There can be no greater or livelier faith than to believe that God is managing our affairs with admirable wisdom and love when he seems to be destroying and annihilating us, when he frustrates our holiest designs, when he exposes us to calumny, obscures all our lights in prayer, dries up our devotion and fervor with aridities, ruins our health with infirmities and languors, reduces us to incapacity for doing anything at all. –Abbot Vital Lehody
Whenever anything disagreeable or displeasing happens to you, remember Christ crucified and be silent. –St. John of the Cross
The highest angel likes nothing better than to satisfy My will in all things. And if it knew that My Glory depended on pulling out nettles and other weeds, this would be what it would most desire to do. –Henry Suso ‘Little Book of Eternal Wisdom’.
Behold, hold and grasp passionately waiting in faith, beatific purging patience,
Let it be done, inspiration a mighty Mother, watching, taking noticing, alone with her kindness, imploring preparation,
Show me the way, contemplative divine, illuminate the mindset of negation, precipitation,
Following the fundamental non-wandering of normalcy displaced within the extraordinary, a humbling complete,
Teach me to be straight, teach be to be normal, teach me to draw unreservedly no attention upon myself, mediocrity contained, simplicity remain,
Know not the difference of hierarchy, aspiration repudiate, negate, in obedience to everything, servitude, all things immense in majesty and tribute,
Unification, nothing is a part, while still I am praying apart, dumbing down in order to avoid the devastation of spiritual pride, seven paths to stagnation, minimalism return hidden,
Secret amongst secrets, surreptitiously smile upon the darkness of clarification, eradicate progress in order to process enlightenment,
Strike harshly, stealthily smash conceptions, whisper the story of individual formation, a tale of ear-piercing woe, identity usurped,
Unification, called into the being of Three in One, salvation sharing in fertility, first a cold burning, a life after cleansing, love everlasting,
In the meantime walking wide eyed and awake, boredom embraced, idleness a gift, nothing to do, nothing to demand, nothing to declare, nothing to be, happily,
Redeemable time, wasting gracefully moments, easy does it, beyond meditation, needing no names, needing no concepts, loving refrain,
It is enough to weep amidst a smiling heart, to pour forth sorrow beneath the exhilarating scream of joy, to know no bounds while staying with inbounds, to be utterly free while under absolute obedience,
Oh Three in One, my lawlessness incomplete, wounding, allowed, constrained, protecting, guiding a guarding affectionate Heavenly Mother, one to assist a guardian angel,
Mother my inspiration, you never let me wander too far away, omnipresent, ubiquitous, how severely I must have broken your heart, you remained, adoring, showering grace,
Anchoring, showing yourself, touching deeply, finishing, completing, Mother, presenting, you made it impossible to part, amalgamated, God speed forward, together we advance.
I have loved her and sought her out from my youth and have chosen her for my bride”. (Book of Wisdom)
An undisciplined spirit, as it first ventured forth, strayed onto the paths of error. There, eternal Wisdom in an indescribable spiritual form confronted him and drew him by means both pleasant and unpleasant until it brought him to the right path of divine truth. And, when he reflected deeply on how wondrously he had been drawn, he addressed God thus: “Dear gentle Lord, since I was a child, my spirit has been searching with unslaked thirst for something. And what this was, Lord, I have never yet fully grasped. For many a year, Lord, I have pursued it feverishly, yet could never attain it because I never really knew what it was; and yet it is something that draws my heart and soul to itself and without which I cannot ever really find peace. Lord, in the early days of my childhood I would search for it as I saw others do before me—in creatures. And more I sought, the less I found; and the closer I came, the farther away I got. Concerning every form that I looked at I heard an inner voice, and before I would occupy myself with it completely or devote myself to it in peace, it would say: ‘This is not what you are searching for’. Always I had this force driving me away from all things. Lord, my heart is raging to possess it because I want it….
Response of eternal wisdom: Don’t you recognize it? It has, after all, lovingly embraced you and has often stood in your path until it gained you for itself alone.
The servant: Lord, I never saw or heard it at all. I don’t know what it is.
Response of eternal wisdom: That is not surprising. It was caused by your intimacy with creatures and your unfamiliarity with it. But now open your inner eyes and see who I am. It is I, eternal Wisdom, who chose you for myself in eternity with the embrace of my eternal providence. I have blocked your path whenever you would have been separated from me if I had let you be. You always found something repugnant in all things. This is the surest mark of my chosen ones, that I want them all for myself.
–Henry Suso ‘Little Book of Eternal Wisdom’
Wisdom enters through love, silence, and mortification. It is great wisdom to know how to be silent and to look at neither the remarks, nor the deeds, nor the lives of others.. –St John of the Cross
St John of the Cross Adoring
III
O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.
And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobody’s funeral, for there is no one to bury.
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away-
Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing-
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.
You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstacy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.
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