The Flowing Presence of the Holy Trinity

In a poem, John of the Cross describes the life of the Trinity as a river. He describes how this Personal Presence given to us in the Eucharist flows through the heavens and the earth. He even claims that this brimming River of Life surges through hell. Is God actually present where He is definitively and eternally rejected? If He can be present there, triumphant and just in the face of malice, how much more He reveals when the rejection is only indefinite and still confined by time.

As St John was tormented by his persecutors, he understood hell fire, and yet, he also knew that those fires could not constrain the Divine Presence. Not only through the very heart of evil, but through the evil that we cling to in our own hearts, this Living Water floods forth.  How can evil withstand this surge? How long will we resist Mercy's force?

Those who are moved to confess their sins and to do penance have felt this Almighty River. Ready to burst dams of bitterness and set limits on the power of sin and death for the price of a prayer, the currents of Divine Mercy cannot be contained or predicted. As this overflowing Flood surges through the sinful levies that we raise, tender tears begin to flow and snobs comforted by forgiveness realize a new beginning.

To help us see what the Divine Persons begins and causes to progress, Saint Elizabeth of the Trinity describes not a river but an Ocean. What mysterious Water holds us afloat on these unfathomable seas! Great tides pull us beyond what is comfortable and convenient. Deep currents can suddenly take us where no one can see. Yet, it is not to nothingness but to fullness of life the Divine Persons draw us.  Christ, the Radiant Star, captivates us and at the same time helps us navigate these Waters in which we lose ourselves. As we surrender, God surrenders - and the Holy Spirit renews this saving Mystery and the Father overshadows with His creative love anew.

Saint John of the Cross - By Love Alone

Saint John of the Cross explored how all of creation was the fruit of the love shared by the Father and the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit. The Father is the One who for Saint John completely delights in the Son. The Son is for him the One who adores the Father with profound joy and solemn gratitude.  Out of this inexhaustible mutual love, the Holy Spirit communicates the whole personal reality of One to the Other in an eternal exchange.   This vision of the inner life of the Trinity allows Saint John to propose the mysterious purpose of creation, its ultimate end in the plan of God.

For the Carmelite Doctor of the Church, it is out of the profundity of the Trinitarian mystery that the Father proposes to present His Son a Bride so that the Son might know what it is to be loved like the Father is loved by the Son. That Bride is the summit of all creation: the Church -- and, throughout the poetry and commentary of Saint John, every soul personifies this ecclesial mystery anew through faith, baptism and growth in spiritual maturity.

When it comes to growth to full spiritual maturity, mental prayer in particular is the special means that Saint John expounds on. In in image of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, we are made for the loving communion that lives in the heart of the Church. The blood of Christ has given us access to this mystery.   If we contemplate this loving communion in faith we not only see a pattern for how we ought to live, but we receive the power to live in the likeness of God.

This vision is so biblical!  When know from John 10:10 that Jesus longs for His disciples to have an abundantly fulfilling life.  Not simply happy within the bounds of this present life, but extremely so in ways that this present life cannot contain.  When men and women thrive, they give God glory because they are in the image  of the One who eternally thrives before the Father: the more like Him they are, the more they reveal His glory.

Jesus made this kind of life possible when He was born of the Virgin Mary and gave himself up for us through his death on the Cross.  Because of sin, we were cut off from this fullness of life.  Before Christ, the miserable absence of love in our hearts blinded and weakened us so that we could not attain our true good.  Our own hostility constantly threatened our very existence.  The Lord could not watch indifferently when the noble goodness with which He endowed us was subject to such futility.  He set out to save us.  Since He is the Word of the Father, whatever He enters into receives purpose and meaning.  When He entered into fallen humanity, He brought our nature into harmony with God’s will to raise us up.  Yet this was done at a great price.

Throughout his writings, Saint John of the Cross reveals his conviction that,Jesus did not hold back from entering into the terrible mystery of our own suffering. He did this not only in a general way for all of humanity, but in a specific way for every single soul. He has suffered the particular hardships, difficulties, and wounds that weigh us down and He did so to the end. As a result, He knows intimately the absence of love that oppresses each heart and we never suffer this alone. For the Carmelite Master, the Lord is always present especially in His seeming absences and always ready to fill this absence with his faithfulness - if we will follow Him all the way to the Cross.

It is on this point that the wisdom of Saint John of the Cross is particularly eloquent. For he is adamant that we should respond to the excessiveness of such love. One only truly enters the heart of another when one embraces the suffering that is there. Out of pure love, Christ has chosen to know our suffering. Out of love and gratitude, Saint John of the Cross encourages us to become familiar with the Lord's suffering -- to share with Him even the difficult spiritual sorrows and death that He offered for our sake.  We do this through prayer and by being faithful to obligations of love that He has entrusted us with - even when we do not feel or understand, even when the effort to love seems to put to death everything else that is in us.

This in fact was the experience of Saint John of the Cross who died mostly misunderstood, especially by the community that he spent his life building up.  When faithfulness to God's love takes us into hardships that completely overwhelm us and cause us to suffer the loss of all things, he firmly believed we are finally accomplishing our greatest work.  Just as the greatest work of Christ's humanity was accomplished through the physical and spiritual agony that He suffered in his death, so too our greatest work is being realized when we seem to have utterly failed and feel ourselves completely powerless.  Even when he was catastrophically misunderstood, this great mystic tenderly loved those who the Lord had given him in his community, and in so doing witnessed to the whole Church what it means that "in the evening time of our life, we will be judged by love alone." 

Self-Denial - Surest Pathway

Contrary to those who insist that spiritual maturity is about mastering a technique or the successful completion of some elaborate program, St. John of the Cross sees the road to union with God as an easy and simple journey if we embrace radical self-denial:

The road leading to God does not entail a multiplicity of considerations, methods, manners, and experiences -- though this may be a requirement for beginners -- but demands only the one thing necessary: true self-denial, exterior and interior, through the surrender of both to the passion of Christ and by annihilation in all things. Ascent to Mount Carmel, book 2, chapter 7, Complete Works, translators Otilio Rodriguez and Kieran Kavanaugh, (Washington, D.C.: ICS, 1991)171. 

Self-denial is the practice of acting against the drive for comfort, security and satisfaction we seek in our relationships with people and in our relation to things.   As long as we worry about having influence over others or whether they esteem us, and as long as we only see anything else as a crutch with which to get through life, we are not vulnerable to the Lord and open to the wonders of His love at work in us and in the world.  This extends even to efforts to practice prayer merely as a program of mental hygiene.  The Lord did not die on the Cross so that we might find a little psychological relief from the stress of daily life. Thus, we turn our backs on these things, annihilate our disordered appetites, pick up our cross and follow in the steps of our Crucified Master.

Christ is our pattern.  We imitate Him out of devotion to Him.  He suffered the annihilation of all his earthly powers unto death out of love for the Father and for the sake of our salvation - because He loved us in the Father from all eternity.   Our love becomes eternal when we follow His example and allow His love for the Father to animate our lives and extend its hidden beauty into the world through us.

