union of the human nature with the divine Word, and in the corresponding union of human beings with God, and the mystery of the harmony between God’s justice and mercy with respect to the manifestations of his judgments in the salvation of the human race. These mysteries are so profound that she very appropriately calls them high caverns: high, because of the height of the sublime mysteries; and caverns, because of the depth of God’s wisdom in them. As caverns are deep and have many recesses, so each of the mysteries in Christ is singularly deep in wisdom and contains many recesses of his secret judgments of predestination and foreknowledge concerning the children of the earth. She then adds: which are so well concealed; They are so well concealed that however numerous are the mysteries and marvels that holy doctors have discovered and saintly souls understood in this earthly life, all the more is yet to be said and understood. There is much to fathom in Christ, for he is like an abundant mine with many recesses of treasures, so that however deep individuals may go they never reach the end or bottom, but rather in every recess find new veins with new riches everywhere. On this account St. Paul said of Christ: In Christ dwell hidden all treasures and wisdom [Col. 2:3]. … When Moses asked God to reveal his glory, God told Moses that he would be unable to receive such a revelation in this life, but that he would be shown all good, that is, all the good that can be revealed in this life. So God put Moses in the cavern of the rock, which is Christ, as we said, and showed his back to him, which was to impart knowledge of the mysteries of the humanity of Christ. The soul, then, earnestly longs to enter these caverns of Christ in order to be absorbed, transformed, and wholly inebriated in the love of the wisdom of these mysteries, and hide herself in the bosom of the Beloved. In the Song of Songs he invites her to these clefts, saying: Arise, make haste, my love, my beautiful one, and come into the clefts of the rock and into the cavern of the wall [Sg. 2:13-14]. These clefts are the caverns we are discussing here of which the soul says next: there we shall enter That is, “there,” into that knowledge and those mysteries, “we shall enter.” And she does not declare, I alone shall enter—which would seem more suitable since the Bridegroom does not enter again—but we (the Beloved and I) shall enter. Thereby she shows that she does not do this work alone but that the Bridegroom does it with her. Furthermore, since the soul and God are now united in this state of spiritual marriage that we are discussing, the soul performs no work without God. To say, “there we shall enter,” is to say that there we shall be transformed; that is, I shall be transformed in you through love of these divine and delightful judgments. … The soul is most sublimely and intimately transformed in the love of God. And with unspeakable delight she thanks and loves the Father again through his Son Jesus. She does this united with Christ, together with Christ. And the savor of this praise is so delicate as to be totally beyond words. Yet the soul states in the following verse: and taste the fresh juice of the pomegranates. The pomegranates stand for the mysteries of Christ, the judgments of the wisdom of God, and the virtues and attributes uncovered in the knowledge of these innumerable mysteries and judgments. Just as pomegranates have many little seeds formed and sustained within the circular shell, so each of the attributes, mysteries, judgments, and virtues of God, like a round shell of power and mystery, holds and sustains a multitude of marvelous decrees and wondrous effects. We observe here the circular or spherical figure of the pomegranate and by each pomegranate understand here some divine attribute and power; each divine attribute and power is God himself, who is represented by the circular or spherical figure because he has no beginning or end. ... The juice from these pomegranates that the bride and the Bridegroom will taste is the fruition and delight of the love of God overflowing from the knowledge of his attributes. In eating a pomegranate, one juice alone is tasted from its many seeds; similarly, from all the infused wonders and grandeurs of God there redounds to the soul one fruition and delight of love, which is the drink of the Holy Spirit. With glowing tenderness of love she at once offers this drink to her God, the Word, her Spouse. She had promised him this divine drink in the Song of Songs if he would lead her into this lofty knowledge: There you will teach me; and I shall give you the drink of spiced wine and of juice from my pomegranates [Sg. 8:2]. She calls the pomegranates (the divine knowledge) her own because even though they are his, God has given them to her. She offers as a drink to God her joy in and fruition of this knowledge in the wine of love. Such is the meaning of the words, “And taste the fresh juice of the pomegranates.” Tasting it himself, he gives it to her to taste; and she in tasting it turns and offers it to him. And thus they both taste it together.2 This is magnificent. We behold here the depth to which the union of the human heart with God progresses, not only to inundate and inebriate her mind, heart, affection, and senses—her whole being—with the ravishing beauty of the inner life of the Trinity, but also to allow her to behold and rejoice, in God and with God, in all the wondrous things that he has accomplished (and accomplishes) in the world. So deeply joined to Christ in his own mind and heart, and filled with and utterly docile to the slightest breath of the Spirit, and indeed gazing always in and through the spotless mirror of the eternal Father’s gaze, the transformed heart looks upon the world and upon all the mysterious God has wrought therein with the very gaze of God, and rejoices with him in the sweetness, wisdom, and beauty of his work. The impression of profound intimacy and familiarity between the human heart and Jesus almost leaps off the page before us, as together cradled in the bosom of the Father they eat pomegranates and rejoice in the sweetness of their juice. Indeed, as John says, loving each other so deeply, they give the seeds to one another so that they can taste them together, even though each already has them. As we read at the very end of the passage: “Tasting it himself, he gives it to her to taste; and she in tasting it turns and offers it to him. And thus they both taste it together.” This is the fruition of love; this is the blossoming of intimacy; this is the reception which is simultaneously gift and the gift which is also acceptance, the knowledge that is love and the love that is knowledge. But we have gotten ahead of ourselves; we will unfold these themes shortly in another reflection. For now let us focus upon something else. John of the Cross gives a phrase in his commentary on the previous stanza, and it is significant for this one. He says that the soul is “transformed into the wisdom of God.” He has her say: “Transform me into the beauty of divine Wisdom and make me resemble that which is the Word, the Son of God. And...she asks that he inform her with the beauty of this other, lesser wisdom contained in his creatures and other mysterious works. This wisdom is also the beauty of the Son of God by which the soul desires to be illuminated.”3 Recognizing the deep truth expressed by Thomas Aquinas that one cannot know something fully unless one takes it into oneself and in turn enters into it, becoming like it through “connaturality,” John gives voice to the bride’s desire to be transformed into Christ in order to know his wisdom from within, in the most intimate way possible. Thus this whole process of assimilation that allows the person to enter through the thickets and into the caverns of the rock, there to taste with her Beloved the juice of the pomegranates, is one of “becoming the wisdom of Christ.” We thus see how—to refer to earlier reflections—the full blossoming of faith, hope, and love has also brought to full flower and fruit the gifts of the Holy Spirit as well, and specifically that of wisdom. Here wisdom is not understood merely as an educated and mature judgment gained from life experience, or any other form of natural knowledge (as important as this is), but the very irradiation of human mind and heart with the uncreated Wisdom of God. This is no natural wisdom; it is that which is a gift of the Spirit. And Christ is the Wisdom of God, the one who from the beginning of the world is the Word in whom all things were created and without whom nothing came to be. And this Wisdom is ever active in the world through the Holy Spirit, the Breath through whom and in whom the Word is spoken. Thus this intimacy between God and the heart that has been totally assimilated unto him—and John is primarily speaking here of heaven, of a gift for all of us—is the fullest realization of those beautiful words of Wisdom in the book of Proverbs: The LORD created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of old. Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth. When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water. Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth; before he had made the earth with its fields, or the first dust of the world. When he established the heavens, I was there, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep, when he assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters might not transgress his command, when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a little child; and I was daily his delight, playing before him always, playing in his inhabited world and delighting in the children of men. (Pr 8:22-31) *** NOTES *** 1 . Stanzas 36&37. 2 . Ibid., 614-617. 37.18. 3 . Quotes are from 36.8&7. Page 612. The ardent longing of the bridal heart, and the flame of the Bridegroom’s love pouring into her and drawing her onward—purifying, strengthening, elevating, and transforming her heart—have led her at last to the place of union. Freed of all that binds her to a miserable and disordered love of the world or of the self, from all the clinging that constricts her heart from living to the full the life of God for which she was created, the life of love, she enters into a deep reciprocal communication with Christ. Indeed, not only has the purification of all her fears and attachments, anxieties and avoidances, been part of her preparation; but so too have all the touches of love, the moments of encounter, the graces of enrichment and enlightenment, the ever deepening fecundation of all her mind, imagination, and sensibility with the wisdom and light of God.
