We may find these kinds of passages far beyond our strength, too elevated for our present state of spiritual aspiration. But who can say where God will lead a soul in the course of a life in which prayer has been a consistent need? The desire of a soul to love God and consider everything else of little or no importance compared to him perhaps does not occur until a late stage in many lives. Yet this desire leads to an increasing loss of self-interested pursuit, as the Gospel demands. Love for God has always the effect of detaching the soul from excessive interest in itself and from the passing things that do not remain after this life. The soul, for instance, no longer seeks to shine outwardly for others or to draw the attention of interested eyes. Only God matters; vain pursuit seems frivolous and without value. There is no gain for the soul but in drawing closer to him and in pleasing him. Saint John of the Cross describes this exclusive love for God in the following words that can serve as almost a testimony of contemplative endeavor. But this is also the program for a saintly life: “The one who walks in the love of God seeks neither gain nor reward, but seeks only to lose with the will all things and self for God; and this loss the lover judges to be a gain” (SC 29.11).

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Our Lord himself and our knowledge of him are described continually by Saint John of the Cross in such terms. We never reach the end point in our knowledge of Jesus. The Gospel offers clear historical testimony of his words and actions. Yet the truth of who he is as our God extends beyond our possession and grasp for a lifetime. The quest is endless because love never arrives at a conclusive knowledge of the Beloved who died on a cross in Jerusalem for us. The only entryway into this greater knowing is to be wounded with love for him. We may have to suffer a perpetual wounding of the soul to open a door repeatedly into the unlimited treasures concealed in the Heart of our Lord. The image used by Saint John of the Cross in the following passage captures both the incomplete encounter felt by a soul and the wounding of the soul that thereby ensues. It can serve as a fitting conclusion to this chapter. As he writes, most impressively:

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]. The soul cannot enter these caverns or reach these treasures if, as we said, she does not first pass over to the divine wisdom through the straits of exterior and interior suffering. For one cannot reach in this life what is attainable of these mysteries of Christ without having suffered much and without having received numerous intellectual and sensible favors from God, and without having under- gone much spiritual activity; for all these favors are inferior to the wisdom of the mysteries of Christ in that they serve as preparations for coming to this wisdom. (SC 37.4)

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

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

Many people who practice prayer adopt a contrary approach. They seek their own gratification and satisfaction, rather than what is pleasing to God. To our surprise, perhaps, what is pleasing to God in our prayer may often contradict our own preference. What God desires especially is that we empty ourselves for love of him; nothing less and nothing more. Yet how difficult to accept this idea of prayer as a progress in self-emptying rather than a path of advancement in knowledge and experience of God. As Saint John of the Cross writes in this section, “I think it is possible to affirm that the more necessary the doctrine the less it is practiced by spiritual persons” (AMC 2.7.4). This “doctrine”, as it were, is the reality of the cross encountered, not just in trials in life, but in the purifying interior experiences of the life of prayer. If we forget that the cross is met not only in the exterior trials of life but in prayer itself, then we erect a barrier on the path to greater love for God. The identification with the Beloved who is the crucified Lord must be fully embraced in prayer itself if prayer is to advance in a genuine manner. The seeking of consolation is not just a fault and an indulgent weakness, but essentially a refusal to embrace the crucified Lord as the Beloved. The following words are a sharp rebuke to this tendency: “From my observations Christ is little known by those who consider themselves his friends. For we see them going about seeking in him their own consolations and satisfactions, loving themselves very much, but not loving him very much by seeking his bitter trials and deaths. I am referring to those who believe themselves his friends, not to those who live withdrawn and far away from him” (AMC 2.7.12).