Some think these counsels regarding self-denial and annihilation mean that the spiritual life is suppose to be a joyless affair.   But really the more we renounce joys that are beneath our dignity, the more room we have for a deeper and more abiding joy.   There are some great joys that in fact give God glory when we share them.

If you have ever been captivated by the mountains in the early morning when they are suddenly crown in light or felt the reverberation of the surf crashing against the coastline --  you have probably felt drawn to silent adoration.   There is also a sweetness found in secretly bringing joy to others -- those who have gone before us in the faith probably smile when we share this foretaste of our heavenly homeland.   We enjoy these wonderful works of God because, comfortable and pleasurable though they are in themselves, they raise us up out of self-pre-occupation to our true purpose, and in doing so they help us behold the splendor of the One in whose image we are made.

Such joys are not opposed to self-denial.  Instead, they foster it.  Somehow these joys give us the courage we need to embrace the beatitude of holy sorrow and open us  to the surest pathway.

Opening our Hearts to the Word

How does the mystery of the Risen Lord, the Word of the Father, become part of one's own life? This question reveals the beautiful paradox that lives in God's work in our humanity and in our humanity's grace filled effort in God. Such questions point us to the great mystery - the Word made flesh.

John of the Cross points to this answer in his work Ascent to Mt. Carmel, Book I, Chapter 13.  He teaches that if we  really want to encounter the Lord, if we really want to find Him, we must resolve first of all to imitate Him in all things.  Then, he explains, if we are to be successful in our imitation, we must also carefully study the life of Christ out of devotion to Him.

This is where his doctrine gets tough.  He observes that when we study the life of Christ we discover that the Lord renounced every satisfaction that was not purely for the honor and glory of God. Saint John of the Cross believes we can enter into deep intimacy with the Lord if we will resolve to do only that which gives God glory and honor - which means renunciation of any delight or comfort which does not give glory to God.  

Most everyone questions this logic. Many are frightened by it to some degree. Few understand it. Even fewer live it.  

To really understand what St. John of the Cross is saying, we must go beyond a pre-critical guess.  The deeper mystery in this teaching is only unveiled if we consider who Jesus is to him and what he means when he invites us to study Christ's life.  What does it mean to study the life of Christ Jesus for St. John of the Cross?

St. John of the Cross believed that study of the Scriptures and contemplation, sacred reading and meditation, silent attentiveness to the Word and wonder filled exploration of sacred doctrine; that all of this must be an integrated effort of the heart.  He believed in a theology carried out on his knees and in constantly rendering himself vulnerable to the demands of the Gospel of Christ.  Such is the power of the Gospel: the more we encounter Christ, the more He animates our innermost being and transforms us in his love.  

St. John of the Cross describes the kind of study we should take up as "gazing" at the Lord with eyes of faith - a search for the eyes of the Lord who looks at us in love.  It is with this living hope that he himself searched for Christ in prayer and study, contemplation and constant conversion. Conversely, any study that does not ultimately lead to the interior peace that God produces is be a waste of time and a distraction.

Christ for him is the Word of the Father who has come as the Bridegroom of Creation -- the perfection of which is the Church Herself. Each soul that participates as a unique endpoint in this ecclesial life reconstituted as the People God, the Body the Bride of Christ. To live for the Bridegroom like this is to begin to live a life that is not one's own. It is to be animated with the life of Christ within.

The Eternal Word communicates everlasting life - wounding, slaying and raising us up all at once. Whoever He touches, by word and sacrament, by inspiration and presence, He wounds. The Word who was wounded for the sake of love wounds us with love. A soul so wounded wants to live by love and to die by love, to make an offering of self in love.  This is because a heart wounded by the Word aches to have been loved so much, and aches over how wonderful the One who so loves.

The Bridegroom gives such souls his own Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity to sustain such souls in these noble desires.  Anyone who has met the Bridegroom yearns for the wedding feast and for the wonderful things that God has in store for those who believe.  For those who ache for love of the Lord, the work of renunciation, of dying to oneself--this is as nothing.   What is love if there is no sacrifice and how do we love but at our own expense?

Liturgy and the Discipline of the Christian Life

The Society of Catholic Liturgy meets this week in St. Louis and for information click here.  There will be a lot of wonderful presentations and we are especially glad to have his Eminence Raymond Cardinal Burke give our keynote address.  The theme is the Liturgy and Asceticism.   If you cannot come, please join us in prayer.  This is part of my presentation. 

High atop the Carthusian Mountians overlooking Grenoble, France, out of the silent darkness hidden voices rise, chanting psalms from memory, feebly making present for a few moments a sign of the resounding praise eternally offered at the Throne of the Lamb. In the movie, Into Great Silence, the camera focuses in on a vigil lamp burning in the sanctuary of the chapel of the Grande Chartreuse. The frail flickering light suggests what the discipline of prayer is in the Church and at the same time what the presence of Christ in the Church appears to be to the world. At this hour and in the icy harsh environment in which they live, we cannot really say how consciously aware the monks are of all that is going on in this liturgy. They are vulnerable – vulnerable to the cold, to the dark, to the silence, to the loneliness and to God. They hope in the Bridegroom. They await His coming. And, they know their hope will not be disappointed. As they chant, the Carthusians surrender to something beyond their awareness, to a mystery greater than what they are able to really know. Their liturgy is enveloped in great silence, a silence pregnant with God’s hidden presence, a silence that waits for their voices and a silence that continues their prayers long after their own words have ended.

Whatever their understanding, whatever their consciousness about what they are doing, they eloquently witness to the mystical prayer of the Church at the heart of the liturgy. If we were to ask how these contemplatives are able to pray this way, nothing of the art, architecture, preaching, chanting or liturgical practices suffices for an explanation. In fact, all these things are merely the fruit of something much deeper. What permeates their liturgies with such prayerfulness is their austere discipline of life, an asceticism they take with them into the liturgy. We are confronted with their continual faith filled effort at prayerfulness as that which allows their silence to be filled with the power of God’s Word.

Many pastoral initiatives have been taken up to render the liturgy more intelligible with the hopes of instilling a more deliberately conscious participation. But is this kind of participation what liturgical renewal is really all about? St. John of the Cross’s doctrine on ascetical practices when applied to liturgical participation indicates an even fuller and more active form of participation than we might imagine if we limit our concept of participation to only those activities of which we are conscious. His doctrine helps explain the Carthusian liturgy, why it is so intense and real. There is a deeper participation in Christ’s priestly prayer, in his work of redemption, an intense participation that extends beyond the vague light of our conscious awareness. It is the realm of supernatural faith where yearnings of love lead our understanding to places with which it is totally unfamiliar. It is a theological habit of mind which unceasingly seeks God in complete trust and surrender to the saving presence of the Risen Lord.