John of the Cross uses a beautiful term to express this entire process: assimilation.1 God, in his infinite tenderness and love, desires to draw near to his beloved and to draw her near to himself, to take her up into his own being and to allow her to live with him his own everlasting life of love. And yet she is not at first fit for this union, bound as she is to the inheritance of sin. Thus, like a fire that is applied to a log of wood, he must first perform in her a great work of assimilation, just as wood must first be prepared for union with the fire, until it too becomes living flame, united in a single light and heat in a unified dance of glorious intensity. A work of assimilation: this is what all the longing and seeking of the bride has been expressing, only from her perspective, from her viewpoint. But it is simply a truth of reality that the Bridegroom, Christ—and in him the Father and the Spirit too—are seeking the bridal heart with far more intensity and effect. Any work she performs in seeking and drawing near to her Beloved is only a small fraction of what he himself does for her; and indeed even her own most intimate work is his own work within her, awakening, eliciting, and sustaining her deep and authentic freedom. And she experiences this powerfully when she enters into spiritual solitude with and for her Beloved—the solitude of a pure heart enraptured by love. She lived in solitude, and now in solitude has built her nest; and in solitude he guides her, he alone, who also bears in solitude the wound of love.2 In solitude her Bridegroom bears with her and for her the “wound of love.” He has first been enraptured by her and drawn to her, before she ever had a single thought of him or decided to seek him and to live for him. “In this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son” (1 Jn 4:10). He has sought her first even to the furthest extent, to the love that gives itself “to the very end” (Jn 13:2), to the Eucharist, Cross, and Resurrection—to Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday. He has descended into her very loss and death, into all the exile of her waywardness and shame. And it is only his own descent that allows her also to ascend. Only the compassionate love of God which meets us in our misery makes possible this whole beautiful journey that we are now witnessing. It is all a work of God’s mercy, his misericordia, his heart-for-misery. To quote a beautiful audience of Pope Leo XIV: We will look at the mystery of Holy Saturday. It is the day of the Paschal Mystery in which everything seems immobile and silent, while in reality an invisible action of salvation is being fulfilled: Christ descends into the realm of the dead to bring the news of the Resurrection to all those who were in the darkness and in the shadow of death. This event, which the liturgy and tradition have handed down to us, represents the most profound and radical gesture of God’s love for humanity. Indeed, it is not enough to say or to believe that Jesus died for us: it is necessary to recognize that the fidelity of his love sought us out where we ourselves were lost, where only the power of a light capable of penetrating the realm of darkness can reach. The underworld, in the biblical conception, is not so much a place as an existential condition: that condition in which life is depleted, and pain, solitude, guilt and separation from God and others reign. Christ reaches us even in this abyss, passing through the gates of this realm of darkness. He enters, so to speak, in the very house of death, to empty it, to free its inhabitants, taking them by the hand one by one. It is the humility of a God who does not stop in front of our sin, who is not afraid when faced with the human being’s extreme rejection. The apostle Peter, in the brief passage from his first Letter that we have just heard, tells us that Jesus, made alive in the Holy Spirit, went to take the news of salvation even “to the spirits in prison” (1 Pt 3:19). It is one of the most moving images, which is expressed not in the canonical Gospels, but in an apocryphal text entitled the Gospel of Nicodemus. According to this tradition, the Son of God entered the deepest darkness to reach even the last of his brothers and sisters, to bring his light down there too. In this gesture there is all the strength and tenderness of the Paschal message: death is never the last word. Dear friends, this descent of Christ does not relate only to the past, but touches the life of every one of us. The underworld is not only the condition of the dead, but also of those who live death as a result of evil and sin. It is also the daily hell of loneliness, shame, abandonment, and the struggle of life. Christ enters into all these dark realities to bear witness to the love of the Father. Not to judge, but to set free. Not to blame, but to save. He does so quietly, on tiptoe, like one who enters a hospital room to offer comfort and help. The Fathers of the Church, in pages of extraordinary beauty, described this moment as a meeting: that between Christ and Adam. An encounter that is the symbol of all the possible encounters between God and man. The Lord descends where man has hidden out of fear, and calls him by name, takes him by the hand, raises him up, and brings him back to the light. He does so with full authority, but also with infinite gentleness, like a father with the son who fears that he is no longer loved. In the eastern icons of the Resurrection, Christ is depicted breaking down the doors of the underworld, stretching out his arms and grasping Adam and Eve by the wrists. He does not save only himself; he does not return to life alone, but carries all of humanity with him. This is the true glory of the Risen One: it is the power of love, it is solidarity with a God who does not want to save himself without us, but only with us. A God who does not rise again unless he embraces our miseries and lifts us up to a new life. Holy Saturday, then, is the day in which heaven visits earth most deeply. It is the time in which every corner of human history is touched by the light of Easter. And if Christ was able to descend all the way down there, nothing can be excluded from his redemption. Not even our nights, not even our oldest faults, not even our broken bonds. There is no past so ruined, no history so compromised that it cannot be touched by mercy. Dear brothers and sisters, to descend, for God, is not a defeat, but the fulfillment of his love. It is not a failure, but the way by which he shows that no place is too far away, no heart is too closed, no tomb too tightly sealed for his love. This consoles us, this sustains us. And if at times we seem to have hit rock bottom, let us remember: that is the place from which God is able to begin a new creation. A creation made of people lifted up, hearts forgiven, tears dried. Holy Saturday is the silent embrace with which Christ presents all creation to the Father to restore it to his plan of salvation.3 This relates in two profound ways to the text of the canticle we are exploring. First, let us not think that the purification and union of the soul with God is somehow an isolated act or experience, separated from the history of salvation or purely for the benefit of a single person. No, rather, as Elisabeth Leseur said, “Every soul who raises itself, raises the world.” Said better: “The one who allows himself to be raised up by God, to let the mystery of Holy Saturday be realized within him, drawing him up from the depths to the heights of salvation, allows the whole world and all of his brothers and sisters to be lifted up within him.” Not only does a heart become more loving and compassionate the more it is transformed in God and united to him, but its own ascent, because of the bonds that unite us in a single Body of Christ, in a single mystery of his love, has an effect on all others as well. He wishes to realize in each one of us, in me, “the silent embrace with which Christ presents all creation to the Father to restore it to his plan of salvation.” Thus the second connection we notice is that the drama of the journey that we see play out before us in the Spiritual Canticle is but the flip side of this great redemptive journey of Jesus Christ. It is not only the bride’s response to his movement—her ascent in response to his descent—but in fact his movement within her, of both descent and ascent, down to the depth of humility, poverty, and the identification of love, and ascent to the pure wonder and delight of contemplative union with the Trinity. And indeed the two movements are one and the same, a rich duality that is not a polarization of opposites but a recognition that love is single, that God is both high and low, pouring himself out eternally into the heart of his beloved Son at the heart of the Trinity’s life and pouring himself out into the lowest and most estranged places of our creation, and twitching the threads of the two to draw them back together into unity once again. A spiritual life of true depth and breadth surpasses the dichotomy between these two and harmonizes them as one. For it is neither preoccupied with seeking its own happiness and well-being, its own salvation, in forgetfulness of others—which begets self-righteousness and contempt of one’s neighbor, narrowness of vision and focus on petty things—nor is it so focused upon tending to the needs of others and entering into the darkness out of love for them that it forgets the primacy of the interior mystery, the ascent to the light, the surrender to the light, the hidden transformation of the heart and profound communion with the Trinity. Jesus shows us the way: that every impulse of the heart’s longing should be directed to the Father, and that even the movement of descent in compassionate love, the movement to the Cross and to hell, is but part of a greater movement of ascension, in the resurrection of love and life, to the bosom of the Father. This is the way that Jesus walked before us, and we are integrated into it; we are made participants in it; we are assimilated into his own redemptive mystery, and in it not only find our own salvation but spread the fruits of salvation to many others. We see in all of this that the work of the world’s redemption is unfolding itself not primarily in external things—in structures and institutions, in governments, or in exterior reforms—but in the hidden recesses of human hearts touched and transformed by grace, and in the concrete love that is born of this transformation, a love manifest in both prayer and act. In other words, God performs this great work of weaving the broken world together in the very heart of his beloved, and through it. Pouring out the grace of redemption from the opened heart of Jesus Christ on the Cross and in the Eucharist, and from the side that bears its wounded openness even in the Resurrection, he meets us in our own journey through darkness to light, where we call out for the Beloved. *** NOTES *** 1 . See for example The Dark Night of the Soul, 2.20.5. on page 445. The example of fire consuming a log of wood is given in 2.10.1-2 on pages 416-417 (though it also appears very briefly in the Ascent of Mount Carmel 2.8.2, p.174). 2 . Ibid., 35. 3 . Leo XIV, “He also went to preach to the spirits in prison,” General Audience of September 24, 2025. The unity within the Spiritual Canticle is quite beautiful albeit perhaps not immediately noticeable at first glance. But when it come to align in the imagination, the whole poem forms a beautiful picture, an “interior landscape” of the soul’s journey from the earliest beginnings of her desire, when, wounded by the love of her Bridegroom, she seeks him out in solitude and prayer, and unto the highest blossoming—in heaven—of the nuptial intimacy for which she was created. She finds herself welcomed into the land of her Beloved, into his embrace, the true homeland, where she knows and loves God, the Blessed Trinity, as she has always been known and loved by him.
But in addition to this interior landscape, the impression of an external landscape also emerges; yet it is a landscape which, in the light of what we discerned in the previous reflection, is more spiritual than material, more heavenly than earthly, though in this case spirit pervades matter and heaven embraces earth. Let us look succinctly at the bride’s journey through this landscape of beauty and love to the consummation that awaits her. Wounded by the tender and loving touch of the Bridegroom, she cries out in painful longing: Where have you hidden, Beloved, and left me moaning? You fled like the stag after wounding me; I went out calling you, but you were gone.1 And she seeks after him, asking the shepherds who go up through the sheepfolds to the hill, “If by chance you see him whom I love most, tell him I am sick, I suffer, and I die” with longing for him who alone is my life and my satisfaction. But she does not dwell long with the shepherds, for no created intermediary, as important a role as they play, can give her in fullness the One whom she desires, and who has called her to himself. And so she goes forth: Seeking my Love I will head for the mountains and for watersides, I will not gather flowers, nor fear wild beasts; I will go beyond strong men and frontiers.2 And along this way the bride passes through thickets and groves of living beauty planted by the hand of her Beloved, and seeks through them, too, traces of him. O woods and thickets, planted by the hand of my Beloved! O green meadow, coated, bright, with flowers, tell me, has he passed by you? Pouring out a thousand graces, he passed these groves in haste; and having looked at them, with his image alone, clothed them in beauty.3 His beauty touches her everywhere, and everything speaks of him. And yet with his image and semblance alone have they been clothed. She must have more. So she calls out to him, touched by these glimpses of his beauty in the thickets and the groves, and by this not satisfied but stirred to yet greater longing and need: Ah, who has the power to heal me? now wholly surrender yourself! Do not send me any more messengers, they cannot tell me what I must hear. All who are free tell me a thousand graceful things of you; all wound me more and leave me dying of, ah, I-don’t-know-what behind their stammering.4 She finds in these words of message, in these lights of reason and truth, much more than mere semblance. And through them she is stirred to raise her sights still higher. In their stammering she hears him, the “I-don’t-know-what” of his own unmediated touch, his own uncreated beauty. And so she prays to him directly with ardent longing and asks for him to make himself known, to come and save her, for by her own light and strength she cannot find him. She asks him to extinguish her suffering and to take at last what he has “stolen,” her heart, that she may be ever with him in the fullness of union. Indeed, gazing deep into the mystery of faith, which, like a silvered-over face, conceals and yet reveals the countenance and mystery of the One she desires, she at last encounters him. And it is too much for her! How do you endure O life, not living where you live, and being brought near death by the arrows you receive from that which you conceive of your Beloved? Why, since you wounded this heart, don’t you heal it? And why, since you stole it from me, do you leave it so, and fail to carry off what you have stolen? Extinguish these miseries, since no one else can stamp them out; and may my eyes behold you, because you are their light, and I would open them to you alone. Reveal your presence, and may the vision of your beauty be my death; for the sickness of love is not cured except by your very presence and image. O spring like crystal! If only, on your silvered-over faces, you would suddenly form the eyes I have desired, which I bear sketched deep within my heart. Withdraw them, Beloved, I am taking flight! Bridegroom Return, dove, the wounded stag is in sight on the hill, cooled by the breeze of your