A genuine spirit seeks rather the distasteful in God than the delectable, leans more toward suffering than toward consolation, more toward going without everything for God than toward possession, and toward dryness and affliction than toward sweet consolation. It knows that this is the significance of following Christ and denying self, that the other method is perhaps a seeking of self in God–something entirely contrary to love. Seeking oneself in God is the same as looking for the caresses and consolations of God. Seeking God in oneself entails not only the desire to do without these consolations for God’s sake, but also the inclination to choose for love of Christ all that is most distasteful whether in God or in the world; and this is what loving God means. (AMC 2.7.5)

This chapter began with the remarkable letter treating the purity of the will in giving all its desire only to God. The will’s operation in love is indeed distinct from the will’s experience of feeling. What we have been hearing now, from these selected passages of The Ascent of Mount Carmel, is a confirmation of this teaching. The purity of a naked will fixed only on God requires an attitude in prayer that is extremely demanding. Yet it must be cultivated despite its uncompromising nature if we aspire to contemplative relations with God. A divestment and stripping away of self-love can take place in prayer only as we renounce the desire for our own enjoyment and consolation in prayer. This emptying of desire allows our will to be inclined in a purity of inflamed desire for God himself.

‘St John of the Cross: Master of Contemplation’ written by Father Donald Haggerty