In St. John of the Cross, the ascetical discipline of the Christian life is ordered what he calls the Dark Night. Just like the Carthusian’s vigil suggests, he sees in this dark night all kinds of encounters with Christ which exceed one’s own conscious awareness. It is not about anything we can experience. It is about being completely vulnerable to the Lord. If you have ever held the hand of a loved one struggling to pray in the grip of death, you know exactly what he is suggesting. That faith filled but agonizing silence is raised up by an aching desire to see the face of God. It is so deep, so heartrending, so solemn. Yet the one offering this prayer is barely aware of what he does. If he questions why the Bridegroom is delayed, he also knows that his hope will not disappoint. Similarly, the Carmelite Master describes a secret search of lovers one for the other in which heart-piercing glances and wounding touches are fruitfully exchanged for the salvation of the world. So important are such encounters for spiritual maturity, this Doctor of the Church orders his whole ascetical doctrine to them. Liturgical asceticism, the mental prayer we offer during the liturgy, is ordered to these encounters with Christ in the night of faith -- it is this kind of faith above all that will renew the liturgy.

The Foolishness of God in St. John of the Cross

"The soul that walks in love neither tires others nor grows tired." St. John of the Cross is a saint passionate about love to the point of foolishness in the eyes of the world.  But this foolishness is a family trait.  Gonzalo, his father, left everything out of love for Catalina, his mother and Gonzalo's brothers despised him as a fool for love.  The friendship of Gonzalo and Catalina, their holy marriage, was filled with the radiant beauty of what it means to really live. True love is never half-way.  It never grows tired in its devotion.   For someone living by love, besides the beloved everything else is rubbish.  Real love fears no sacrifice and is ready for every hardship.  His father would die in destitution and yet his widowed mother never lost hope.  They were rich in love, and in the evening of our lives, nothing else really matters.  Their home was held together through every hardship and disappointment by living faith, a faith alive with love.  This love, this hope and this faith formed the soul of a future saint.  

John of the Cross was a fool for love like his parents, and in his foolishness lived life to the full just as they did.  Like his father he too was impassioned by love's yearnings and in that passion found courage to make every sacrifice for the one he loved.  The only difference between father and son was that for John of the Cross his beloved was God alone.  God's love radiates from his poetry and evokes urgent desire, profound peace and uncontainable jubilation.  Fired up with love, driven by love, given over to love, friendship with God was his life's priority and a zeal to lead others into this same divine friendhsip burns throughout his writings.  He chose poverty and a disciplined life so that he would have the freedom to love.  This is why he embraced the the hungry, the sick and the dying.  It is why he made himself radically available to the spiritually poor as well.  Something of the foolishness of God lives in St. John of the Cross's foolishness for love.

If someone were to ask what made his love for God so intense, at least part of the answer must include his devotion to prayer and the Word of God.  He memorized the Scriptures and loved to comment on them, especially the Song of Songs.  He loved silence and he loved to search for the Lord in the silence of his own heart.  It was in the silence of his heart that he heard the Lord speak to him, "The Father spoke one Word, which was his Son, and this Word he speaks always in eternal silence, and in silence must it be heard by the soul."

Understanding the yearnings of love which moved in his soul provides insight into his friendship with Teresa of Avila, his zeal for the reform of Carmel and his fierce fortitude when imprisoned in Toledo.  It explains why hundreds of the faithful sought him out for spiritual direction and why he would walk for miles to hear confessions.  It sheds light on why he enjoyed camping in the wilderness and solitude in the countryside.    If he demanded rigor in religion, the friars he formed were gratefully loyal to him because his devotion was contagious.  At the same time, he was so rooted in love that he really did not care what others thought of him or whether those who were closest to him treated him poorly -- although he always cared about them and would sacrifice anything to make sure they knew they were loved.  After his miraculous escape from the harsh torments he suffered in prison, he was asked about his experience.  His words were washed with wisdom, "Where there is no love, put love, and you will find love."

The Flower of Love

One of my favorite poets is Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit also known as Jessica Powers.  She lived from 1905 to 1988.  She became a Carmelite in her thirties.  In her poem Flower of Love she reflects on St. John of the Cross's saying, "Where there is no love, put love and you will find love."

The difficult labor of putting love where there is no love is described in terms of a planting a flower.  This flower has the potential of recreating Paradise in our hearts.   These last strophes seem to offer particular encouragement to those who struggle to plant such a flower in their own lives:

Blessed are they who stand upon their vow

and are insistent

that love in this bleak here, this barren now

become existent.

Blessed are they who battle jest and scorn

to keep love growing

from embryo immaculately born 

to blossom showing.

Primarily for them will petals part

to draw and win them,

It, when the pollen finds their opened hearts,

will bloom within them.

(1948) 

Selected Poetry of Jessica Powers, Ed. Regina Siegfried, ASC and Robert F. Morneau, Washington D.C.: ICS Publications (1999), 41.

You are a Temple of the Holy Spirit

Some points for prayer-

Since the Blessed Trinity is living in you, 

you are the temple of God.  

You are also a holocaust, a word of unending praise, 

a flower of great beauty offered up to God.   

Francis Xavier Cardinal Nguyen Van Thuan, 

The Road to Hope: A Gospel from Prison

Here there is an interiority, 

a depth which lies beyond the merely natural, 

as far beyond the natural depth of soul 

as the "realm" where God is enthroned, 

and where our "glory to God in the highest" seeks Him, 

and is beyond all thoughts and feelings of natural sublimity.  

This interiority has been given to us by Baptism, 

and now Christian practice must lift it 

beyond the natural world of feeling and thinking.  

Romano Guardini, 

Learning the Virtues that Lead you to God

The Father spoke one Word, which was his Son, 

and his Word he speaks always in eternal silence, 

and in silence must it be heard by the soul.  

St. John of the Cross, 

Sayings of Light and Love

In the heaven of her soul, the praise of glory 

has already begun her work of eternity.  

Her song is uninterrupted, 

for she is under the action of the Holy Spirit 

who effects everything in her; 

and although she is not always aware of it, 

for the weakness of nature does not allow her 

to be established in God without distractions, 

she always sings, she always adores, 

for she has, so to speak, 

wholly passed into praise and love 

in her passion for the glory of her God.

Blessed Elisabeth of the Trinity, 

Heaven in Faith

Theological Contemplation and the Lord's Gaze of Love

There are many ways to enter into silence.  Teresa of Avila was told to think about scenes of the Lord's passion.  St. Augustine in the first nine books of his Confessions reflects on the patient presence of the Lord in his life, even throughout the time he rejected his faith.  St. John of the Cross also mentions a contemplation on the doctrines of our faith - a kind of mental prayer he describes in Spiritual Canticle, stanza twelve.  Because it is a way of prayer which involves reflecting on sacred doctrine, I like to call this theological contemplation.

St. John of the Cross uses a beautiful image to illustrate what happens when we prayerful ponder sacred doctrine in deep silence. He describes this prayerful reflection on the content of our faith as peering into the reflective surface of a spring of water.  When our faith is pure, when we faithfully receive the teachings passed on to us through the Church, he suggests this opens up a deep loving knowledge of the Lord which matures us and raises our friendship with Him onto a whole new level.

