Father Thomas Dubay

Jun262018

New ways, perpetual transformation

The eventual disappearance of images, concepts and reasoning as vehicles communing with God is not merely a chronological occurrence that we await and then adapt to when it happens. In the nature of things, intimate relating to the divine demands a new dimension, an infused communion that transcends the created order. Finite realities are not adequate and proximate means to the infinite. There exists no proportion between them. Jumping higher and higher is no way to try and reach the moon. There is no proportion between human muscle power and leaving the planet. Something entirely new, rocket power, must be introduced if the latter is to be achieved.

To appreciate what John (St John of the Cross) is saying as he insists upon the insufficiency of the created order to bring us to the Uncreated, we must first grasp something of the utter otherness, the transcendence of God. He is not only beyond all things; He is boundlessly beyond them. Created realities are, as one of the councils puts it, more unlike God than like Him. Because no one gets anywhere without a means fit to the destruction, so faith is radically necessary to reach the inner life of the Trinity. The saint appeals to the philosophical axiom that all means must be proportioned to their ends. If a person wants to get to a particular city, he must take a road that leads to it. If a log is to burn, heat must be applied to it. The wood must be made like to the fire so that it may eventually ignite. “If the intellect, then, is to reach union with God in this life, insofar as is possible, it must take the means which bears a proximate resemblance to God and unites with Him. That which bears this near similitude to God is the virtue of faith. While created things bear a trace of the divine, none of them unites proximately with Him or has an essential correspondence to Him. The distance between creation and its Author is endless, and it is faith alone on earth that can bridge the gap. –Father Thomas Dubay ‘Fire Within: St Teresa of Avila, St John of the Cross, and the Gospel on Prayer’

spacer
Jun032018

A saint the world, a saint of contemplation

In their totality of pursuit, saints have the happy but rare gift of combining in their persons qualities that seem to be opposed to one another. Fanatics may have one natural virtue to an eminent degree, but they lack its balance the opposite. Mediocre people have no outstanding qualities, and so there is nothing to balance. The activist may think himself the cutting edge of the future, but if he is not a mystic, he is frightfully narrow–and part of the narrowness is that he may not possess even a small suspicion of his myopia. St Teresa was magnanimous: she sought in lived the whole picture. On the one hand she did an amazing amount of work both in the monastery and on the road, and yet on the other hand she loved long periods of prayerful solitude. Rare indeed is the man or woman who, as Vatican II puts it, is “eager to act and yet devoted to contemplation”. Teresa was wholeheartedly both. She likewise combined a tender love for her family and would not waste time in idle talk with them. She could say as her father neared death that “it seemed my soul was being wrenched from me, for I loved him dearly”. She so loved him and the others in her family that she would not lead them into the guilt of idle chatter for which we shall give a count on judgment day–which is to say that she really loved her relatives as very few people do. Her balance was likewise evident in her ability to combine a great deal of asceticism and penance in her personal life with a willing and appreciative reception of comfort from dear friends. To Gratian she wrote that “I was thinking of what a comfort it would be to me if my daughter Maria de San Jose were here: she write so well, and she is so clever and gay, that she could do something to lighten my burdens”. During her many travels, Teresa saw to it that her companions on the road with combine times of silent prayer and the cover carts with periods of healthy fun and conversation. Seldom does one meet an individual who is unashamedly ascetic and yet warmly appreciative of human comfort, who can enliven a conversation with wit and joy and then can turn to a long solitude of deep prayer afterward. For most of us it is at best a question of one or the other, not both. A saint is indeed a rare work of divine art. –Father Thomas Dubay, S.M. “Fire Within: St Teresa of Avila, St John of the Cross, and the Gospel”

spacer
May272018

To be ‘filled with the utter fullness of God’ (Ephesians 3:19)

The full response to this objection (rejection of St John of the Cross’ Nada theology) may be positively explained in our chapter on freedom, for thorough understanding is the best answer to partial views. A few short comments will suffice for now. People who argue against detachment and self-deniel are perhaps unaware that they are simultaneously rejecting the same teaching found in the New Testament. Jesus lays it down that to be his disciple, anyone and everyone must “renounce all that he possesses”, not just part or most of it. In Titus 2:12 we read that “what we have to do is give up everything that does not lead to God”. John and Teresa ask not a whit more…or less. Texts like these could be multiplied. We must further note that in our human, finite condition, every choice necessarily entails negations. If I spend money for one thing. I cannot spend it on something else. No man can love two women with his whole heart. No one can serve God and mammon. No one can attain an ecstatic joy in God without giving up paltry, self-centered pleasures in things less than God. People who reject Gospel detachment cannot have clearly thought it through. Like the adolescent who sees no value in Dante or Shakespeare or Michelangelo because comic strips have captured his fancy, the adult who discounts evangelical detachment cannot have experienced the sublime infused love found in advanced prayer. One can only wonder if this individual has ever tasted even a morsel of it. Can he know what St Paul meant when he spoke of rejoicing in the Lord always or “having nothing, possessing all things”? Does this person believe what Jesus himself taught, namely, that it is a hard road and a narrow gate that leads to life and that there is no other way to happiness on earth? —Father Thomas Dubay ‘Fire Within: St Teresa of Avila St John of the Cross and the Gospel on Prayer

spacer
spacer