flight.5 He appears, and yet she is not ready for the impact of his presence, and he must intervene himself to prepare her for the union which she desires, to make her heart and flesh capable of union with the eternal Love that is her everything. And this leads us to the verses that we explored in the previous reflection. She discovers in her Beloved the mountains and lonely wooded valleys, the beauty of all things—the beauty that she desires which surpasses all created beauty, which is forever perfect and complete, the limitless glory which alone fulfills the infinite yearning of her heart for goodness and love. And this encounter itself prepares her to drink yet more deeply from the wellspring of his being, until, little by little, she is made capable of drinking in God himself the very life of God, breathing with him his very own breath, and loving him with his very own love first given to her and alive within her as her own. What the bride encounters in her Beloved here and now, in the encounter of this life, as the fruit of her painful longing and her ardent search, is an anticipation already of the heavenly bliss of eternity that awaits her. Let us give one tiny little example which is nonetheless significant. As John notes: “Lonely valleys are quiet, pleasant, cool, shady, and flowing with fresh waters; in the variety of their groves and in the sweet song of the birds, they afford abundant recreation and delight to the senses, and in their solitude and silence they refresh and give rest.”6 This is already in stanza 14. But all of these things recur again at the end of the poem, and yet now no more constrained by the bride’s frail capacity or limited either to an earthly image or an imperfect glimpse. Rather, all is given in the limitless consummation of face-to-face vision, heart-to-heart embrace, in eternity: She lived in solitude, and now in solitude has built her nest; and in solitude he guides her, he alone, who also bears in solitude the wound of love. Let us rejoice, Beloved, and let us go forth to behold ourselves in your beauty, to the mountain and to the hill, to where the pure water flows, and further, deep into the thicket. And then we will go on to the high caverns in the rock which are so well concealed; there we shall enter and taste the fresh juice of the pomegranates. There you will show me what my soul has been seeking, and then you will give me, you, my life, will give me there what you gave me on that other day: the breathing of the air, the song of the sweet nightingale, the grove and its living beauty in the serene night, with a flame that is consuming and painless. No one looked at her, nor did Aminadab appear; the siege was still; and the cavalry, at the sight of the waters, descended.7 *** NOTES *** 1 . “The Spiritual Canticle” 1. 2 . Ibid., 2. 3 . Ibid., 4-5. 4 . Ibid., 7-8. 5 . Ibid., 8-13. 6 . Ibid., 527. 14.7. 7 . Ibid., 35-40. If what we explored in the previous reflection remains in some way mysterious and uncertain—for how can God be mountains and valleys, water and wind, when he is purely spiritual and does not possess materiality in himself—perhaps the commentary of John of the Cross himself can aid us. In what manner is God experienced as all of these things? John writes of the experience of the soul in union with God:
The soul sees and tastes abundance and inestimable riches in this divine union. She finds all the rest and recreation she desires, and understands secrets and strange knowledge of God, which is another of the foods that taste best to her. She experiences in God an awesome power and a strength that sweep away every other power and strength. She tastes there a splendid spiritual sweetness and gratification, discovers true quiet and divine light, and tastes sublimely the wisdom of God reflected in the harmony of his creatures and works. She has the feeling of being filled with blessings and being empty of evils and far removed from them. And, above all, she understands and enjoys inestimable refreshment of love, which confirms her in love. These in substance are the affirmations of the two stanzas. The bride says in these stanzas that the Beloved is all these things in himself, and he is so also for her, because in such superabundant communications from God the soul experiences and knows the truth of St. Francis’ prayer: My God and all things. Since God is all things to the soul and the good that is in all things, the communication of this superabundance is explained through the likeness that the goodness of the things mentioned in these stanzas has to it, which we shall explain in our commentary on each of the verses. It should be known that what is explained here is present in God eminently and infinitely, or better, each of these sublime attributes is God, and all of them together are God. Inasmuch as the soul in this case is united with God, she feels that all things are God, as St. John experienced when he said: Quod factum est, in ipso vita erat (That which was made, in him was life) [Jn. 1:4].1 “God is all things to the soul and the good that is all things.” This expresses it well, though no words, nothing but experience itself, can penetrate the mystery truly and participate fully in it. John is trying to portray something of the “superabundance” of God by “the likeness that the things mentioned” in the poem “has to it.” But what moves us so much about the glory and majesty of mountains or about the sweetness of wooded valleys, about refreshing water and love-stirring breezes, exists in God in a superabundant manner—in a non-physical, spiritual manner as an attribute proper to himself, indeed as the unity of his simple being. Thus, in a manner far greater than mountains, God is “affluent, vast, beautiful, graceful, bright, and fragrant.” And like wooded valleys God is “quiet, pleasant, cool, shady, and flowing with fresh waters.” In God are found “many strange kinds and powers never before seen by humans, and they cause surprise and wonder in anyone who sees them.” And the “rivers” of God’s love and goodness “besiege and inundate” the heart receptive to him, “fill up all the low and empty,” and bring such recollection that they “muffle and suppress every other sound.” And the “love-stirring breezes” of God “are understood” as “the attributes and graces of the Beloved that by means of this union assail the soul and lovingly touch her in her substance.” As John explains: “This most sublime and delightful knowledge of God and his attributes which overflows into the intellect from the touch produced in the substance of the soul by these attributes of God, is called by the soul the whistling of these breezes. Of all the delight the soul here enjoys, this delight is the most exalted.” The love-stirring breeze expresses an aspect of the sublime manner in which God gives himself to a person who is disposed to receive him, and to whom he desires to give himself in this way (though he shall do so for all of us in the consummation of the next life, and even more so). For “just as the whistling of the breeze pierces deeply into the hearing organ, so this most subtle and delicate knowledge penetrates with wonderful savoriness into the innermost part of the substance of the soul, and the delight is greater than all others. The reason for the delight is that the substance, understood and stripped of accidents and phantasms, is bestowed.” This is “an unveiling of truths about the divinity and a revelation of God’s secrets,” “a manifestation of these naked truths to the intellect, or a revelation of the secrets of God. These are pure spiritual revelations or visions, which are given only to the spirit without the service and help of the senses. Thus what is called the communication of God through hearing is very certain and lofty.”2 This is the highest expression of “hearing the word of the Lord” and receiving it into oneself, and such an experience is founded upon a lifetime of listening to and obeying the word of God in all of its other manifestations—in Scripture and the teaching and life of the Church, in the ordinariness of daily life and the sacramental beauty of all created things, in the light of reason and intellect, in the illumination and guidance of will, and in the awakening of affection. And this deeper hearing, piercing the substance of the spiritual hearing beyond all forms and concepts, beyond the exercise of the senses or the discursive reason, is a created participation (however limited in this life) in the knowledge that the beloved Son has of his eternal Father at the heart of the Trinity. For if we ordinarily come to knowledge in this life through sense contact with the world, from which our intellect abstracts understanding of the essences of things—tree, flower, love, fidelity, beauty, person, and in our case mountains, wooded valleys, rivers, wind piercing the eardrum—what God communicates here happens differently. He bypasses all of these means, and even the interior means of the reason’s capacity and the inner imagination, and touches the “substance of the soul” directly, pouring into it the very substance of his truth and being as God, his “inner secrets.” In other words, he gives himself to the person in the way that he eternally gives himself to the Son in the Holy Spirit whom they share. And, purified and transformed by love, the soul is able to receive him, anticipating sublimely if inchoately the consummation that awaits in the life of eternity. For the “substance of the soul” is what we often term the “heart” (if understood deeply enough), the inner sanctum of the person wherein spirit and body are conjoined beyond thought or feeling. This inner sanctum, while beyond our direct grasp or comprehension—for it is us in our very foundation—is the origin of all thought and feeling and choice and action, wherein the faculties of mind, affectivity, and will are one in their source and suppository. And yet here, in this experience, they are at rest in the pure and intuitive presence of a knowledge that is non-conceptual, in a feeling that is unified in its very origin before being expressed in partial acts, and in a willing that is pure assent to uncreated Love, and thus greatest freedom. This is the direct presence and reciprocal communication of Lover and beloved, God and the human person, Christ and his chosen bride. And if it seems too complicated to try and explain, as we have done, the nature of the heart and its relation to our faculties, to grasp in what exactly this communication consist, such is not really necessary. The heart that is in love really only desires to know the Beloved, after all. It does not need to preoccupy itself with all these other things. They are in the hands of the Bridegroom. It seeks only to receive his love in its full flood and to reciprocate such love with its entire being and every moment of its life, pressing on to the consummation of eternity, where the reciprocal knowledge and love, the shared communication and intimacy begun in this life, shall find everlasting fulfillment without limit and without end. As John wrote in poetic verse: Upon my flowering breast, which I kept wholly for him alone, there he lay sleeping, and I caressing him there in a breeze from the fanning cedars. When the breeze blew from the turret, as I parted his hair, it wounded my neck with its gentle hand, suspending all my senses. I abandoned and forgot myself, laying my face on my Beloved; all things ceased; I went out from myself, leaving my cares forgotten among the lilies.3 This is “that perfect knowledge of peace and holiness held at no remove,”4 in other word, directly. The soul tastes such knowledge, such love, in the confines of this mortal life, and it cannot help crying out for more, for the full communication that awaits in eternity. And there... There you will show me what my soul has been seeking, and then you will give me, you, my life, will give me there what you gave me on that other day: the breathing of the air, the song of the sweet nightingale, the grove and its living beauty in the serene night, with a flame that is consuming and painless. *** NOTES *** 1 . The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, 526-527.The Spiritual Canticle, 14&15.4-5a 2 . Excerpts are from The Spiritual Canticle, 14&15.6-15. In The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, 527-231. 3 . Ibid., 51-52. “The Dark Night” 6-8. 4 . Ibid., 53. “Stanzas concerning an ecstasy experienced in high contemplation” 2. Mi Amado, las montañas,
los valles solitarios nemorosos, las ínsulas extrañas, los ríos sonorosos, el silbo de los aires amorosos, la noche sosegada en par de los levantes del aurora, la música callada, la soledad sonora, la cena que recrea y enamora. Gocémonos, Amado, y vámonos a ver en tu hermosura al monte y al collado, do mana el agua pura; entremos más adentro en la espesura. Y luego a las subidas cavernas de la piedra nos iremos, que están bien escondidas, y allí nos entraremos, y el mosto de granadas gustaremos. Allí me mostrarías aquello que mi alma pretendía, y luego me darías allí, tú, vida mía, aquello que me diste el otro día: El aspirar del aire, el canto de la dulce filomena, el soto y su donaire, en la noche serena, con llama que consume y no da pena. My Beloved, the mountains, and lonely wooded valleys, strange islands, and resounding rivers, the whistling of love-stirring breezes, the tranquil night at the time of the rising dawn, silent music, sounding solitude, the supper that refreshes, and deepens love. Let us rejoice, Beloved, and let us go forth to behold ourselves in your beauty, to the mountain and to the hill, to where the pure water flows, and further, deep into the thicket. And then we will go on to the high caverns in the rock which are so well concealed; there we shall enter and taste the fresh juice of the pomegranates. There you will show me what my soul has been seeking, and then you will give me, you, my life, will give me there what you gave me on that other day: the breathing of the air, the song of the sweet nightingale, the grove and its living beauty in the serene night, with a flame that is consuming and painless. The Spiritual Canticle, 14-15.36-39 Some experiences cannot be adequately expressed in words, and this is the more true the more profound an experience is. Or rather no mere words can ever communicate exhaustively the rich fullness of reality’s truth and abundance. But the words of poetry, through their beauty and their succinctness, can often invite one to share an experience more directly than their prose counterpart, which tends to be received more as instruction or teaching given at a distance—unless, of course, the prose itself becomes a form of poetic expression. In the poem, in the poetic outpouring, we have “the breath of experience itself.” This is certainly true if we wish to draw near to the heart of the saints and their experience of God, and thus to know God ourselves more deeply, and the intimacy of his love. For example, the prose writings of John of the Cross, written at the request of others, pale in comparison with the simplicity, beauty, and freedom of his poetry, which is not bogged down by his use of scholastic terminology and his tendency to offer ascetical directives or categorical stages (which often disrupt the flow of the gratuitous wonder and also narrow the true breadth of spiritual experience to something more easily communicated for purposes of practical guidance). It is understandable why he does this, trying to make his own experience as expressed in his poetry more accessible to others, but we should take his prose with “a grain of salt” (as he did himself), realizing that the real fire lies in the poems themselves—or rather in the experience that the poems express at the very moment of encounter—a fire which cannot be adequately translated into the form of prose (or poetry for that matter) without losing something of its depth and breadth. But it is also true that unfolding and exploring (in prose) the rich words in a poem can help us to hear that poem more