The basis for this description is the fact that the propositions of our faith, the articles we believe, are "truth-bearing."  These doctrines (like the Incarnation, or the Trinity, or Christ's work of redemption) bear First Truth, the ineffable mystery of God Himself.  Another way to consider this is that the articles of the faith are like veils which disclose the substance of our faith.  They are like silver plated gold jewelry explains St. John of the Cross.  The golden substance under the shining silver of the propositions we believe is the Living God.  Like all veils, the content of what we believe serves to both protect and disclose something unspeakably beautiful.   The veil of our faith protects God from being misunderstood.  It also discloses Him to us, as we learn to see Him in it.

In this life, limited and frail human intelligence lacks the capacity to behold the incomprehensible love radiating from the face of God.  So the Lord has adapted Himself to our capacity, permitting himself to be reflected in truths we can understand.  In other words, we believe what we believe because this faith helps us find the Lord.  He has chosen to reveal himself, to allow Himself to be reflected, through sacred doctrine.

Now St. John of the Cross's description of a reflection on a watery surface comes in.  A prayerful reflection on sacred doctrine is like looking into a pool of water that your friend is looking into.  If you are patient for the water to smooth out, if you allow your grasp of the faith to be pacified by prayer, you will see the eyes you search for.  What a wonderful description of the truths of our faith!  As we assent to them, they make a enchanting spring in the soul where a beautiful encounter is meant to take place, where friends find a mirror into each others heart.

St. John of the Cross describes this reflection in terms of a remarkable presence of God.  While God is reflected in all creation, this special reflection of the Lord in sacred doctrine pierces the heart.  It is a look of love that binds us to the Lord in a new way.  John of the Cross describes seeing the eyes of the Lord gazing on us in love.   Our gaze meets His gaze.  Something of God is impressed deep into the soul.  We realize He has been searching for us, waiting for our friendship.  This loving gaze of God captures the heart.  For those who glimpse this presence, catch a glimpse of the Lord in the truths we believe, this experience of the substance of our faith is sketched into their hearts.

Anyone who has experienced this theological contemplation can never live the same way again.  It not only changes the way one thinks, but it goes deeper, transforming even the affections of one's own heart.  Everything that once seemed so important in life takes second place to a new priority of the heart, a new hunger and thirst for God.  The heart turns to the Lord with love enflamed.

The Peaceful Stillness of Prayer

A very contemplative monk of the Grande Chartreuse reads the writings of Elisabeth of the Trinity because they have helped him sustain a life of deep prayer.  She leads into theological contemplation.  Her spiritual vision combines beautiful doctrine of great mystics, the Sacred Scriptures, and discrete references to her own life experience.   She does not present her ideas as an organized treatise.   Her thought instead is musical - in fact, it is a lot like 19th Century classical music with intricate interwoven themes repeating in new ways almost rhythmical throughout her reflection.  Each beautiful idea is surrounded by contemplative silence.  By this, I mean that the words pull one into prayer.  Some of those who read her works describe how they cannot read even a full paragraph without being moved to pray, overwhelmed with a longing for the Lord.  Helping her friends enter into deep prayer is exactly what she believed her mission from God to be. 

Probably she is most known for her Prayer to the Trinity, a prayer that has helped many contemplatives grow in devotion to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.   This prayer begins with a petition asking the Lord to establish one's own soul in a peaceful stillness.  Whenever we forget about ourselves a little and look to the Lord, it is refreshing.  And we need this kind of refreshment on a regular basis.  Without it, we compromise ourselves in a thousand petty ways, and we feel trapped in our own egos - and this is a foretaste of hell.  When we make time for God, allowing our hearts to rest in Him, if only for a few moments, it is refreshing because it is a foretaste of the perfect freedom awaiting us.  For this is what heaven is - the state of being where we are completely free to thrive: free of pettiness, pride, anger, and all selfishness, of everything that impedes our ability to love.  It is exactly this stillness and peace, this sacred silence out of which love flows, that Blessed Elisabeth is teaching us to seek from God.  

John of the Cross: Seek Christ in Whom Are the Treasures of God

This remarkable priest prayed for hours every day while carrying on an active ministry, directing hundreds of souls, leading academic institutions, going in and out of imprisonment and helping to reform of the Carmelite Order in the 16th Century.  His writings are filled with beautiful poetry and solid teaching for the spiritual life.  His doctrine constantly focuses on Christ Jesus, and he invites his readers to ponder Christ in everything that happens to them, in all the different experiences of prayer, even the most arid.

It is in living in solidarity with what Christ suffered for oursakes that his doctrine takes on its riches proportions.  In the mystery of Christ, John of the Cross teaches that there are the most precious treasures of wisdom and knowledge of God waiting to be discovered.  To see the world, those we love, and even oneself with the eyes of God: nothing in life is as precious as this kind of knowing, this vision of the whole.  

This is why contemplation, beholding the mystery of Christ in our hearts, is for him the most important human activity - so essential that all other human activity finds its fullest meaning in being directed to this end.  This means life should be ordered around prayer.  (But how often do we approach prayer as something to fit into our busy lives instead?) No matter how much we know about Christ, there is always more beautiful and wonderful to know in Him - truths He knows we need and that he yearns to share.  His mystery is inexhaustible and holds everything we need to thrive, to live life to the full.

John of the Cross is a realist about this achievement and what it costs - although it is primarily God's work, the soul must cooperate in faith even in the most difficult trials.  No matter the cost, he insists, what is to be gained is worth it - for we gain the Lord himself.  In the Office of Readings, the whole Church ponders his words on this point:

The soul cannot enter into these treasures, nor attain them, unless it first crosses into and enters the thicket of suffering, enduring interior and exterior labors, and unless it first recieves from God very many blessings in the intellect and in the senses, and has undergone long spiritual training ... it is quite impossible to reach the thicket of riches and wisdom of God except by first entering the thicket of much suffering, in such a way that the soul finds there consolation and desire.  The soul that longs for divine wisdom chooses first, and in truth, the thicket  of the cross.  
Spiritual Canticle, 36-37.

John of the Cross - the Advent Saint

We celebrate the feast of John of the Cross in Advent.   One finds in his spiritual doctrine certain themes that encourage contemplative prayer in Advent.  One of these themes is that of the The Dark Night.  In Ascent of Mount Carmel, Book II, he describes the journey of faith as a pilgrimage through a kind of spiritual night from sunset to sunrise - it is a pilgrimage to the coming of the Lord, an advent journey.

The sunset is our old way of life which we must leave behind.  When we were limited by sin and death, we viewed the things of this world in a manner not commensurate with their true purpose - and in doing so, we prevented ourselves from realizing our true destiny, and with that lost the happiness, the beatitude God designed us to have.   Now, by faith in the Lord and his great love for us we can let the sun set on the personal emptiness we felt when we limited ourselves to the visible, tangible comforts and pleasures we once let drive us.

