The LORD spoke to Nathan and said:
“Go, tell my servant David,
‘When your time comes and you rest with your ancestors,
I will raise up your heir after you, sprung from your loins,
and I will make his kingdom firm.
It is he who shall build a house for my name.
And I will make his royal throne firm forever.
I will be a father to him,
and he shall be a son to me.
Your house and your kingdom shall endure forever before me;
your throne shall stand firm forever.'”
St Joseph by El Greco
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
“There are two things to be aware of if the fight against evil inclinations is to have any chance of success. First, our efforts will never be sufficient on their own. Only the grace of Christ can win us the victory. Therefore our chief weapons are prayer, patience, and hope. Second, one passion can only be cured by another – a misplaced love by a greater love, wrong behavior by right behavior that makes provisions for the desire underlying the wrongdoing, recognizes the conscious or unconscious needs that seek fulfillment and either offers them legitimate satisfaction or transfers them to something compatible with the person’s calling.”
― Jacques Philippe, Interior Freedom
All winter the fire devoured everything —
tear-stained elegies, old letters, diaries, dead flowers.
When April finally arrived,
I opened the woodstove one last time
and shoveled the remains of those long cold nights
into a bucket, ash rising
through shafts of sunlight,
as swirling in bright, angelic eddies.
I shoveled out the charred end of an oak log,
black and pointed like a pencil;
half-burnt pages
sacrificed
in the making of poems;
old, square handmade nails
liberated from weathered planks
split for kindling.
I buried my hands in the bucket,
found the nails, lifted them,
the phoenix of my right hand
shielded with soot and tar,
my left hand shrouded in soft white ash —
nails in both fists like forged lightning.
I smeared black lines on my face,
drew crosses on my chest with the nails,
raised my arms and stomped my feet,
dancing in honor of spring
and rebirth, dancing
in honor of winter and death.
I hauled the heavy bucket to the garden,
spread ashes over the ground,
asked the earth to be good.
I gave the earth everything
that pulled me through the lonely winter —
oak trees, barns, poems.
I picked up my shovel
and turned hard, gray dirt,
the blade splitting winter
from spring. With hoe and rake,
I cultivated soil,
tilling row after row,
the earth now loose and black.
Tearing seed packets with my teeth,
I sowed spinach with my right hand,
planted petunias with my left.
Lifting clumps of dirt,
I crumbled them in my fists,
loving each dark letter that fell from my fingers.
And when I carried my empty bucket to the lake for water,
a few last ashes rose into spring-morning air,
ash drifting over fields
dew-covered
and lightly dusted green.
Anonymous submission.
Sometimes, I write words that seem to vibrate with potential, even though I may not understand their exact meaning. That vibration is a promise. It promises that, in time, all will be revealed. I have learned to trust that intuition, because I know I am dealing with a metaphoric form that is essentially mystifying, and that a seemingly insignificant couple of lines have the capacity to reveal, in their smallness, in time, all of the world.
‘The kid drops his bucket and spade/ And climbs into the sun’ are such words. Two short lines that draw to an abrupt and brutal halt the main body of the epic song, ‘Hollywood’. I can understand why these are your favourite lyrics. They are a lovely image. However, looking at them now, these lines are perhaps not so obscure, and without wanting to take away their power by attaching my own meaning to them, their intent seems fairly clear. They mean, the child stopped what he was doing and died.
Nick Cave answering a question on his Red Right-Hand website.
These times of darkness are necessary for the mind to purify and refine it. The fact is that many things are often at work in our use of our minds, in our desire to understand, from which we need deliverance: some curiosity, a lot of pride, conceit, and desire for power (to understand is to dominate); as well as a human quest for security (to understand is to master and control).
To know everything, we must first pass through a stage of not knowing…we cannot truly grow, humanly or spiritually, without going through times when the intelligence is painfully humbled.
We should also recognize that thinking and reflecting can bring us nearer to God, they can be a path toward him, but they cannot give us God himself. Thinking of an object means holding it at a certain distance in order to master it. That is not possible with God-we cannot “think about” God in the sense of making him into an object. It is faith, love, and adoration that place us in contact with God. The spiritual life has sometimes been over-intellectualized in the Western world.
The conclusion to which what has just been said obviously points to this: our emotions and our intellects are useful and valuable, but they cannot serve as the basis for our relationship with God or our prayer life. The only basis for that has to be faith. When our emotions are dry and our minds are blind, faith should be enough to carry us forward. Faith is free, untrammeled. It can feed on what stirs our emotions and enlightens our minds, but it can also do without those things.
‘Thirsting for Prayer’ written by Father Jacques Philippe
The soul is not plunging into a state of quietistic oblivion. It is not disappearing into an inward state of nothingness, with a loss of identity and all awareness. The passivity stressed by Saint John of the Cross has to do with the withdrawal from any active pursuit of a knowledge or an experience. The passivity is in the refusal to direct or control what is taking place. The soul allows God to take the lead. On the other hand, there is a certain active receptivity necessary in such prayer, at least in its beginnings. Our soul must accept the inclination that it delicately experiences of being drawn to an inner “cavern” of loving quiet where a desire for God is present deeply within it. The effort, mildly and gently undertaken, is to remain open, receptive, free to being drawn, but refusing as well to grasp at an experience or at any kind of knowledge. As Saint John of the Cross just affirmed in the last passage, one is not entirely passive in keeping one’s eyes open to receive light. The surrender to that light occurs passively but cannot take place except that
our soul is willing to be receptive and does not obstruct this receptive disposition. The result is a knowledge bestowed on the soul by a love to which it surrenders itself. As Saint John of the Cross writes: “This reception of the light infused supernaturally into the soul is passive knowing. It is affirmed that these individuals do nothing, not because they fail to understand but because they understand with no effort other than receiving what is bestowed. This is what happens when God bestows illuminations and inspirations, although here the person freely receives this general obscure knowledge” (AMC 2.15.2).
It is important also to reaffirm that the inclination to remain alone and quiet with God, in a peaceful desire and loving awareness, without making acts or pursuing discursive exercises, must be a real state of grace granted to a soul. The danger in the realm of deeper prayer is to seek possessively after a “state of prayer” that is not being given by grace. There are people who might choose by way of preference to cultivate a state of “induced quietude” in prayer. The practice, for instance, of slowly repeating a single word or a mantra, as so-called “centering prayer” teaches, can be an example of this. The method may bring a “quietude” to the psyche, emptying thoughts from the mind and conveying a noticeable tranquility to the inner feelings. But these effects have their likely source in the rhythmic repetition of the mantra. It is a serious misrepresentation to identify this practice and its effects with genuine contemplative prayer. The symptoms induced by the method are quite capable of coexisting with an indifference in some lives to grave personal immorality. That in itself should raise questions. No method of prayer advertised as a contemplative practice of prayer can dispense with the need to pursue virtuous and sacrificial living. Even for a person in a state of grace, however, the inward quiet and tranquilizing peace experienced in pseudo-contemplative approaches pose a dubious and deluding feature. These effects are generally sought as a goal in themselves as part of a self-oriented pursuit, rather than coming as an inclination moved by a grace drawing the soul to God. In that case, the real focus is not directed toward God. And the passivity of inner emptiness, with the mind doing nothing, becomes over time a harmful condition for a soul. The person would not be turning with loving attentiveness to God, but descending into a progressive exercise in self-absorption. The fruits, as always, are seen in time. Without addressing, of course, contemporary practices, Saint John of the Cross is nonetheless clear on the importance of a careful discernment.
St John of the Cross: Master of Contemplation written by Father Donald Haggerty
Recent Comments