“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. The Carthusians teach, the greatest gift we can offer to one another is silence.
St John of the Cross. Euclid, Ohio.
“He who interrupts the course of his spiritual exercises and prayer is like a man who allows a bird to escape from his hand; he can hardly catch it again.” –St John of the Cross
In the inner stillness where meditation leads, the Spirit secretly anoints the soul and heals our deepest wounds. –St John of the Cross
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’
That the two extremes, the soul and the divine wisdom, may be united, they will have to come to accord by means of a certain likeness. As a result, the soul must also be pure and simple, unlimited and unattached to any particular knowledge, and unmodified by the boundaries of form, species, and image. Since God is unincluded in any image, form, or particular knowledge, the soul in order to be united with Him should not be limited by any particular form or knowledge. –St John of the Cross ‘Ascent of Mount Camel’
A second and more important reason for their (St Teresa of Avila and St John of the Cross) preeminence today is that their method of approach to spiritual theology is already very much the modern scientific method as we know it. Both writers take as their starting point an immense quantity of carefully assembled empirical data. They lived at a time and in a place where there was an immense religious zeal, and when innumerable people applied themselves to the business of the spiritual life. Many more, spurred on by fashion rather than piety to study, and in the course of guiding, directing, and praying for them St Teresa and St John of the Cross, observed them and learnt from them, filling out the wealth of their own personal experience from the temptation and the blessings, the successes and the failings of their fellow countrymen and women. Like the true scientists they were, they collated, classified, and examined in detail the information at their disposal, and wrote their conclusions in treaties which deliberately give a conspectus of the whole field of spiritual theology. Thiers is no haphazard, piecemeal work. They aimed to produce a complete and systemized body of doctrine. It was of the genius of St Teresa to pioneer the method, the crowning glory of St John of the Cross to relate the material to the whole background of dogmatic and moral theology of the Church.
…this was no academic exercise. The saints were surrounded by those who wished to make their way to God. The task before them was that of evolving a practical method of guiding them. –E.W. Trueman Dicken ‘The Crucible of Love: A Study of the Mysticism of St Teresa of Jesus and St John of the Cross’
During the last twenty years there has been a quite astonishing demand among English speaking people for the classics of the spiritual life. It would be rash to draw from that fact any general conclusions as to the state of religion at the present day, for a not too serious curiosity on the part of the reading public concerning all that appears mysterious or occult may easily account for the sales of many ‘mystic’ works. But if this is so, it is a pity. It is true that the spiritual masters can open for us ‘deep caverns of the sense which were dark and blind,’ but they make no offer of a sight-seeing trip at the price in cash of a paper-backed translation. The road where they would lead us is one of self-discipline and self-abnegation, and there is no easy way round. “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” —E.W. Trueman Dicken ‘The Crucible of Love: A Study of the Mysticism of St Teresa of Jesus and St John of the Cross’ copyright 1963.
Crucible: noun 1. a container of metal or refractory material employed for heating substances to high temperatures. 2.
Metallurgy. a hollow area at the bottom of a furnace in which the metal collects. 3. a severe, searching test or trial.
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