deeply, and to respond more readily to its call. And the more directly such words adhere to the purity of expression and impact in the poem, the more they help to build this bridge. So what do the stanzas quoted above seek to communicate and to make accessible to us? Well, let us first ask a question: What kind of God to we encounter in these stanzas? What are his defining characteristics? Let us note just a few: He is adventure. He is beauty. He is generosity. He is intimacy and love. He is the fulfillment of every desire. He is the one in whom the beauty of all things, including of the soul united to him, both exists and finds its everlasting consummation. He is also the harmonization of opposites, the communion of paradoxes. He is both silence and song, solitude and togetherness, strangeness and familiarity, freedom from all bodily need and the supper that refreshes flesh and spirit, pure spiritual mystery and the abundance of earthly, sensory imagery; he is light and darkness, consuming without pain, a mystery into whom one enters ever more deeply and yet in whom one has always already been at home. Take only the first two stanzas quoted. The Beloved is mountains and valleys, wooded and solitary, majestic and expansive and yet warm, sheltering, and hidden, and he hides us within himself as in the very bosom of the mountains. He is strange islands wherein are to be found countless things never before guessed by human imagination, things to awaken ceaseless wonder and delight for eternity without end. To love God and be loved by him is to be ever discovering new depths of beauty and goodness that one did not know before, not only through every moment of this life but also in heaven. For the heart of the life of those who behold the very face of God is to plunge ever deeper into this inexhaustible mystery and to contemplate its beauty, letting it irradiate them like rivers of glory and thrill their heart with its love-stirring breezes. And yet if God is the glory of this never-ceasing discovery and delight, he is also the gentleness, restfulness, and peace—the contentedness and relaxed surrender—of the tranquil night at the time of rising dawn, where light and darkness intermingle in a single harmonious symphony of beauty, and the whole world is at rest. Yes, he is silent music: he is the music beyond all earthly music that sounds deeper and fuller than any created sound and yet also echoes in utter silence, in the silence by which the eternal Word is ever spoken in love by the heavenly Father, resounding in the breath of the Spirit. And he is sonorous solitude: he is the beauty of authentic aloneness, in which all the peripheralizing influences of the crowd, all the anonymity, busyness, and noise is forgotten and left behind, and all the forces that pull us out of ourselves and out of him, causing disquiet, confusion, and fear, are dissolved. And yet this solitude is not aloneness but togetherness, deeper than anything possible in the crowd, for it is the mutual presence of Lover and Beloved cherishing their shared union and speaking in words known only to love. And let us note an amazing truth. When John speaks of the Beloved in his poem, he does not say “My Beloved is like the mountains and the lonely wooded valleys;” rather, he says quite simply “My Beloved, the mountains and the lonely wooded valleys.” In other words, in God he does not find mere semblance, or something that resembles the beauty and grandeur of mountains and the peaceful shadedness of wooded valleys. Rather he finds in God the superabundance of these realities in their very origin. This does not mean that God is creation or that creation is God, but rather that all things that exist in our cosmos, parceled out into radiant albeit limited multiplicity, take their origin from God himself in his abundant fullness; to the degree that they participate in being, they participate in God, in who and how he is. And thus when we read these words, we should not think that God is like mountains and wooded valleys, like water and a supper that refreshes, like winds and all the rest—no, rather, we should recognize that God is in some manner all of these things (and thus the Origin of their created, participatory being), but in a way far beyond our comprehending, in his simple and essential being as God, as the eternal circumincession in love of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Thus if we have in our lifetime been moved to tears while the sun rises over the horizon before our eyes, or filled with wonder and delight at the majesty of a range of mountains or the rich foliage that is nestled at their knees, or filled with gratitude and peace in a supper shared with those we love, or had the heartache that the beauty of music awakens, and the longing that blossoms in authentic solitude, or been touched and moved to gratitude by teardrops falling upon our upraised face, or astounded by the expansive beauty of the nocturnal sky sparkled with countless stars and the moon, simple and serene—if we have experienced any beauty or goodness in our life, we have experienced God. For his light glimmers through all that exists, all that has being, and without him it would not be. “For in him all things live and move and have their being...and ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made” (Acts 17:28; Rom 1:20). And if the sight or experience of any of these things have stirred in our heart a longing for more, a thirst to plunge into beauty and goodness and to drink it to the full, then we have longed for God. And in God alone will we find what we desire, the satisfaction of all our desires and the journey without end. Yes, in this adventure the destination already holds us from the very beginning, and rather than lessening our amazement and sense of adventure this only deepens it, as we delve more and more deeply, in the awe of wonder-filled contemplation and ardent love, into the heart of the Beloved who is: the mountains and lonely wooded valleys, strange islands, and resounding rivers, the whistling of love-stirring breezes, the tranquil night at the time of the rising dawn, silent music, sounding solitude, the supper that refreshes, and deepens love. Let us move now from speaking of the reality of interior freedom to the beautiful mystery that is both its source and its consummation, the path that leads to such freedom and also the wellspring from which it flows, since it is, as we indicated, a fruit of God’s grace within us. Namely, let us explore the mystery of prayer. Having written much on the practical and theological aspects of prayer elsewhere (see for example the sections in From Glory Unto Glory), I would like rather to try to go deeper. Indeed, in this whole trajectory of reflections that we are now pursuing, this is the goal: to try to enter a place of greater docility, presence, and openness, so that we may see with more simplicity and purer vision the truth of God’s gift and call, and so may respond to it with greater freedom and joy. For we carry about within us so many false ideas about ourselves and about God, about who he wishes to be for us and who he wants us to be for him, and indeed about so many little aspects of life, faith, and prayer. In the correcting and healing of these, the path before us can be embraced with less self-focused control and with greater confidence in the truth, clarity, and simplicity of the way. So let us lean into God and open ourselves to his light. As we lean into his love and his mystery, he can align these things aright and illumine our thoughts, so that we may think in truth and thus feel in truth, and thinking and feeling in truth, we may act in authentic freedom, the freedom of love.
Whenever a person is first awakened to faith, hope, and love of God, these dispositions start in their infancy—indeed they are implanted into us in baptism, as it were, in an embryonic state—and only through continual exercise and irradiation with the light of God do they gradually grow to maturity. And this means that our practice of prayer in the beginning will be quite “earthly,” bound to our normal way of experiencing, analyzing, and responding to the world. There is nothing wrong with this; but it is also a stage that we are meant to grow beyond, just as we are not always meant to read only at a third-grade level. Eventually, to carry the image further, we are meant to be able to read the great literature of the world, from Dickens and Dostoevsky to the great Fathers and Doctors of the Church. And this maturity does not mean we leave behind simplicity or what is good and true in nature and natural ways of thinking and relating, but rather that we discover a deeper simplicity, and a thorough healing and liberation of nature, one possible only by the maturation and transformation accomplished by grace. But in the beginning we tend to approach God in a rather “base” way, in the likeness of our own imperfect, wounded humanity rather than on the basis of his own purity and beauty. As Saint Paul expressed it: “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood. So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor 14:11-13). And the truth is that we need to bring our humanity to him—all of it—and not only in the beginning, but always, even to the highest expressions of the mystical life and intimacy with God in unmediated vision. For it is precisely our humanity, and not something else, which is to be purified, elevated, and transformed to become a partaker of the divine nature and made to share in the Trinity’s very life. But our humanity is incapable of this in its merely natural state, a state which before its transformation is adapted only to visible, tangible, earthly things. This is why God has given us his own being so generously, has grafted into us his own life through the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love (and also the gifts of the Spirit that manifest and deepen the operation of these virtues through all the parts of our humanity). It is only through faith, hope, and love that our humanity is sufficiently illumined, opened, and elevated to be made capable of communion with God himself in all of his transcendent mystery, rather than relating to him only as a “distant one” glimpsed imperfectly through our worldly experience and understanding, our accustomed way of operating. These capacities placed within us by God’s grace do not replace the activity of our natural faculties, nor do they destroy them or take away their importance. Rather, they seek to touch and pervade them until they, too, are purified and accommodated to God, a process that can happen to a degree in this life but which must wait for the consummation of the new creation to be realized fully, where what Job said comes true in all of us: “And from my flesh I shall see God” (Jb 19:26). Faith purifies the natural activity of our intellect even as it surpasses it, opening it to contact with something that infinitely transcends the intellect’s capacity for comprehension or insight, even as it fulfills all of these capacities super-abundantly. Hope purifies the capacity of the affections and memory and their innate longing for the good, for happiness, and indeed their sensitivity to sorrow, compassion, joy, and every other deep feeling; and it also opens this affectivity to something beyond itself which cannot be directly felt in the manner of ordinary feeling, since it communicates itself in a different way than all the realities of which we are accustomed in this life. Love purifies the activity of the will both by detaching it from disordered aims and acts and also by dilating its capacity and orientation, so that its “yes” may be directed to that reality which lies beyond all things, which of itself cannot be attained by the choice of the will and yet calls for all of the will—indeed for the whole being of the person—in order to be experienced as its true and ultimate fulfillment. And in this process of acclimation, of purification and transformation, there occurs a “death” to one’s natural way of operating even as there blossoms a “birth,” a “rising” into a new way of living—of thinking, feeling, and choosing—grounded on the basis of these new virtues placed within us by God.1* Or better said, a new way of living is born in which we act always in union with the God who is ever active within us, who has set us free to be joined ceaselessly to his own activity, his own divine manner of seeing, feeling, and loving. But as in all deep things—though here in an infinitely more elevated manner—one must pass through an unknowing in order to enter into a new form of knowing, through a loss of feeling and experience, a void of apparent nothingness, in order to come to experience on a new ground a reality that was henceforth hidden, and through a purgation of love that is a crucible to every disordered love and desire that is focused on the self or created things apart from God, thus diminishing and constricting the heart that would take flight into the heart of the Trinity. The maturity of the Christian life indeed is dependent entirely upon the growth of these three theological virtues of faith, hope, and love within us, spreading out also through all aspects of our humanity and life in wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord. And the fruit of such a transformation of our being, the growing and development of this embryonic gift into full maturity, is “charity, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, generosity, gentleness, faithfulness, modesty, self-control, chastity” (Gal 5:22-23). Such is the beautiful interrelationship between the theological virtues and the gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit. But how do we understand this “mystic death” in order to attain to the full life of intimacy with God, to the radiant maturity of faith, hope, and love? Is it something like the practice of the Asiatic religions or the “new age” that adopts so liberally from them? Or is it something else? Let us take a look at that for a moment before marking out clearly how the way of Christian holiness differs so radically from it. In this regard, let us quote a Carthusian monk, whose words are both wonderfully succinct and deliciously profound, speaking as he is from a lifetime of seeking the face of God in silence and solitude. He says: The goal is not the destruction of the passions but their rehabilitation according to a true priority of values. Grace builds on nature. To the extent that the goal remains unfulfilled, we must cultivate attentiveness, vigilance—the nepsis of which we have spoken, that watches at the door of the heart in order to turn away hurtful desires before they can even enter into the heart. ‘Apatheia, impassibility, does not consist in not experiencing passions, but in not welcoming them’ (Philokalia, ‘Centuries of Kallistos and Ignatius’). But this is accomplished over a long period. It is more efficacious to exorcise the problem by nurturing what is good. We must focus the energy of the passions and direct them towards the good, towards God. Modern psychologists tell us that we must sublimate the power of the passions, transforming them from lower, more sensual desires, to higher, nobler, more spiritual ones. The ancients knew this very well. ‘The perfect soul’, says St Maximus (On Charity, III, 93), 1500 years ago, ‘is the one in whom the very power of the passions is turned towards God.’ There it is: peace, hesychia.2 Every religion and every human being who has sought to live their life in all its fullness has discovered the need for a certain separation from the world outside in order to enter within the heart. This is evidently necessary to keep the attention from being distracted by other things while it focuses on the sole object that it wishes to examine more closely. All study requires this, and all prayer presupposes it to a certain degree. But what interests us is something else entirely. It is a matter of the search for God, for the Absolute. Mystical experience is found in all major religions; they are unanimous in saying that such experience requires detachment in regard to every created thing (as such) and the going beyond every representation. God is Wholly Other. It is this that is the final purpose of our solitude; it is therefore worth the effort to understand a little more exactly, because there are counterfeits of solitude-peace that are not available to Christians. For example, yoga is a spiritual path of detachment that goes extremely far. It aspires to detachment from the senses, imagination, discursive reason, passion, egoism. To a certain degree it generates mastery over physiological and psychological functions, and integration of the personality. It is a wisdom tradition because it raises a person beyond the pull of desires and contingency, and this is its solution to the problem of suffering. One has only to look at the huge, peaceful immobility of the Buddha sculpture. It signifies the quiescence of all its powers; its perfection can be compared to dreamless sleep. But in his depths, the yogi ends in defeat, because his blissfulness is locked in himself. His efforts succeed only in isolating his own essential being in order to have a direct intuitive experience of it. His goal is en-statis (as opposed to ex-statis) of soul that contemplates itself in its own essence at a level that lies deeper than the physical or psychological. This is already a lot for one human being... The cords of desire and therefore of sin are cut, but there is no love (because love, too, is a passion to be overcome) and therefore no positive virtue. The disciplines of yoga are able to obtain one of the highest forms of purely natural blessedness, but it is far from the vision of God. It creates a void in the soul, and encloses the soul in itself, which creates a hostile climate for mystical gifts (see the implacable rejection of ‘distinct apprehensions’ in the mysticism of St John of the Cross).3* But even if it is logical within itself and conforms to the philosophical principles to which it subscribes, it excludes the experience of God, because either it treats the soul as a single monad, an absolutely independent little world, outside of which nothing exists, or else the soul is the Absolute (Brahman), God, and its task is to free itself not only from its attachments to anything else whatever (which is nothing but illusion—Maya), but even from its own unique personality in order to be reabsorbed in its source. It is not a question of union in love, because in the end there is only the Self. But equally it is possible for the void to create an open door for all sorts of incursions from the unconscious and the demonic (Matthew 12:43-5)—you remember the gospel parable of the spirits’ return to the soul that is ‘empty, swept, and put in order. Then it goes and brings along seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and live there; and the last state of that person is worse than the first’4 Imposing “death” upon oneself, in other words, does not ensure the blossoming of faith, hope, and love. This is not only because a pure emptiness like that conceived of in the Eastern mysticisms is not an authentic goal for humanity, but also because the true purification that we need—and the true transition from our natural mode of operating to the divine—is not something that we can do of ourselves. Thus, trying to create this transition ourselves, trying to impose silence and nothingness on our faculties, can be just as contrary to the exercise of these virtues as are our disordered clingings to earthly goods or to our own ideas and projects and plans. For in fact it is one of our projects and plans, a subtle seeking of the self rather than an ecstasy—a movement-out-of-self—to the Beloved of our heart, in whom alone we are free and fulfilled. Rather, we should allow God to take the lead and to purify and detach out heart from what binds it to its all-too-worldly way of thinking, feeling, and acting. So too in our experience of prayer. We should not try to impose upon our prayer the contours that we think—through our own ideas or through things that we have read—are the most holy. Rather, God shall lead us along the organic path that is uniquely our own. The passage continues, noting the essential disposition necessary to keep us from going astray on our search for peace and purity of heart: looking always upon the Beloved, and seeking him alone! The will and spirit, the heart...must be firmly focused on God himself, the absolute Being who is Goodness and Truth, on whom everything depends. The ascetical effort to create an emptiness, a listening ear, a heart that is attentive must be simply a response to the divine activity; it must be God who begins to silence the heart by infusing a hidden taste for an immediate presence, and gives it a glimpse of obscure light quite different from that brought by concepts and words, and enables it to divine the presence of a Person, who beholds, who communicates. Sometimes certain beginners, having read a number of spiritual books and absorbed philosophical teaching on God’s transcendence of all discursive knowledge, quickly come to the simplistic conclusion that we can know nothing of God and that we ought to remain before him with a mind that is devoid of images and ideas. They are then able deliberately to impose on themselves a complete vacuum that resembles certain aspects of mystical emptiness but is not the same. It is only an absence, a silence effected by the will in consequence of reason (and therefore by reason), and it does not admit the subtle intuition of the intellect, informed by faith, nor the impetus of authentic love that transcends all mediation to touch the beloved Person, that ensures the quality of presence essential to true ‘emptiness’. This is one of those situations where conceptual knowledge of the spiritual life far exceeds the person’s development of the spiritual life itself, and the genuine abilities of faith and above all, love. We must have the humility to follow the activity of the Spirit and not wish to look for shortcuts. This false emptiness is bitter and its fruits are impatience with oneself (and with God!), self-centeredness, a critical spirit, and judgment of others. Thus the energy is brutally repressed without being assimilated, and looks for an outlet for its aggressive self-affirmation in outbursts of anger, excessive activity, miscellaneous compensations, etc. This is not the only cause of the impression of repressed and frustrated energy given by certain religious; it is only one application of the principle of repression, the refusal to incorporate the full human reality in the spiritual ascent. There are others. All the great teachers agree: one must not depart from meditation, the ordinary way, for as long as it is fruitful and helps us to focus on God, to know him and love him. It is only when the soul finds it impossible to profit from these means that it leaves them. The fundamental principle is always to follow grace to let the Spirit lead us, instead of wishing to impose our own way of seeing, which is fatally deficient and selfish. Many saints have never left a more or less discursive way, but that has not lessened their sanctity in the slightest. For all, outside of prayer-time, a discursive element in the sense of lectio divina is always part of the spiritual life. Each person has a name known only to God, each has this way to follow. For any particular person (and only particular persons exist) there is no higher or lower way. There is only the way traced by God for this particular person, and personal perfection consists in following this way with the greatest fidelity and docility possible. The spiritual life and the life of prayer always grow into greater simplicity, and it is important that each person should consciously encourage this tendency by seeking simplicity and purity in life as in prayer. It is always appropriate to yield to moments of silence in prayer, to be silent in order to let God speak if he will. But when God acts more directly on the soul and ushers it into another form of knowledge and an experience whose nature is more passive (which is only the secret activity of ‘ordinary’ grace become conscious to a certain extent), that depends only on God and his plans for the particular person. Let each hear the voice of the Spirit within. In this matter too we must be poor, we must be humble and trusting. Most of us are not strong enough for God to inundate us with manifest grace. We would become proud and claim it as our own; we would grasp the gifts instead of yielding to the Giver; we would lose the invaluable means of pure faith. And who knows? The light of grace is so translucent and delicate that its presence in all its purity remains hidden, often unperceived. It is only when it passes through our sensibility that it becomes visible. The mystics consider ecstasy as a weakness of the body that is not yet completely in harmony with the Spirit. There are those in whose life everything is ‘ordinary’, simple, humble. But they radiate a certain peace, a certain joy. In such a person we can perceive a soul whose heart is so given to God that this condition is their deepest reality, but so ‘natural’ that it is not possible to pin it down in discrete acts. It is scarcely conscious of itself.5 God gives a sense of his presence that grows very subtly at the root of our consciousness, the seed of the awareness that is made possible through faith-hope-love. And as this sense grows in intensity, depth, nuance, and maturity, it proves to be a lodestar that shows us how we are to pray. Or said more accurately, God’s own guiding hand shall be what determines our course of prayer, and all that we need to do is be docile, pliable, and receptive—and earnestly trusting—as we seek him wherever he may lead. Seeking a false emptiness, a certain feeling or experience, or clinging to a certain way of operating, or trying to force his hand in whatever manner leads to many ills; not only is it presumptuous and therefore obstructing of the gifts that God actually desires to give, but it also does harm to our humanity. This is particularly true if this forcefulness consists in any of the many forms of “repression” in which our humanity, in all of its messiness, littleness, and indeed brokenness is not integrated in the movement toward God. We grow in prayer not merely or primarily through ascetical practices directed toward ordering our faculties or suppressing movements that are not desirable within us, but rather by allowing everything within us to live before the loving gaze of God, before the touch of Christ and the Spirit, which alone can heal what is wounded within us, set free what is enslaved, order what is disordered, and bring to maturity what is inchoate. And in fact this “asceticism,” if one may call it such, is not less demanding than the other kind; it is only more real, authentic, and humble. For it calls for deeper vulnerability with myself and with God, a transparent honesty with all that lives within me and the willingness to abide with it, to recognize it as a part of myself, in his presence (rather than immediately thrusting it away with ascetical discipline). Gratitude, praise, discernment, listening, contrition, and repentance, deep sorrow for our sin and deep gratitude for God’s loving providence—all of this has a place in this realm. This honesty with all that lives within us does not, however, mean that every passing thought needs to receive our deliberate focus or analysis, or that every part of us needs to be dragged up from the subconscious and into the light. No, there can be a danger of “psychologizing” our prayer as well, which is yet another form of self-focus and subtle conceit, making our time with God focused wholly upon our healing and integration. Rather, this movement occurs with great simplicity and without forcefulness or complicated processes; superficial thoughts can pass by without any trouble because they just stir the surface of the waves; but deeper thoughts which recur or come with an emotional intensity or a weight of distraction can be more explicitly laid before the gaze of Jesus and his mercy, to receive his healing light. And it is he who orders within us what we cannot. But so too, within all of this honesty with what is within oneself, and indeed enfolding it and surpassing it, is the simplehearted act of directing one’s gaze upon the Lord of life and love, seeking to know him more, to sense his presence everywhere, and to praise, thank, adore, and love him at every moment, simply because he is infinitely beautiful and deserving of such love. And we can do this because he has first loved us, and in this very act stirred love awake within us. So the forceful repression of certain aspects of our humanity causes impatience and unnatural tension, manifest in irritability, restlessness, harshness and undue rigidity both with oneself and with others. But so too does the preoccupation with all that is happening within me and the miserly over-focus on my own healing and wholeness, rather than on conversion of heart and humble devotion to the One who has called me, who as the Bridegroom in the Song of Songs has said: Arise, my love, my beautiful one, and come to me, for behold, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth, the time of singing has come, and the cooing of the turtledove is heard in our land. The fig tree puts forth her first figs, and the vines, with their blossoms, give forth fragrance. Arise, my love, my beautiful one, and come to me. O my dove, in the clefts of the rock, in the hidden places of the cliff, let me see your face, let me hear your voice, for your voice is sweet, and your face is lovely. (Sg 2:10-14) We see that the disorders of the spiritual life all consist in one way or another in self-centeredness, in the movement away from God and toward the self, the curvatus in se “curving in upon oneself” mentioned by Saint Augustine. Whether this is a rigid control of all one’s interior being leading to harmful repression and disintegration, or whether it is daydreaming and distraction rooted in self-love (daydreaming “is nothing but the projection and illusory satisfaction of our desires”6), or any of the other forms of disordered self-seeking in sin and selfishness, all of these bring harm to ourselves and also often to others. But the beautiful truth is that when we allow our hearts to be magnetized by the beauty of God and drawn to seek him with tender and ardent love—a love that starts small but grows exponentially as the heart is ravished and drawn by him—then we find ourselves inhabiting our true self even more authentically. Here, in going out of ourselves to the Beloved, we come home to ourselves truly—“habitare secum,” to dwell within oneself, as Saint Benedict said. Since we were created in the image of the beloved Son of the Father, who dwells forever in his Abba’s bosom, gazing upon his face and reciprocating his love, and receiving in him all being, life, and light, we come to dwell within ourselves only through our return to him. This is the paradox of which Jesus spoke when he said: “He who would save his life will lose it; but he who loses it for my sake shall find it” (Mt 16:25). But we have gotten off track in our train of thought and reflection. Let us return to the text that we quoted. While a healthy discipline born of wholehearted commitment is always right and necessary in approaching God, manifest in our fidelity to prayer and to concrete love, as well as in the gentle and tender direction of our attention away from ourselves and toward the One who loves us, discipline should never become the end goal for us. Nor should it suffocate the spirit of lightness and play that God desires for all of his children, even as the full maturity of playfulness comes to blossom only in the heart that has been made free by love. In other words, we are meant to play all along the road to perfect play. As we seek to play in his presence, we