As the evening progresses, St. John of the Cross tells us that we discover dark contemplation, complete vulnerability to the Lord in prayer.  He calls this prayer spiritual nakedness and it normally comes with all kinds of trials and afflictions.  Such prayer leads us to trust the Lord completely with everything in our lives.  The effects of such prayer bring a deeper peace to our soul and an invincible confidence in his love so that we can stand strong in the darkest hour of our life, our personal midnight.

The final stage of the night of faith is just like the early morning before sunrise.  He says there is a certain joy the permeates everything because the soul sees signs that already anticipate Christ's coming.   The joyful excitement we see in children this time of year as school ends and Christmas break begins suggests something of what St. John of the Cross means.  If we stay in prayer, it is a time of patience, joyful expectation and great hope.

Living for the Glory of God

In our last several posts we have been examining the spiritual doctrine of St. John of the Cross for entering into what he calls "The Night of the Senses."  This night is a hidden encounter with Jesus beyond our comfort levels.  Living a life devoted to God beyond what is merely comfortable prepares us for this life changing experience of God.  In fact, this kind of encounter with the Lord is vital if we are to spiritually mature and fully enjoy the friendship He has invited us to share with Him and one another.  

To get to this spiritual place of prayer, the 16th Century Carmelite emphasizes, first of all, that it is mainly God's work.  Our part is to cooperate in faith.  We also saw that our activity, although secondary to what God is doing, is none-the-less very necessary.   The Lord is counting on us to rise to the occasion.  What is our part?  To imitate Christ by a prayerful study of His life.  When we take up this kind of study, St. John of the Cross proposes we begin discover in Christ a life completely given for the glory of God.  In his theology of prayer, God blesses our feeble efforts to make the life revealed in Christ Jesus our own.

Now we get to a very difficult teaching - renunciation.  Jesus admonishes his followers that unless we renounce ourselves and take up our Cross and follow Him, we cannot be his disciples. This means we must be willing to suffer the loss of all things for Christ Jesus.  Why is renunciation so important in following the Lord?  Love is not a wish - it is an action.  We can only love at our own expense.  Our hearts are filled with inordinate desires that weaken us, dissipating our strength on things that fail to satisfy.  Our strength must be reserved for the love of God.  This means some things that are otherwise good, but not for the glory of God, must be forsaken. 

At this point, many throw up their hands in discouragement.  It sounds as if God never wants us really to enjoy ourselves, to recreate, or to have any fun at all.    How could anyone live such a humdrum life?   Those who are discouraged by this, however,  might be buying into a reductionistic view of what gives God glory.  A life lived for the glory of God is anything but humdrum.

The glory of God is man fully alive, says St. Irenaeus.  Those who take up the path of renunciation discover a great paradox.  The more one renounces the drive to satiate oneself all the time, the more satisfying life becomes.  If we act against our tendency towards the easiest, the most comfortable, the most gratifying, by doing the opposite out of love for Jesus - we soon discover beautiful dimensions to life we never knew existed.  Things and the gratification they give, things like one's own reputation, take their proper place.  It is not that they are never enjoyed.  In fact, they can be more fully enjoyed when they are not what is driving us anymore.  In this way, renunciation is a pathway to true human freedom.    

The humdrum, banal life can not reach beyond the merely gratifying, the comfortable, the pleasurable.  While many think freedom is about being unrestained in the pursuit of these things - this view of freedom is insipid.  Such a life is not any freer the more freely it gives itself to things.  Instead, it is imprisoned by what it desires - not because what it desires is bad, but because human desire needs to be healed.  Stuck in what seems to satisfy, such a life is very unsatisfying.  The human heart is made for more.  It needs a greater freedom to thrive.  

In a life lived for the glory of God - whether something is gratifying, comfortable or pleasurable is totally secondary.  Such is the freedom of the children of God.  The things of life, the things God meant to be gifts from Him to show us his love, no longer master us.  We can enjoy them for what they really are.  Such a life discovers that deeper satisfaction which God alone provides.   Such a life is free to go to even greater kinds of freedom, free to really love, free to completely thrive.   

What a paradox St. John of the Cross proposes!  This childlike freedom opens our heart for the hidden encounter with God which makes us spiritually mature.  Christian prayer is ordered to this new freedom -- and the freer we become the more profoundly we encounter the Lord.

Imitation of Christ - the threshold to deeper prayer

In our last post, we introduced a teaching of St. John of the Cross concerning prayer.  Namely, we considered how prayer and the spiritual life is principally God's work.  All our efforts are secondary, subordinate to the power of the Holy Spirit at work in us through faith.  This being said, it would be a mistake to assume that because something is secondary it is not important.  Our cooperation with what God is doing is vital.  He is counting on it. In fact, He hopes in us, placing important parts of his divine plan into our hands.  This is why we can always rely on the Lord when being faithful to Him is difficult - He hopes in us even more. 

So the question is, just how do we cooperate with what God wants to do in our heart?  On this point, St. John of the Cross urges us cultivate the desire to imitate Jesus in everything. Such holy desires are cultivated by studying the life of Christ.  This does not mean to pick up a textbook on Christology, although there is nothing wrong with this.  The Carmelite Doctor means to attend to Christ's life by prayerfully reading the Holy Bible, especially the Gospels.  The more we ponder his life, the more ways we discover to imitate Him in our own.  Obviously, such study goes beyond any mere cerebral exercise.  This kind of meditation is an asceticism of the heart.  St. John of the Cross's teaching resonates with the words of St. Paul to the Philippians 2:5-11: we are to conform our lives completely to the One who humbled Himself for our sake on the Cross.  Christian prayer reaches maturity through becoming Christ-like: He is our model, our exemplar for real prayer.  The moment we try to go beyond or around Him, this is the moment our prayer loses its specifically Christian character.

One of the great mysteries of Christ's life that St. John of the Cross singles out as important to imitate is the mystery of renunciation.  We will consider Christian renunciation in our next post.

How to Prepare for the Lord's Sheer Grace

In our last post, John of the Cross described an experience of seeking the Lord, fired by the urgent promptings of love in one's heart, free of the normal concerns that normally trap us within ourselves.  Such freedom for seeking the the Lord is "sheer grace." Is there anything we can do to prepare our hearts for such a gift?

In Ascent of Mt. Carmel, Book 1, Chapter 13, Fray Juan de Yepes y Alvarez proposes practices, which in his own experience, have helped people find this freedom.   While many have heard of his doctrine of nada, very few really understand it in a beneficial manner.   Here, we will consider a good foundation for a proper understanding and personal appropriation of this teaching.

The first thing to remember is the "sheer grace" by which we find the freedom to seek the Lord with our whole hearts - this grace is exactly that, a grace, a gift, something entirely undeserved.  This is why John of the Cross emphasizes that they way to come to know the Lord is more "passive" than "active."  The passivity he has in mind is not the absence of activity, but an active receptivity, a generosity of heart that is ready to make a total response to the Lord.  Gratitude, humility and love of God form the dimensions of such generosity.  Such is the only proper response to the Lord for the price He paid for the freedom He yearns us to know.   In Salvation History, the best example of this response comes from Mary in her encounter with Gabriel, "Let it be done to me according to your will."

