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The Flowing Presence of the Holy Trinity

In a poem, John of the Cross describes the life of the Trinity as a river. He describes how this Personal Presence given to us in the Eucharist flows through the heavens and the earth. He even claims that this brimming River of Life surges through hell. Is God actually present where He is definitively and eternally rejected? If He can be present there, triumphant and just in the face of malice, how much more He reveals when the rejection is only indefinite and still confined by time.

As St John was tormented by his persecutors, he understood hell fire, and yet, he also knew that those fires could not constrain the Divine Presence. Not only through the very heart of evil, but through the evil that we cling to in our own hearts, this Living Water floods forth.  How can evil withstand this surge? How long will we resist Mercy’s force?

Those who are moved to confess their sins and to do penance have felt this Almighty River. Ready to burst dams of bitterness and set limits on the power of sin and death for the price of a prayer, the currents of Divine Mercy cannot be contained or predicted. As this overflowing Flood surges through the sinful levies that we raise, tender tears begin to flow and snobs comforted by forgiveness realize a new beginning.

To help us see what the Divine Persons begins and causes to progress, Saint Elizabeth of the Trinity describes not a river but an Ocean. What mysterious Water holds us afloat on these unfathomable seas! Great tides pull us beyond what is comfortable and convenient. Deep currents can suddenly take us where no one can see. Yet, it is not to nothingness but to fullness of life the Divine Persons draw us.  Christ, the Radiant Star, captivates us and at the same time helps us navigate these Waters in which we lose ourselves. As we surrender, God surrenders – and the Holy Spirit renews this saving Mystery and the Father overshadows with His creative love anew.

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Saint John of the Cross – By Love Alone

Saint John of the Cross explored how all of creation was the fruit of the love shared by the Father and the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit. The Father is the One who for Saint John completely delights in the Son. The Son is for him the One who adores the Father with profound joy and solemn gratitude.  Out of this inexhaustible mutual love, the Holy Spirit communicates the whole personal reality of One to the Other in an eternal exchange.   This vision of the inner life of the Trinity allows Saint John to propose the mysterious purpose of creation, its ultimate end in the plan of God.

For the Carmelite Doctor of the Church, it is out of the profundity of the Trinitarian mystery that the Father proposes to present His Son a Bride so that the Son might know what it is to be loved like the Father is loved by the Son. That Bride is the summit of all creation: the Church — and, throughout the poetry and commentary of Saint John, every soul personifies this ecclesial mystery anew through faith, baptism and growth in spiritual maturity.

When it comes to growth to full spiritual maturity, mental prayer in particular is the special means that Saint John expounds on. In in image of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, we are made for the loving communion that lives in the heart of the Church. The blood of Christ has given us access to this mystery.   If we contemplate this loving communion in faith we not only see a pattern for how we ought to live, but we receive the power to live in the likeness of God.

This vision is so biblical!  When know from John 10:10 that Jesus longs for His disciples to have an abundantly fulfilling life.  Not simply happy within the bounds of this present life, but extremely so in ways that this present life cannot contain.  When men and women thrive, they give God glory because they are in the image  of the One who eternally thrives before the Father: the more like Him they are, the more they reveal His glory.

Jesus made this kind of life possible when He was born of the Virgin Mary and gave himself up for us through his death on the Cross.  Because of sin, we were cut off from this fullness of life.  Before Christ, the miserable absence of love in our hearts blinded and weakened us so that we could not attain our true good.  Our own hostility constantly threatened our very existence.  The Lord could not watch indifferently when the noble goodness with which He endowed us was subject to such futility.  He set out to save us.  Since He is the Word of the Father, whatever He enters into receives purpose and meaning.  When He entered into fallen humanity, He brought our nature into harmony with God’s will to raise us up.  Yet this was done at a great price.

Throughout his writings, Saint John of the Cross reveals his conviction that,Jesus did not hold back from entering into the terrible mystery of our own suffering. He did this not only in a general way for all of humanity, but in a specific way for every single soul. He has suffered the particular hardships, difficulties, and wounds that weigh us down and He did so to the end. As a result, He knows intimately the absence of love that oppresses each heart and we never suffer this alone. For the Carmelite Master, the Lord is always present especially in His seeming absences and always ready to fill this absence with his faithfulness – if we will follow Him all the way to the Cross.