find our freedom grow a little at a time, small and hindered at first by our weakness of faith and trust in God and our preoccupation with ourselves, and liberated more and more as we find confidence in God’s loving providence and his tender care for us, and blossoming fully when our hearts are ravished and captured by God’s beauty and surrendered totally to him, resting filially in the Father’s heart, united totally to Christ the Bridegroom, and pervaded peacefully by the Spirit whom they share. And along this way God will touch us in countless ways known only to himself, making his love and truth manifest to us—to touch and cherish our hearts, to bring order and harmony within us in ways that we ourselves cannot do, to lead us deeper into prayer, to mature the theological virtues within us, and to enable us to relate to him more authentically as he is based on his very gifts of faith, hope, and love within us. And all in all he will simply love us with the tenderness and generosity that are his, since his greatest delight in regard to all of his creation is to bestow his goodness and undivided attention on each one of his precious and beloved children. In this process it is normal for prayer to progress from a more active and rational exercise to one that is simpler and more affective—indeed more cordial, more of-the-heart—not in the sense of being emotional but in the sense of expressing an intuitive awareness of the presence of the Beloved, and a simplehearted attentiveness to him. One becomes more attuned to him at every moment, and often he manifests himself and even makes the soul aware of a sense of his closeness, of some aspect of his being, or stirs in it a yearning, a longing for him that it did not know before. Such are some of the many manifestations of what is commonly termed “infused contemplation,” the gentle outpouring of God into the receptive heart. And this movement from praying merely in a human manner, based on my own thoughts, feelings, and reasonings, to letting my humanity resonate under God’s touch like the strings of a harp, is a necessary and right development in the prayer of each one of us. It is simply part of the maturation of the relationship of love between God and ourselves. As faith, hope, and love mature within us, we relate to God more directly, more ardently, with the impulse of trust that goes right from our heart to his like an arrow of confidence, with the breadth and depth of a hope that is anchored in him both with strong longing and with peaceful acceptance, and with a love that is both totally surrendered to the will of God and gently, spontaneously fixed upon him, ever contemplating his beauty and goodness and embracing its service in the hearts and lives of all. The particular external contours by which this maturation takes place within us do not really matter: let us leave such things to God. As we read in the quote above, all that is necessary for us is to humbly allow God to lead us rather than to insist on our own ideas concerning our way. This maturation and expansion of grace within me, this full flowering of faith, hope, and love, may lead to the forms of prayer described by some of themystics, or it may transform radically from within—in ways profound, wide, and true even if so subtle that they are hardly noticeable to myself—my ordinary acts of prayer. Regardless, all becomes filled with God and I come to relate to him as a mature partner in a reciprocal dialogue of love, as a bride before her Bridegroom, as a mature son or daughter before a loving Father, as one totally surrendered to and docile to the slightest movement of the Spirit. Whether I am praying the liturgy of the hours with simplicity of heart and crying out to God through the words of the Psalms and Antiphons, or am letting myself be touched intangibly by the Word beyond all words in my lectio divina, or resting in silence with no particular thoughts or considerations in peaceful repose or tender longing, or being inundated with more tangible experiences of God or even receiving the more exceptional graces of mystical insight or visions and locutions, or indeed am simply walking down the road in silence, my hands tucked into my coat because of the cold, or am washing dishes or cleaning the house with a mind and heart fixed upon my Beloved—in all of these ways and more, prayer blossoms from its first beginnings to its full maturity and its abundant fruit. We should not gauge and compare between “better” and “worse,” “higher” and “lower,” for what matters is God’s unique will for every person, God’s unique will for me. And I can be confident that this will, this way, is the best that could possibly be. And in this acceptance I will find not only peace, but abundance of joy and fullness of intimacy, the total transformation and union of my whole humanity, that it may live with God, in God and through God, the very life that he eternally lives, made a partaker in the love and intimacy of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is the gift given to all of us, for it is the very reason for which we were created and redeemed. And whatever its particular experiential resonances in our life on this earth, marked by the limits of mortality, the shadows of a fallen world still on its journey to definitive redemption, and indeed the communion of our heart with our brothers and sisters who still sit in darkness and the shadows of death—whatever its particular resonances in our journey through this world—it shall be consummated for all of us in the direct, unmediated, face-to-face vision of the Trinity in eternity, in the full-hearted and full-bodied embrace of his ravishing mystery, which shall be our endless gladness and our everlasting, ecstatic fulfillment. *** NOTES *** 1 Using the example of a creature who knows only two dimensions (length and width) being introduced to the third dimension (height) by a superior being, the Carthusian whom we are quoting says this: “But let us suppose that the superior being has the power to give him new faculties of knowing, able in themselves to grasp the height of things. And that these faculties are able to be given him in embryonic state, their development being realized by progressive exercise. This is the situation for the theological virtues of faith, of charity and hope that are infused in us by sanctifying grace. It is the same with the gifts of the Holy Spirit which ensure that these virtues operate in a divine manner closer to that of God. In the beginning, the new vision of faith, so different from that of our bodily eyes and our intellect, seems to us to be but a shadow. We see nothing. It is only by exercising our faith, in judging and living according to this vision, that we become adjusted to its mysterious light and that we develop our new eyes. Natural light is so much more accessible that we must first close our eyes to its glare in order to perceive another light that is delicate and utterly other. When the eyes of faith are stronger and refined by the gifts of the Spirit, we are then able to look at the ‘natural’ world, but with a transfigured gaze that perceives a new dimension in it, its real identity, that sees the glory of God resplendent in the face of Christ and in the face of the entire cosmos, assumed in him and for him.” (The Way of Silent Love, 95) 2 . The two quotations in this text are from the following: 1) Writings from the Philokalia on Prayer of the Heart, tr. E. Kadloubovsky and G. E. H. Palmer (London, 1977), pp. 164 ff. 2) Maximus Confessor: Selected Writings, tr. G. C. Berthold, Mahwah: Paulist, 1985. 3 The meaning of this reference to John may not be apparent to all readers, so I want to clarify. He is not saying that John spoke against the practices of the yogi (though he certainly was not one), but rather that insofar as John inclined to excess in the negative focus of his ascesis and theology—to moving beyond all that can be thought, felt, seen, or experienced—he tended to neglect also the more normal expressions of prayer and also any mystical experiences that God might wish to bestow upon a person. His cautions against possessiveness and pride in these areas are always salutary, and yet it is also true that John’s emphasis needs to be balanced in order to be understood rightly in the context of a more holistic, incarnational theology that takes into account the rightful and continued use of our human faculties in relating to God. 4 . A Carthusian, The Way of Silent Love, trans. An Anglican Solitary (Herefordshire, England: Gracewing Publishing, 2008), 88-91. 5 . Ibid., 90-93. 6 . Ibid., 98. In the perspective of this mystery of the one light, and the security of belovedness that it begets in the receptive human heart, we can understand both deeply and simply the reality of interior freedom. The ascetical dimension of the teaching of John of the Cross can best be summarized thus: a guidance for the attainment of interior freedom, the freedom for love and constant communion with God, and the freedom to relate to all created realities in such a way that we love them only in God and through God, with the very liberty and expansiveness of God’s own love.
For it is a fact of human experience that our concerns with the things of this world are often petty and self-centered, grasping and possessive, not so much because of what the things are in themselves as because of how we externalize our interior disorder upon them. We seek for security through our possessions or accomplishments, through our role in society or what people think of us or how much they like us, or we feel a sense of well-being if we think that we have all the material goods that we might need and the enjoyment that our heart desires. There are countless examples of this tendency for the heart to spread the tentacles of disordered attachment outward and to latch onto the realities surrounding us. Indeed, there are countless ways in which we latch onto “spiritual possessions” as well, not only certain prayer practices or experiences, but also one’s own too-narrow understanding or one’s apparent virtues and traits, etc. In the beginning, before being purified, liberated, and transformed in God’s love, the heart finds itself deeply interlaced in a network of possessiveness and attachment; and thus the groundwork for being made free for intimacy with God and his true glorification is the gradual releasing of these bonds. Indeed, John recognizes so deeply that God is ever pressing in upon us with tenderness and generosity, in the desire to fill us with his love, that he says that all that is necessary to be filled with the fullness of God is to be freed from all the disordered attachments that fill us instead. While I would add that there are more positive preparations as well—a growth in a spirit of receptivity, responsiveness, and reverence, a gradual attunement to the manner in which God communicates himself, and a growth in the ardent and all-consuming desire for God being among them—I think that John’s intuition is very illuminating. The path before us is not to ascend to God by the power of our own efforts or to learn how to “gain” or “possess” him by performing some particular series of pious or holy actions. Rather, as we indicated in the previous meditation, true sanctity is born within us not through any accumulation of such things but through purity of heart, which is precisely the interior freedom, joined to ardent love, of which we are speaking. The heart that is interiorly free, living the spirit of the Beatitudes by which the spirit of poverty is abundance of life, is fit to be transformed by God and made a partaker in his divine nature. Indeed, in order for a heart to discover in itself such freedom, the presence of God within it only needs to grow more and more. It will become more and more ravished by God and confident in his provident care, his tender presence, and his generous love, until there is no place within it any more for the petty clinging that would limit its heart from taking flight at every moment into the heart of its Beloved, indeed from its welcoming his coming into its heart in the sacramental beauty of its singular moment of life. And rather than offering a list of examples of possible attachments, it is much better just to express both their essence and their effect upon us, so that we can discern for ourselves, in the light of God’s loving and liberating gaze, the bonds that tie us, so that we may yield them up to his love and his mercy. In essence, a disordered attachment is a disposition or action in our life wherein we set something else in the place that only God can truly inhabit, seeking in it for what can only come from him: love, affirmation, security, peace, serenity, control. All created things are good in themselves, beautiful as God’s gifts to us, and they can communicate his love and care to us in so many ways; but when we abuse and misuse them, whether in the attitudes of our hearts or our actions, we disrupt this flow of love, of free receiving and giving, since it is contrary to the nature of God’s own life at work in us and around us: the total openness in self-giving that knows nothing of the possessive “mine,” but lives rather in the ceaseless joy and perfect security of shared belonging between Lover and Beloved, united always in the consummate happiness of their shared Love. Here “I” and “mine” is enfolded totally within the embrace of “Thou” and “Thine,” within the embrace of the One who cherishes me and cares for me; and thus all is “We” and “Our” together, affirming the uniqueness of “I” even as it fulfills it in the communion of all-enfolding Love. This is the mystery for which we were created; and indeed it is the mystery that approaches us and communicates itself to us both in the depths of our hearts and from the heart of every created thing. When we cling to things in a disordered way, when we grasp for the “mine” apart from the “Thine,” rather, we find our hearts not dilated and set free, liberated from preoccupation and fear, but rather burdened and narrowed, distracted and fretful, always worried about losing control or possession and being left without that of which we don’t want to let go. That is the twofold path before us: the narrow restlessness of being stuck always in ourselves and our own unhealthy fears and desires, or the expansive freedom of spirit and joy of heart, activity born of the wellspring of God’s love and security within us, and the consummation of intimacy with uncreated Love himself: the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Here we see that our clinging to ourselves and to the world for security and peace in fact has the opposite effect upon us—filling us with great grief and misery—and God in his great love desires us to free us from it, so that we may be filled with himself. Indeed he is the source of all God things, all beauty, light, truth, goodness, and joy. And in him all the things of this world can be received and loved aright, loved aright in the freedom of a pure and detached heart. A detached heart, in fact, is one in which the great paradox of love is brought to complete maturity and harmony: to reverence and cherish deeply all things created by God and entrusted to us, and yet to do so with the freedom of spirit necessary for these things to never become the source of our security or hindrances to the openness of our heart to receive and reciprocate God’s love. But in fact the “yet” in this sentence is only an appearance; it does not belong. For we cannot truly love and reverence things as they are in themselves unless we love them with purity and detachment; and such purity frees our hearts to love all things with a depth hitherto unknown, radiant and expansive like God’s own love, for it is indeed made possible through God’s love within us. It is God’s love within us. Yes, we find in all things the same God whom we love beyond all things, and everything, both the depths of inner prayer unmediated by any earthly reality, and the beauty of every moment of