Once we see that all the counsels of this doctor of the Church concern principally the river of grace flowing from the side of Christ, then any practices or disciplines we take up on our part are simply subordinate to the Lord's work, a humble response to a generous gift.   How can we repay the Lord for his goodness to us?  How can we say no to his invitation to friendship?  Everything we do for the sake of this friendship is a simple cooperation with what He has already done for us: it is love in the face of Love.

Dark Night

One dark night,
Fired with love's urgent longings,
 -Ah, the sheer grace!-
I went out unseen,
My house being now all stilled;

(Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh, OC.D. and Otilio Rodriguez, O.C.D., Washington, D.C.: ICS (1979) p 711.)

St. John of the Cross orients us to the beauty of silent prayer in these first lines of his poem, Noche Oscura. Such prayer is a hidden experience of ecstasy, a going out of self to meet God.  In this experience, God is like a secret lover who is waiting outside our normal preoccupations with self.  The soul yearns to be with God, yearns to be loved.  This soul that yearns for love also suffers imprisonment, trapped in its own house, in its own self: what it imagines, what it feels, what it thinks it wants.  But what happens when all this limiting activity is silenced?  What happens when my passions for my own comfort, reputation, and self-satisfaction are asleep?   This is a sheer grace, a delightful surprise, a longed for opportunity.  Now the soul can sneak out of itself and search for the One for whom it longs.

This silent prayer is a loving movement by which we leave behind, if only for a few minutes, all the anxieties and concerns that eat up so much of our day to day living.  Forgetting everything, pressing forward to what lies ahead, those who take up this kind of prayer encounter the Bridegroom who eagerly waits for them.  Such prayer normally requires preparation - although God can also grant it as a pure surprise to someone when they least expect it.  In our next post we will consider the preparation John of the Cross proposes.

Living by Faith Alone

St. John of the Cross provides excellent counsel for how to begin to live by faith alone.   In his work, Ascent to Mt. Carmel, he uses his poem "Dark Night" as a description for the spiritual life.  In the first strophe, the poem describes a romantic adventure that begins in the stillness of a dark night.  When silence befalls his household, a lover sneaks out to find his beloved.  The stillness and darkness that cloak him are all sheer gift because in this he is completely hidden, unable to be distracted from his passion.  

One dark night,
fired with love's urgent longings
-- ah, sheer grace! --
I went out unseen,
my house being all still.

The Mystical Doctor interprets this stophe to mean that the soul sings the grace it had in departing from its "inordinate sensory appetites and imperfections." This gets to  big obstacle in the life of prayer specifically and the discipline of the Christian life in general.   There are so many distractions in our hearts and in our lives that we often forget about what is truly essential.  This is because rather than surrendering to the gentle movement of the Holy Spirit in our hearts, we live driven by irrational cultural and psychological forces.  The desires of our heart are selfish and out of order, not directed to that which will make us thrive.  John of the Cross calls these often subconscious psychological forces "inordinate sensory appetites and imperfections."  The truth is our spiritual life is often choked out by a myriad of anxieties and concerns - most of which are rooted in the silliness of our own immaturity.   Those who want to break passed this are hungry for practical counsel on how to move forward.  John of the Cross provided this in Book 1, chapter 13 of the Ascent of Mt. Carmel. 

But before we go to this counsel, there is one more element that is key to understanding what he is trying to say.   Namely, the soul that does enter into the stillness of the night, that no longer lives by inordinate passions, but instead lives by faith alone -- this soul sings!   It rejoices with jubiliation and cannot contain itself.  I emphasize this because most people think the dark night is about being somber and depressed.  But quite the opposite is true.  Those who live by faith are on a journey to ever more profound kinds of joy -- and their joy is contagious.   It is not the glee of a simply psychological state -- although it might feel this way at first.  It is the deeper joy of realizing the deepest desires of one's heart, of becoming profoundly authentic, of thriving in the fullness of one's natural capacities - now expanded in a supernatural way.

So what is the first step to find this joy?  What is the quickest, surest way?  John of the Cross says the desire to imitate Christ must become a habit of soul that takes up and consumes one's whole life.   The way to foster such a desire is to prayerfully study the life of Christ in order to know how to imitate him and behave in all events as he would.  His life is dynamic.  That means that the more we attend to it, the more it evokes a response from us.  The only proper response to the life of Christ is love - and friendship love desires above all else to imitate the beloved until the lover and beloved are of one heart.

From this we can better understand the Mystical Doctor's second counsel (one which most misunderstand or otherwise freak out over): to be successful in this imitation, renounce and remain empty of any satisfaction which is not purely for the honor and glory of God.  Do this out of love for Jesus Christ.  In his life he had no other gratification, nor desired any other, than the fulfillment of his Father's will. 

Most people today want to read this counsel within the context of Buddha's four noble truths where the elimination of suffering is caused by the elimination of desire.   I am no expert on Buddhism, so I cannot speak accurately on whether westerners really understand that teacher.   But I do know that the popular understanding of this doctrine in the West provides a huge misconception and misapplication of St. John of the Cross's Carmelite doctrine.   John of the Cross really is not interested in eliminating suffering or desire.  He is interested in making room in the heart for Divine Desire - and in the work of salvation, God's yearning takes up not only every human suffering but every joy and endows these with meaning beyond what this world can contain.   This is the life of Christ poured out for us on the Cross.  To realize it, the Carmelite Mystic is telling us that we must choose to live His life and not our own.  

Those who really think about this claim find it astounding.  They ponder whether it could possibly be true.  And those who embrace its truth soon find that they too sing.  They discover an ineffable and suprising joy which must break forth in total jubilation.

(Translation of St. John of the Cross from The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, trans. Kavanaugh and Rodriguez, (Washington. D.C.: ICS, 1991)).
 

The Happiness which God Designs

The happiness which God designs for his higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstacy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. 
(C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity on why God decided to create us with a free will, a will that could reject Him.)

For as the Father and the Son
and He who proceeds from them
live in one another,
so it would be with the bride,
for, taken wholly into God,
she will live the life of God.
(John of the Cross in Romances (trans. Kavanaugh and Rodriguez)  reflecting on why God created the Church)

The Bridegroom' love, or rather the Bridegroom who is Love, asks only the commitment of love and faith.  Let the beloved love in return.  How can the Bride not love, the Bride of Love himself?  How can Love not be loved?
(Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Song of Songs: Sermon 83 (trans. G.R. Evans))

Adoration, Silence and the Lamp of Fire

Hunger for silence is the sign of spiritual maturity. This saying is attributed to John Paul the Great and reminds me of the program he proposed to the Church after the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000. He called the Church to gaze on the face of Christ. Learning to gaze on the face of Christ takes us into a mystery of great silence - not just the absence of noise, but a peaceful silence of heart that only the Lord himself can produce. The Carmelite mystics explain that it is in Christ's adoring silence that a Lamp of Fire begins to burn within.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church #2628 identifies adoration as one of the forms of prayer encompassing an attitude primary to all authentic prayer, an attitude that blends humility and hope in our approach to God. Externally, adoration expresses itself when we kneel down, fold our hands, and close our eyes. But more important than these external gestures that dispose us to adore the Lord is the interior movement of heart, a movement that should inform everything we express in prayer.

