…he has placed his confidence in God alone and has accepted in advance all that his good Master may be pleased to ordain. This obviously is not the peace of paradise, but it is the most perfect peace possible here below. God does not will that we should enjoy absolute repose here on earth or enduring happiness. We cannot avoid tribulation. The cross will pursue us wherever we go. –Abbot Vital Lehodey.
Such also is the thought of St Teresa. In her ‘Interior Castle’ she teaches that “all our desires, all our meditations, all our tears, all the efforts we can make (in order to raise ourselves to supernatural quietude), are useless; God alone gives this heavenly water to whom He pleases; often He gives it just when we least think of it.” However, she requires as an indispensable disposition “humility, humility, since it is by this virtue that Our Lord allows Himself to be overcome, and is induced to grant all our desires…Let a soul be humble and detached from everything, in very truth, however, and not merely in imagination which often deceives, and the Divine Master, I have no doubt, will grant her not only this grace, but even many others surpassing all her desires.” –Abbot Vital Lehodey
Lord make me mindful of your nearness in every situation of my life. Help me to understand every happening as coming from Your hand. Ask Mary to help me see that. Lord never let my best plans and projects stand in the way of Your providential plan. Encourage me to be a channel, a vessel, an instrument, of its unfolding, in all the little things that make up my life. Lord eat with me, dress with me, drive with me, shop with me. Be there where I am, in my here and now, every day ordinary life. Mary stay at my side, so that I can see your Son in my situation. Sometimes Lord you know that I feel like a lost child rooming in a world that has become a foreign country. Let me always be led again to the place where I belong. Do not let me feel like a lonely ship lost in the night. Lead me to friends, to a faith community. Lead me to the Eucharist, so that where ever I am I will be found there with you. Lord you know that there is much about me that is still like a little child. I need to be shown. I need to be led. I need to be fed. Give me solid food Lord. The solid food of Your Word Lord, of the tradition I love. Let it feed me feed me when I most need to be nurtured, when I feel in danger of forgetting. St Alphonsus De Liguori on Mary offering her Divine Child in the Temple: ‘Consider Mary on her journey to Jerusalem to offer her son. She hastens her steps toward the place of sacrifice and she herself bears the beloved victim in her arms. She enters the Temple, approaches the altar and there, beaming with modesty, devotion and humility, she presents her Son to the Most High. In the meantime, the holy Simeon, who had received a promise from God that he should not die without have first having seeing the expected messiah takes the divine child from the hands of the Blessed Virgin, and enlightened by the Holy Spirit, announces to her, how much the sacrifice, which she then made of her son, would cost her and that with him, her own blessed soul would also be sacrificed. Yes, she will suffer in her heart. Her compassion alone for the sufferings of this most beloved son was the sword of sorrow which is to pierce the heart of the mother as Simeon foretold. Mary, I say, knew all these torments that her son was to endure, but in the words addressed to her by Simeon and all the minute circumstances of the sufferings, internal and external, that were to torment Jesus in His passion were made known to her. She consented to all with a constancy which even filled the angels with astonishment. All this was involved in her sacrificial offering of her son this day in the temple. She consented completely to the will of God and the sword was indeed to pierce her heart and soul. To understand the violence which Mary had to offer herself in this sacrifice, it would be necessary to understand the love that this mother bore to Jesus. How ineffable the son. How noble the mother. How much it cost her and how much strength of mind she had to exercise this act by which she sacrificed the life of so amiable of Son to the cross. And so we pray. Mary, we know that your sufferings did not end in the temple that day. They only began. From that time forward, during the whole life of Jesus, oh Mary, you had constantly before your eyes, the death and the torments, he was to endure. Oh most compassionate lady, I cannot believe that you could have endured for a moment, so excruciating of torment, without expiring under it, had not God himself, the spirit of life, sustained you. In every moment, you lived dying. For in every moment, you were assailed by the sorrow of the certain death of your beloved Jesus. Mother of God, grant through your prayers, that we to will be able to walk with Jesus this path that is the fall and the rising of many. Oh Mary, make of us an offering, this day, in the temple of our situation.
Amen.
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.
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.
“When one loves, one does not calculate.” –St Therese of Lisieux
― 
When one fails to advance in perfection because one fails to advance in humility, it is easy to grow discouraged and backslide. Lost is the spirit of perseverance. Replacing it is the delusion that doubling up on spiritual exercises will increase satisfaction. Instead one only feels more aridity. Motivated by self-seeking rather than by self-denial, one misses the mark of real advancement, stubbornly refusing to take counsel and reasonable instruction from one wiser than he or she. It is hard to admit that what seems so right has proven to be so wrong. Moral deeds have been done, but for the motive of increasing joy in oneself, not submission to God. Hardly anyone escapes this danger. Before long this “outstanding citizen,” this “pillar of the church,” this “mirror of virtue” grows slack in love of God and charity to others and may even fall into corruption he or she so publicly abhorred.
—Susan Muto ‘John of the Cross for Today: The Ascent”. The originator of the wonderful term ‘wasting time gracefully’
There are certain spirits I am immediately and intensely attracted to. Susan Muto is one. I find her to be a beautiful woman, immensely wise in the subtly of profound spiritual growth. I enjoy contemplating her physical beauty as a woman. I heard it said that though St John of the Cross is a name tossed about by many, few truly comprehend the depth and ascension of his thought. The previous statement basing the idea of comprehension upon a demanding utilitarian aspect. Vital comprehension of St John of the Cross involves application rather than knowing. From a distance, I rest assured Dr Susan Muto is a soul attuned to St John of the Cross.
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