our concrete life in relation to the world, becomes filled with God, communicating God to us and carrying back to him our reciprocal gift. But how do we attain to such a state? Do we need to climb up a rugged mountain of ascetical practice and intense discipline, to undergo a program of total stripping away of all things, until we are left with nothing? In the way we most often understand these things, absolutely not. For one, the way in which we think of asceticism and discipline and stripping away is a far cry from the way in which God sees it and the manner in which it actually unfolds in the contours of real life. Perhaps we have read things that make the process appear so elevated, so intense and orderly, and we feel that we can never do what the saints have done. But what is expressed in books is one thing and what is lived in the visceral reality of life is another. It is easy to idealize things, to take refuge in ideas and to impose them impersonally upon life. But life is always both much more messy and much more real, much more organic and much more authentic. And, held by God and his love, it is also always both much more tender and gentle and much more radical than the path that, from our ideas, we would mark out for ourselves. Life is in the hands of God—my life is in the hands of God. And he will mark out for me each day my unique path to him; he will foster in me all the gifts that prepare my heart to receive him; he himself will unveil before me what holds my heart back from him, and he shall aid me in being free of it. Yes, in the end it is he, by the outpouring light of his love irradiating my being silently and secretly—should I only offer my “yes” to his activity—who will work in me what I could never do of myself. My deepest healing and transformation, carrying me from the earliest beginning to the fullest consummation, is ultimately his work and not mine, and my cooperation is but a small part cradled in his great activity, the play of a child in the orbit of his Father’s perfect love and ceaseless delight. And here, indeed, I am released from the need to always look upon myself, and my gaze is set free to be fixed always upon the countenance of Christ, my heart to be led by the Spirit in a beautiful dance, and my spirit to sing ceaselessly to the Abba who loves me. Yes, I am free to be caught up in enraptured contemplation of the very life of the Trinity, in whom is the fullness of beauty, life, and joy. *This is the complete introduction to my newest book, From Glory Unto Glory: A Foundational Vision of Our Transformation in the Trinity. A Spiritual Theology. This book is a comprehensive collection, arranged in an orderly manner and according to topic, of all my writings relating to the "spiritual life" in the deepest sense of the term: they explore prayer, growth in holiness, and the journey to transformation and consummation, founded upon the great mystery of God's love for us and his call to be share in his own life and love as Trinity.*
In his most mature and glorious work, The Living Flame of Love, the 16th century poet, priest, and man of prayer, John of the Cross, wrote of the human person’s longing and capacity for God in beautiful words which are as relevant now as when they were first penned. He speaks of the innermost capacities of the human spirit as “caverns” open to the infinite, capable of being filled and satisfied with nothing less than the fullness of God. And when the person is filled with God, united to him in intimate reciprocal love, these caverns are radiant with light from “lamps of fire” which are the attributes of God in their infinite variety and irreducible simplicity: his wisdom, his love, his goodness, and all else that he is in the unity of his being, source and consummation of all that is beautiful, good, and true in the created universe. As John says: O lamps of fire! in whose splendors the deep caverns of feeling, once obscure and blind, now give forth, so rarely, so exquisitely, both warmth and light to their Beloved. In this stanza the soul exalts and thanks its Bridegroom for the admirable favors it receives from its union with him. It states that by means of this union it receives abundant and lofty knowledge of God, which is all loving and communicates light and love to its faculties and feeling. These who were once obscure and blind can now receive illumination and the warmth of love, as they do, so as to be able to give forth light and love to the one who illumined them and filled them with love. True lovers are only content when they employ all they are in themselves, all they are worth, have, and receive, in the beloved; and the greater all this is, the more satisfaction they receive in giving it. The soul rejoices on this account because, from the splendors and love it receives, It can shine brightly in the presence of its Bridegroom and give him love. The verse follows: O lamps of fire! First of all it should be known that lamps possess two properties: They transmit light and give off warmth. To understand the nature of these lamps and how they shine and burn within the soul, it ought to be known that God in his unique and simple being is all the power and grandeur of his attributes. He is almighty, wise, and good; and he is merciful, just, powerful, loving, and so on; and he is the other infinite attributes and powers of which we have no knowledge. Since he is all of this in his simple being, the soul views distinctly in him, when he is united with it and deigns to disclose this knowledge, all these powers and grandeurs, that is: omnipotence, wisdom, goodness, mercy, and so on. Since each of these attributes is the very being of God in his one and only suppositum, which is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and since each one is God himself, who is infinite light or divine fire, we deduce that the soul, like God, gives forth light and warmth through each of these innumerable attributes. Each of these attributes is a lamp that enlightens the soul and gives off the warmth of love.i Such is one of the many examples of the breathtakingly beautiful depth of knowledge and intimacy with God to which John of the Cross, and many other men and women like him throughout the history of the Church, give voice. And yet, even if these words are objectively beautiful and true, it is also a fact that they may appear abstruse or esoteric, far removed from our actual life in this world and our daily concerns. We may not perceive at all either their truth or their relevance to ourselves. They may appear alien and exaggerated, and we find no “point of access” into our own personal lives or experience. This may be a matter of “language translation,” the fact that we have had little or no experience of such a way of thinking and speaking before, and thus need to accommodate to the essence of what is being said, perhaps beyond certain limited ways of expressing it. Or it may be a matter of a lack of preparation on our part, a lack of openness, as John himself says in regards to the caverns of the soul. We may not perceive within us this deep capacity and longing for God because we are so filled and surfeited with earthly goods, to which we cling with possessiveness, pride, and pleasure-seeking. We are often afraid of the poverty that would allow us to feel the depth of our creaturely need and longing, and standing in the innate vulnerability of our being before the great “unknown” of God can be terrifying; it is a step of faith into what appears to be darkness and which only through transformation comes to be known as pure and brilliant light and unending joy. We all bear the inheritance of sin and selfishness within us, scarred as our beautiful humanity is by the fracture that occurred at the beginning of our human history, and which is perpetuated and extended in the life of each one of us. At the start, none of us experiences the freedom that our hearts desire and for which they were made; we are severed from the beauty, the love, the creativity, and the communion for which we thirst, and nothing we do of ourselves can attain it or restore it to us in its fullness. And yet we long, we yearn, we thirst; we are continually restless for more than this present life offers us, even as we hope for more to find us even in this present life, to make the contours of our daily existence even in the here-and-now something that has significance beyond the fading moment, beyond indeed the confines of our temporal life from the cradle to the grave. Yes, and the good news is that in this very place of brokenness and fracture, in the place of our desperate longing, however weak and even misaligned it may be, God comes to seek us out. He has come to seek us out, and he continues to do so, not only through his hidden grace and activity in our heart, but through the most marvelous intervention in the fleshly history of the world: by becoming a man in Jesus Christ and giving his life, beyond the very boundary of death, to open the way for us back into the heart of God, and inviting us thus into an intimacy of love and a fullness of belonging beyond our wildest hopes and dreams. Indeed, God has shown us with concrete and indubitable signs that he loves us far more than we can ever hope to be loved, far more than our limited minds can understand or our weak hearts contain. And yet he wants to fill us with this very love, in mind and heart and will and affection and sense and body—our whole being in this world and the next. He wants to fill us with his very self, with his own uncreated Beauty, with all that he is. For “God is Love,” as the Evangelist John wrote in his first letter. God is an eternal dance of love and intimate belonging between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and, through sending the Son and the Spirit into this world and drawing us thus into a dialogue of love, he has opened up this dance for us to participate in. The aim and ardent desire of men like John of the Cross—as of Jesus himself, their teacher and Lord, whom in all of their life and writing they seek only to serve—is to stir up in us the longing that we bear latent within us, that it may catch flame under the gentle breath of the Holy Spirit, and to educate and free this desire that it may guide us from the first beginnings to the highest climax of union with God in what is commonly and appropriately called the “spiritual marriage,” in which is found our fulfillment and our everlasting happiness. And along this journey lie a thousand beautiful discoveries, the dissolution of a thousand lies that we wrongly believe about ourselves and about God, and a thousand experiences, both great and small, of God’s true goodness, beauty, and breathtaking love, and of our own beauty and preciousness in his eyes, forever held and cherished in his gaze and his embrace as singularly beloved and desired. The real God whom we come to know is not the one we so often fear because of our wounded experiences of human relationships or our own projections and ideas, nor the one that, in our sins, we use to excuse ourselves from responsibility. Rather, God is like the father in the parable which is often called the “parable of the prodigal son,” but which would be better called the “parable of the prodigal father,” the word prodigal meaning giving, expending without reserve. After his son asks his father for his inheritance only to squander it on dissipation until he is left destitute, the Father does not condemn him or offer him harsh punishment, but rather welcomes him back with open arms and kisses, manifesting that all the time the son was away the Father longing for him and sought for him with anxious care and ardent love. Indeed, even the other brother, the father’s second son, who lives in his father’s house not as a beloved child but as though he were a slave or a servant, receives the outpouring generosity of the Father, who says to him the beautiful words that, despite their conciseness, are so full of meaning: “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.” In other words: Recognize your belovedness, recognize the child that you are, and thus recognize my generosity, my tenderheartedness, which shares with you all that I am, even my own heart and life, if only you will be open to accept it! In these words of the loving father in the parable, indeed, we glimpse the face of our heavenly Father, of whom Jesus said, “All that the Father has is mine” (Jn 16:15). Jesus is the true and eternal Son of the heavenly Father, and in him we are called to adoption, to the fullness of filiation*, to intimacy with our Father and with his Son at the heart of the life of the Trinity. Indeed, in the prayer he spoke at the high point of his life, Christ prayed: All that is mine is yours and yours is mine… And I pray for those whom you have given me, that they may all be one; even as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory which you hast given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to behold my glory which you have given me in your love for me before the foundation of the world. (Jn 17:10,21-24) What a beautiful calling and what a blessed destiny! God desires us to be with his Son, where the Son is for all eternity, in the glory that the Son eternally receives from the Father’s generosity from before the foundation of the world. He desires us to stand in the flood of love pouring ever from the heart of the Father into the heart of his Son, to be caught up right into the heart of the everlasting embrace that they share, to be thrilled by the kiss of the Holy Spirit that unites them and filled with the vibrant breath of their life that is consummate love and undying intimacy. Yes, and we are in this space not mere spectators, not merely “eavesdropping,” for the word of love spoken from the Father to the Son and the Son to the Father is spoken also uniquely, unrepeatably, to each one of us, as if we were the only person whom God had ever made. All of his riches and beauty and abundant goodness are ours and for us. John of the Cross had a profound and direct experience of this in the depths of his own mystical contemplation, of which he wrote in these words: In this interior union God communicates himself to the soul with such genuine love that neither the affection of a mother, with which she so tenderly caresses her child, nor a brother’s love, nor any friendship is comparable to it. The tenderness and truth of love by which the immense Father favors and exalts this humble and loving soul reaches such a degree—O wonderful thing, worthy of all our awe and admiration!