When we glimpse the incomprehensible transcendance of the Lord, His holiness, over anything and everything else that is, especially over "self", a certain awe grips our hearts and we fall humbly silent before Him. Those who surrender to this awe more and more through their faithfulness to prayer discover a deep yearning for this adoring silence. That is because this silence is not a mere therapeutic experience of non-activity. For the overworked and exhausted, such silence can be very important but it is not the adoring silence of Christian prayer. Rather the silence of adoration is a humble openess to the Lord's super activity, an active receptivity to the overwhelming and unimaginable power of God. Those who embrace the mystery of the vigilant silence have a sense of exaltation in their hearts. They understand the words of Mary, "My spirit exalts in God my savior."

When we are moved like this, it is such a personal experience that we are tempted to think we are the only ones who have ever had it. But then we notice others folding their hands and closing their eyes after a powerful homily or during a beautiful hymn. I have seen some people not move for hours, they are so enveloped in this prayer. Others, like the Carthusians, have accepted vocations in which their whole way of life is centered in this prayer. Very few are willing to share the movement of their hearts at these moments.

Those who begin to pray soon discover that adoring silence characterizes their conversations with the Lord. Elisabeth of the Trinity, a twenty six year old Carmelite nun, just weeks before her death in 1906, identifies this movement of prayer as an "ecstacy of love" and the "beautiful praise" that is "sung eternally in the bosom of the tranquil Trinity."

Ecstacy is not merely an emotional trip but a spiritual journey. The word actually means "to go out from oneself." Elisabeth well understood how adoration rescues us from self-preoccupation. It makes God the center of our hearts. At the same time, it involves us in a search for the face of Christ within us, within those painful places - memories, feelings - we would rather avoid. When we discover the face of Christ gazing on us in love in the midst of our own brokeness - the brokeness has no more power over us. Before Christ, human misery can no longer imprison us within ourselves. We discover real freedom when the Lord leads us out through this misery into the abyss of his mercy. For the Christian, true ecstacy in prayer is like the journey revealed in Psalm 23, "though I walk through the valley of death, I fear not for you are with me."

If we consider adoration as a going out of self, we better understand what Elisabeth intends to convey when she attributes adoration to the inner life of the Trinity. In the bosom of the Trinity, that is in the very communion of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Elisabeth 'hears' adoration as a song of praise.

Notice that her vision of heaven is not something static or boring. I think anyone who actually believes God is like that will never learn to pray. Why should anyone pray if in the end we wind up with something lifeless? In us, there is a passion to thrive the rebels against the temptation of nihilism. Even under the shadow of the certainty of death, we do not want to perish, but to live. This passion was put there by God himself. God is himself the thriving happiness which is the source of all beatitude. He is so filled with life and love that only those with great passion can find Him. And yet He yearns for us to find Him and in Him to realize the perfection of all our noble human potential. We are talking about the total freedom to love - to give oneself to God and others in a communion of unending love. To live like this is completely opposed to anything boring or static.

Heaven is a place where nothing inhibits love. And we all know our finest moments in life are precisely those moments when we love without counting the cost, when we give everything for the sake of the beloved - whether a spouse, a child, a stranger or God. These moments of strength, courage and freedom are such gifts. They allow us to glimpse who we really are. Imagine yourself in your finest moment -- only this time the moment never ends. It is with this kind of love the Jesus adores the Father from all eternity -- it has all the force and power of great music, or rather, this is the source of all music. Flowing from the heart of the Trinity, Elisabeth 'hears' a symphony of love in which our own silent adoration somehow participates. Elisabeth understands this graced participation as Christ adoring the Father within us through our faith in Him.

Perhaps the most beautiful attempts to express this idea is contained in the writings of St. John of the Cross. Especially in Living Flame, the Spanish mystic describes an intimate experience of God in terms of "Lamps of Fire" (LF 3). Those who fully enter into the prayer of adoration discover that their journey into God has allowed God to journey into them - that is, has allowed God to be present in new ways. The warmth and light of God permeates their every action - this to such an extent their very presence strengthens and enlightens those around them. Elisabeth would say that even in their most weakest and human moments, the Lord's eternal resounds through them.

How does silent adoration lead to a life filled with such love? Elisabeth and John of the Cross speak about a humble loving acceptance of persecutions, tribulations, nights, dryness, and other tests. By having the courage to continue to adore in the midst these great trials, joining his song of praise in those crucifying moments of our lives, we learn the secret of gazing on the face of Christ crucified by love. This allows us to be completely surrendered to God, because keeping our eyes fixed on Him, nothing can overwhelm us but His infinite love. And so the reason we come to yearn for adoring silence. When we catch, even for an instant, the look of love in his eyes, that powerful yearning for our happiness, nothing can separate us from Him and his warmth and light in us becomes, even in the most bitter cold darkness, a Lamp of Fire.

Abandonment to Love and our Resurrection

A theme that runs through the great christian teachers of the spiritual life is abandonment to the love of God the Father. Our faith tells us that this is the supreme act of love Jesus offers on the Cross. Jesus also directs his disciples to make the same offering when he commands them take up their own cross and follow him. By following the Lord in this, we begin to experience the resurrection. Here I would like to explore this paradox - I ramble abit only because I do not have time to make it more concise - please forgive me.

At the end of the 19th Century and the beginning of the 20th Century, two Carmelite mystics have helped shape the way we understand this teaching in our era. Therese of Lisieux and Elisabeth of the Trinity help us understand how to begin to practice this total surrender to the love of God in daily life and prayer. Their lives witness to the fact that this act on our part is something that the Lord will invite us to make at the supreme moment of our lives, and at the same time, it is an act we practice every day. It is a desire of the Christian heart that needs to be fed and strengthened until it bears the fruit of a mature love.

The desire to completely surrender to God's love is holy and all holy desires are produced by the Holy Spirit working within us. It is also true that already desiring something is to possess it to some degree. But in the beginning these holy desires are impeded by deep wounds in the heart - and the heart does not have the power to heal itself either from the harm others have caused it nor from the harm it has caused itself. Our hearts are not pure - at least, they do not start out that way. So eventhough we have holy desires, we might desire them with a mix of impure motives and without the courage such the Holy Spirit demands. Since this desire comes from the Holy Spirit, what can we do to help the Holy Spirit purify and strengthen it?