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

The shift from meditation to contemplation entails, in effect, a different manner of knowing God. Saint John of the Cross writes in The Ascent of a “loving knowledge”, a “general loving knowledge” (AMC 2.14.2), a knowledge “where nothing is understood particularly and in which they like to rest” (AMC 2.14.4), “an act of general, loving, peaceful, and tranquil knowledge” (AMC 2.14.2). The stress is on a loving knowledge. The more spiritual and penetrating this loving knowledge, and the more interior it is to the soul, the more the soul does not perceive it in any clear manner, even as it is a loving knowledge. “The purer, simpler, and more perfect the general knowledge is, the darker it seems to be and the less the intellect perceives” (AMC 2.14.8). Perhaps we may question how it can be a knowledge if it is unperceived. The reply would be that it is a knowledge by love, a knowledge by means of an inclination drawing the soul. If it is not perceived or felt initially, the reason is the delicacy of this inclination and the strong sense of incapacity due to the ligature of the faculties. But in time this knowledge is felt, as it were, if a soul is receptive. It is felt as a simple inclination to love in the inner quiet of prayer. The desire to love is what is given to the soul in this knowledge, the awareness of a longing within the hidden depths of the soul to love God.  –‘Saint John of the Cross: Master of Contemplation’ written by Father Donald Haggerty

The higher he ascends
the less he understands,
because the cloud is dark
which lit up the night;
whoever knows this
remains always in unknowing
transcending all knowledge.

To anyone first experiencing it, the obscure sense in prayer of losing a hold on God, and even, strangely, of not knowing him, may appear to be a sign almost of a spiritual illness. But the experience is not an unhealthy state, and it is important that this is realized without much delay. A painful sense of incomprehension toward God is an aspect of deeper interior prayer. There are clear reasons for this experience of darkness, even as it causes confusion in prayer. The disproportion between the nature of God and our own limited human nature becomes an experience in prayer to the degree that our soul draws nearer to God. Even as God loves us in great tenderness and mercy, there remains a measureless chasm between God and our soul.

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

In later spiritual theology, the word “ligature” recently mentioned became useful for describing the binding or tightening effect on the faculties in their incapacity to exercise themselves in discursive meditation or to find satisfaction in it. This tying down of the faculties extends into the early period of contemplation. Everything now in prayer becomes at times very dim and imperceptible to the soul. Grace is at work in drawing the soul to the deeper quiet where God hides his presence in the inner recesses and caverns of the soul. But for the moment, the soul is unable to appreciate what is happening. It is conscious more of the tightness it feels and the inability to move freely in any internal activity. The inclination gently stirring within the soul from infused grace is not so noticeable. What our soul does know, if it is attentive to its inner inclination, is a desire to be alone with God in silence, which compensates for the tightening of the faculties and their incapacity: “Ordinarily this contemplation, which is secret and hidden from the very one who receives it, imparts to the soul, together with the dryness and emptiness it produces in the senses, an inclination to remain alone and in quietude” (DN 1.9.6). And yet it is often the case that souls do not surrender to this inclination to remain quietly alone with God. The reason is usually the confused state of the experience in the early period of contemplation. The following passage from The Dark Night insists on the importance, in effect, of an exercise of spiritual intelligence in allowing God to do his work of sanctification in this new experience of contemplation. Receptive surrender to God is always the key disposition that a soul should cultivate in contemplation.

“And even though more scruples come to the fore concerning the loss of time and the advantages of doing something else, since it cannot do anything or think of anything in prayer, the soul should endure them peacefully, as though going to prayer means remaining in ease and freedom of spirit. If individuals were to desire to do something themselves with their interior faculties, they would hinder and lose the goods that God engraves on their souls through that peace and idleness. If a model for the painting or retouching of a portrait should move because of a desire to do something, the artist would be unable to finish and the work would be spoiled. Similarly, any operation, affection, or thought a soul might cling to when it wants to abide in interior peace and idleness would cause distraction and disquietude, and make it feel sensory dryness and emptiness. The more a person seeks some support in knowledge and affection the more the soul will feel the lack of these, for this support cannot be supplied through these sensory means.” (Dark Night of the Soul)

“Saint John of the Cross: Master of Contemplation” written by Father Donald Haggerty