—that the Father himself becomes subject to her for her exaltation, as though he were her servant and she his lord. And he is as solicitous in favoring her as he would be if he were her slave and she his god. So profound is the humility and sweetness of God! In this communication of love, he exercises in some way that very service that he says in the Gospel he will render to his elect in heaven; that is, girding himself and passing from one to another, he will minister to them [Lk. 12:37]. He is occupied here in favoring and caressing the soul like a mother who ministers to her child and nurses it at her own breasts. The soul thereby comes to know the truth of Isaiah’s words: You shall be carried at the breast of God and upon his knees you will be caressed [Is. 66:12]. What then will be the soul’s experience among such sovereign graces! How she will be dissolved in love! How thankful she will be to see the breasts of God given to her with such supreme and generous love! Aware that she has been set among so many delights, she makes a complete surrender of herself and gives him the breast of her will and love.ii This is the destiny that awaits us if we accept God’s gift and invitation. And the purpose of this book, in all of its humility and imperfection, is to stir up in us the longing for such a beautiful love and such a wondrous intimacy, to clear away our fears and misconceptions, and to help us discern the contours of the path before us, that we may walk it with confidence, trust, and gratitude, even unto the consummation that awaits. My words are meant to be a humble companion of your prayer and your life, to offer bread of truth and wisdom on which you can chew, tasting through them the enduring beauty of God and finding yourself growing ever closer to him on the paths of faith, hope, and love. If you find in and through this collection of reflections something of the savor of God and his closeness, if you find your heart healing from lies and fears and your mind illumined in the truth, if you are able to yearn more deeply and more freely for the One who yearns so ardently for you, then my hopes for this book are already immeasurably fulfilled. ישוע The subtitle of this books says that it offers “a foundational vision of our transformation in the Trinity” and “a spiritual theology.” I thought of saying instead that it offers a “theology of the spiritual life,” but opted for the more organic, personal word of “vision” over theology; though I also thought it important to include the phrase “spiritual theology,” for it well expresses the nature of what is contained with the covers of this book. Of course in truth these two words—“vision” and “theology”—are complementary, and both are appropriate for what this work offers. For the term “theology” literally means “words about God,” theo-logia, an exploration of the nature of God and his relations with this world, and thus also our relationship with him, from earliest beginnings to fullest consummation. While I am not a systematic theologian and do not seek to offer a comprehensive overview or a highly classified examination of all the different possible aspects of the topic at hand, nonetheless something like a unified vision does emerge from these many reflections, something, if the word is understood aright, like a “spiritual theology.” What you will find here, informally speaking, is a unified, organic theology of the spiritual life—a theology of the relationship of love and intimacy that the Trinity desires to have with each one of us, from the seed of baptism to the culmination of spiritual marriage tasted in this life and consummated in the everlasting glory of heaven. And hence, I truly think the best way to introduce this book is as I finally decided: “A Foundational Vision of Our Transformation in the Trinity.” But let us pause for a moment to reflect upon the term “spiritual theology.” I would explain spiritual theology as the disciplined exploration of the way in which the objective truth of God and his self-revelation in Scripture and the living tradition and life of the Church (which is explored by systematic theology) is made present and active—enfleshed—in the life of individual persons and the believing community. It explores the life of grace in us from the beginnings of faith and baptism to the fulfillment of heaven, and all “stages” or periods of the journey intervening. It differs profoundly, therefore, from the amorphous or merely subjective forms of “spirituality” that are so widespread in our current world and culture. Spiritual theology, rather is rooted in the objective, in the union of faith and reason, of heart and life, in obedience to the God who reveals himself in Jesus Christ and the gift of the Holy Spirit, and who, by his gift of grace, seeks to graft us into himself and to grant us a participation in his own life, and to spread this very life in us and through us also into all the world. In this regard, even the term “spirituality,” understood aright, would mean not some subjective or personal preference that I may elect for myself, or my own private approach to the “divine,” as opposed to the content and demands of organized religion. It expresses rather the spontaneous and living manner in which the objective fullness of God’s truth is incarnated within the unique contours of my own life, and through me perpetuates God’s loving presence in the world, even as it lifts me up to my own highest fulfillment in the union of love for which I was created and redeemed. Perhaps a word about my way of writing and communicating is also in order. The style of my writing is indeed organic in nature rather than systematized or schematic, though there is order to be found in the sequence of reflections and the topics chosen, as well as within the reflections themselves. I state this as a preface only in order to give a gesture as to the best way of receiving the words of this book and letting them be of service to your own prayer and life of faith. For those in the early steps of following Jesus or those unacquainted with theological language, these reflections should be fully accessible, though they may require some effort and patience on the part of the reader for them to unfold the fullness of their meaning. For those farther along the way, though many of the concepts and language may be familiar, the content herein was still nonetheless written to be consumed not as a warehouse of information and ideas but as a locus of contemplation and a pathway to deeper understanding and more holistic comprehension. Only when approached in this way, with a heart open to seeing the many interconnections between the truths of the faith—both ontological and practical, both mystical and embarrassingly human—can the full reality of what I mean by a “foundational vision of our transformation in the Trinity,” and “a spiritual theology,” be grasped and experienced. In this book have been gathered together substantial portions* of my other writings exploring the many truths relating to the life of faith, prayer, and transformation in the love of God. And yet here they have been arranged in such a way—in a meaningful order and according to topic—such that hopefully the beauty of the reality of which they speak can radiate even more transparently and clearly than in their original context. These reflections deal with a range of topics from the most grounded of human experiences at the origin of our earthly existence to the highest of mystical transformation and union with the Trinity; they deal both with an exploration of the structure of our humanity and the inner faculties of our soul to an affirmation of the sacredness and sacramentality of our bodies; they deal with the ordering and healing of our emotions and the foundational “psychological” wholeness that is united to and a bedrock for spiritual wholeness; and they explore in depth the ontological, theological foundations on which all aspects of our life, bodily and spiritual, profane and sacred, ascetical and mystical, are founded: namely the mystery of God as Trinity and his redeeming and saving work within this world, perpetuated in his mystical Body the Church and guiding all things toward their fulfillment in the new creation. In this respect, this book is meant to be something like a journey, or better, an aid and a companion in your own journey of faith, your own unique “romance” with God. What it lacks in systematization hopefully it makes up for in organic depth and interconnectedness, in transparency to the richness and abundance of the God whom we love and the faith which we profess. This at least has been my hope and my aim: to offer bits of wisdom, counsel, affirmation, correction, and inspiration for you along this rich, multifaceted way which is nonetheless profoundly simple, since the God who loves us and draws us to himself is simple, and he invites us to approach him as children, with lightheartedness, wonder, and the spirit of play which reflect the freedom of his own eternal life as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I humbly ask for your patience with this book, as well, because it does not follow, and in fact goes directly contrary to, many trends in recent spirituality that—while making these books appear very accessible and offering many “immediate answers”—in fact have the effect of disintegrating our humanity and our approach to God rather than encouraging its unification and integration in his presence. The approach of this book, rather, is slow and patient and thorough. And because of this it addresses many topics—and some repeatedly—that may seem to have little direct relation with the spiritual life as we might conceive of it. But as long experience of life and discipleship shows, often it is the most ordinary and neglected of things which prove to be the greatest obstacles—or the deepest wellsprings of grace—in our journey to God. For when God addresses us and draws us into a dialogue of love with himself, he does so not by drawing us out of the world or our humanity into a purely spiritual sphere, but rather by engaging all that we are in mind, emotions, experiences, and body, and our whole life on this earth. And in order to go to him truly, to respond to his grace authentically, requires that we come with all that we are—the good, the bad, and the ugly, our heaviest baggage and our most intimate desires—and allow him to fill it all with his love. In fact, it is my perennial life experience that the more a person matures spiritually, the more a person is united with God, the more authentically human they become. They no longer hold a false dichotomy between what is “holy” and what is “profane,” between activities that are “spiritual” and those that are not; and they come to have a deep sensitivity to all that is truly human, indeed to all that in this world is beautiful, good, and true, and thus speaks of God. That is one of the deepest paradoxes of the life of faith: that the more authentically human we allow ourselves to be, the more widely and deeply can God speak to us and draw us to himself, even as his very speaking and drawing also enriches and expands our humanity. And vice versa: when a heart falls in love with God it becomes restless with longing for him in such a way that all else pales in comparison with the sole all-consuming desire of its life—intimacy with God. It finds in this longing the only path to true liberation, to the depth and breadth of freedom for which God has made us, unfettered from all the things of this world. And yet at the heart of this very freedom and this very union, it discovers the capacity to love and care for all things created, all things human, yet more deeply and truly, with a participation in God’s own way of seeing and loving. A final point. This book has been born of prayer and was written in prayer. In order to be heard aright, in prayer must it also be received. But of course this is the case for all theology, for all speaking and hearing of God; and in fact it is necessary in order for the true mystery of life itself in every moment to unveil its deepest meaning. Many have lamented the unfortunate fact that in the history of theology in the last eight to ten centuries a profound rupture gradually emerged between the more rarefied forms of systematic theology, including moral theology, which became scholarly and academic disciplines, and the exploration of “spiritual theology” (also divided at times into “ascetical” and “mystical” theology), which thereby was often relegated to its own sphere. The tragic result of this divorce was that systematic theology lost much of the ardor, beauty, and intimacy that come only from prayer and deep relationship with God, and fell often into undue abstraction, weary and baseless historical speculation, or empty legalism. And on the other hand, spiritual theology was endangered with becoming narrow, self-centered, and subjectivistic, bereft of the deep and wide vision of God’s revelation and his action in the world and the Church. Indeed, spiritual theology—the life of faith, prayer, and love—was in danger of losing its own true ontological foundations in the mystery of God’s life and being as Trinity, and his work in the world through the Incarnate Christ and the Holy Spirit sent to redeem, sanctify, and transform us, until the whole world—and every person within it—is made fit for the eternal marriage feast of the Lamb in the new creation, where the whole universe is inaugurated into its everlasting consummation in the heart of God’s embrace. This work hopes to be in some small way a return to the way of “doing theology” proper to the Fathers of the Church in the first millennium of Christian history, in which study and prayer were one, in which the work of the intellect and the affection of the heart were inseparable, in which a life of integrity, virtue, and purity of heart was a condition for real, clear perception of the truths of God and of reality bathed in the light of his love. Of course, the saints in all ages have read, contemplated, spoken, and written from this single, indivisible wellspring of prayer and intimacy with God, and this is why their vision—for all its rich diversity—is so single and unified. What we need today so desperately in our divided and polemical world, in the midst of societies aching from the loss of the sense of God and the diminishment and abasement of humanity that follows from it, in a Church that herself is pulled left and right by those who champion extremes of their own making, is a “theology of the saints.” And this is nothing but a lived, faith-filled elucidation of the single and indivisible truth that the Church, the Bride of Christ, has preserved alive and undiluted in every generation—even in the face of so many obstacles and the danger of so many lies—and offers still to the people of today. It is the glorious message of God’s love given to us at the heart of our humanity, redeeming all that we are, and inviting us to the reciprocity that allows him to sweep us up into his embrace, to purify, renew, and transform us, and to make us fit to share eternally in the ecstatic joy and consummate intimacy of his own everlasting life as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This truth is what the words of this book humbly seek to serve; indeed they aim for nothing else but this. Let us therefore renew our wonder at this marvelous truth, ready our hearts to receive it, and allow God to draw our hearts close to himself, so that we may not only come to know him as he is, but to love him in being loved by him, unto the fullest transformation that fulfills in us the union of love, where we love God in God with the very love of God alive in us, and thus breathe with the Father and the Son the single Spirit whom they share, in everlasting gladness. *** NOTES *** *The word “filiation” means “being-made-a-child,” from the Latin word for son (filius) or daughter (filia). So too the word “filial” means “expressive of one’s identity as another’s child.” Thus “filial love” is the love of a child for her parent. *For those who might be interest in the other things that I have written, it would be helpful to know that the books Responding to the Thirst of God, Home for the Restless Heart, At the Heart of the Gospel, Cradled in the Arms of Love, and The Prayer of the Heart are more or less contained in their entirety in this book. Sections from other books are also included here (for example at least half of the little book Looking into His Loving Gaze). However, anything published after September 2025, with the exception of a handful of reflections, will be new and not contained here. i. Unless otherwise noted, all quotes from John of the Cross are from the following: The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh, OCD, and Otilio Rodriguez, OCD (ICS Publications: Washington, D.C., 1991). This one is from The Living Flame of Love, 3.1-2, found on p. 673-374. ii. Ibid., 580-581. The Spiritual Canticle, 27.1-2a. |
Joshua ElznerI am a humble disciple of Jesus Christ who seeks to live in prayerful intimacy with the Trinity and in loving service to all through a life devoted to prayer, compassion, and creativity. On this blog I will share the little fruits of my contemplation in the hopes of being of service to you on your own journey of faith. I hope that something I have written draws your heart closer to the One who loves you! Archives
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