The first thing that strengthens a holy desire is to give it expression. Both Therese of Lisieux and Elisabeth of the Trinity are known for prayers centered around an act of complete surrender, total abandonment to the will of the Father. Therese wrote her "Act of Obedience to Merciful Love" in 1895 of which she also provides an explanation for in Manuscript B of her autobiography Story of a Soul. Elisabeth of the Trinity likewise authored a prayer Oh My God, Trinity whom I Adore in 1906. (Another similar prayer authored about the same time is Charles de Foucauld's Act of Abandonment to God the Father or Into your Hands I Commend my Spirit.) When we begin to pray these prayers, we do not always feel like what we are actually doing with our lives correspond with the desires we are trying to express. But I do not think this is very important, at least not in the beginnning. The noble desire to completely surrender to God's love is fragile in the beginning. Praying these prayers is like blowing on sparks to light a fire.

Closely associated with giving expression to our holy desires is the cultivation of a humble attitude. Elisabeth calls this simplicity - we must simply learn to rely on the Lord alone and not be distracted by anything that tries to draw us away from him. John of the Cross details a discipline of life in Ascent to Mt. Carmel, Book I, Chptr 13.

Key to his counsels is to practice only enjoying those things that are purely for the glory of God and renouncing the enjoyment of anything that does not give God glory. John of the Cross observes that Jesus acted in the same way and that we should imitate him because we love him. In truth, God is in all things, surrounds all things, sustains all things. Things of themselves never distract us from God when we enjoy them for His sake.

Our problem is that we tend to entertain ourselves for our own sake rather than for God's. As long as we do this, we are living with disparate desires and to have desires at war with each other within the heart is very exhausting. This is why simplicity of heart is so important. The more simple the heart, the less the interior conflict, the greater our strength for the Lord. If we seek him in simplicity of heart, we will find him and have the strength to enjoy his presence.

God is also at work in us to strengthen and purify our desire to completely surrender to him. John of the Cross describes the dark contemplation where God seems absent in prayer as one of the most vital ways God is at work in us. When God seems absent in prayer it is like suffering from a spiritual poverty and a naked vulnerability twoards suffering. It is a very uncomfortable experience to endure. But when we persevere in being present to God when he does not seem present to us the Lord is able to transform our involuntary and unconscious motivations. Those who endure begin to experience an abiding peace in their spiritual life.

Before this dark night of prayer, we seek the Lord in a sort of anxious way - just like someone who in dating is trying too hard to find his spouse. Such anxiety does not instill confidence. But God looks passed this weakness because He always sees the love of which someone capable - and our love enchants Him. He yearns for the soul that begins to move towards Him and his desire is for that soul to thrive. Even when He seems to withdraw his presence for a little while, His purpose is always for a greater union, in this case one characterized not by anxiety, but by peace.

To be relatively free of mixed involuntary motives like anxiety is a great grace. To live a peaceful spiritual life of walking with the Lord is worth anything trial that one must endure. But the Lord is not satisfied with a peaceful desire. He wants a joyful desire. And to accomplish this, he must allow us to suffer even greater and more intense spiritual trials. These are never the punishment of an angry God but always the careful remedy of the Divine Physician. He yearns for us to be whole - which means to ceaselessly desire to love, peacefully and with joy.

Until now, our desire for abandonment into the merciful love of the Father has freed us from sin and from the involuntary inclinations to sin. Here our desire for abandonment has matured. But though we have matured in our holy desires, there are still deep abysses of the heart that rebel against the love of the Lord, that prevent us from abandoning ourselves completely. This is where John of the Cross explains there are still first movements of the soul. Original sin deeply wounded the first movements of our soul so that they are not disposed to God. This fundamental movement is such that only sheer grace can heal and restore it so that our souls become as innocent as those of Adam and Eve. Here, God begins to heal even that which causes our unconscious motivations. The very depths of our misery, the rejection of God that lives within us and is our hell, is embraced by the Lord. Free to offer God this misery, we discover his abiding joy - a love that is stronger than death, that can overcome even our deepest resistance to him.

Thus, insofar as our desire for abandonment disposes us to these experiences of the Dark Night, it helps to cause the night. As this same desire is purified through these difficult trials, a more perfect desire for abandoning ourselves into the hands of our merciful Father is also a fruit.
When the soul becomes perfect (in this life it is always a relative state of perfection), it is finally free to abandon itself in such wise that it becomes a complete and holy sacrifice of love to the Lord.

In the Oblation to Divine Mercy, Therese is celebrating this fruit. The heights of Christian mysticism do not culminate in being removed from messy humanity but being submerged in it with Christ. Nothing holds it back from completely trusting the Father and wholeheartedly doing everything for love of Him that his merciful love might be known. Such a soul fully realizes what it means to be an instrument of divine mercy for others. It is free to receive all the graces rejected by others and to become a conduit through which these gifts of love flow into the world, even into those places where the Lord is most absent.

This is what John of the Cross describes in Spiritual Canticle where he says that such souls become springs of living water for others. By desiring to be a spring for others, we already are to some extent. Yet it is of the very perfection of the Christian life to become a spring for others in a more perfect way - without anxiety, in peacefulness, and in joy. And today, so many thirst for peace and joy.

All of this is the experience of the great saints that everyone points to. But this path from glory to glory - from desire to peace to joy - is experienced as a smooth transition. It is lesser known that the mystics also testify to this more difficult and more human reality. All along the way, no matter how much we strive to edify others and love them as Christ has loved us, we know that this is not enough. We see what lies ahead, what the Lord really desires for us but it seems impossible. Elisabeth acknowleges in the face of such noble aspirations we become curiously aware of our weaknesses and deficiencies. For some this awareness is so great they are tempted to discouragement. She, however, turns to the Lord even more, begging him to achieve through her what she cannot possibly achieve by herself.

Elisabeth's prayer is rooted in an insight from her older Sister in the Spirit, Therese. Therese in the midst of the same trial would think about the goodness of God in relation to her holy desires to give everything to him, to be completely surrendered to his love. She reckoned that God's goodness and her desires must collide and she wanted to know how. Why would God fill her with such noble desires if He did not have a plan to realize them? Yes, God would realize her desires in his own time and by his own power.

She understood that her job was to trust him, to believe in love, to love unto the point of folly, just as He did not the Cross for those whom he loved. In this, a path was opened to her and she discovered a new way to draw her strength from the Lord. She would persevere in love, waiting for Him to lift her up. She called this kind of surrender, a surrendering to the Lord as his prey.

The image she used was that of a little bird yearning to fly to the sun without the wings to do so. How could God allow her, like that little bird, to suffer such great desires if he did not intend to satisfy them in another way? Christ would come like a great Eagle and lift her on high just like an Eagle might carry a small bird in its pinions. Her job was to wait on the Lord and to trust in his power. To him, would be all the glory for any good that she might do.

Her insight is rooted in a profound teaching on the Holy Spirit and the nature of Christian hope. The Holy Spirit lifts us up To surrender ourselves as his prey, to abandon ourselves to him as our Father – these are the same movements of heart produced by the Spirit of God that raise Jesus from the dead. God in his merciful love will raise us up to realize the perfection of these holy desires in us - the realization of the holy desires of our hearts, this is the beginning of our own resurrection.