It is on this point that the wisdom of Saint John of the Cross is particularly eloquent. For he is adamant that we should respond to the excessiveness of such love. One only truly enters the heart of another when one embraces the suffering that is there. Out of pure love, Christ has chosen to know our suffering. Out of love and gratitude, Saint John of the Cross encourages us to become familiar with the Lord’s suffering — to share with Him even the difficult spiritual sorrows and death that He offered for our sake.  We do this through prayer and by being faithful to obligations of love that He has entrusted us with – even when we do not feel or understand, even when the effort to love seems to put to death everything else that is in us.

This in fact was the experience of Saint John of the Cross who died mostly misunderstood, especially by the community that he spent his life building up.  When faithfulness to God’s love takes us into hardships that completely overwhelm us and cause us to suffer the loss of all things, he firmly believed we are finally accomplishing our greatest work.  Just as the greatest work of Christ’s humanity was accomplished through the physical and spiritual agony that He suffered in his death, so too our greatest work is being realized when we seem to have utterly failed and feel ourselves completely powerless.  Even when he was catastrophically misunderstood, this great mystic tenderly loved those who the Lord had given him in his community, and in so doing witnessed to the whole Church what it means that “in the evening time of our life, we will be judged by love alone.” 

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Self-Denial – Surest Pathway

Contrary to those who insist that spiritual maturity is about mastering a technique or the successful completion of some elaborate program, St. John of the Cross sees the road to union with God as an easy and simple journey if we embrace radical self-denial:

The road leading to God does not entail a multiplicity of considerations, methods, manners, and experiences — though this may be a requirement for beginners — but demands only the one thing necessary: true self-denial, exterior and interior, through the surrender of both to the passion of Christ and by annihilation in all things. Ascent to Mount Carmel, book 2, chapter 7, Complete Works, translators Otilio Rodriguez and Kieran Kavanaugh, (Washington, D.C.: ICS, 1991)171. 

Self-denial is the practice of acting against the drive for comfort, security and satisfaction we seek in our relationships with people and in our relation to things.   As long as we worry about having influence over others or whether they esteem us, and as long as we only see anything else as a crutch with which to get through life, we are not vulnerable to the Lord and open to the wonders of His love at work in us and in the world.  This extends even to efforts to practice prayer merely as a program of mental hygiene.  The Lord did not die on the Cross so that we might find a little psychological relief from the stress of daily life. Thus, we turn our backs on these things, annihilate our disordered appetites, pick up our cross and follow in the steps of our Crucified Master.

Christ is our pattern.  We imitate Him out of devotion to Him.  He suffered the annihilation of all his earthly powers unto death out of love for the Father and for the sake of our salvation – because He loved us in the Father from all eternity.   Our love becomes eternal when we follow His example and allow His love for the Father to animate our lives and extend its hidden beauty into the world through us.

Some think these counsels regarding self-denial and annihilation mean that the spiritual life is suppose to be a joyless affair.   But really the more we renounce joys that are beneath our dignity, the more room we have for a deeper and more abiding joy.   There are some great joys that in fact give God glory when we share them.

If you have ever been captivated by the mountains in the early morning when they are suddenly crown in light or felt the reverberation of the surf crashing against the coastline —  you have probably felt drawn to silent adoration.   There is also a sweetness found in secretly bringing joy to others — those who have gone before us in the faith probably smile when we share this foretaste of our heavenly homeland.   We enjoy these wonderful works of God because, comfortable and pleasurable though they are in themselves, they raise us up out of self-pre-occupation to our true purpose, and in doing so they help us behold the splendor of the One in whose image we are made.

Such joys are not opposed to self-denial.  Instead, they foster it.  Somehow these joys give us the courage we need to embrace the beatitude of holy sorrow and open us  to the surest pathway.

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Opening our Hearts to the Word

How does the mystery of the Risen Lord, the Word of the Father, become part of one’s own life? This question reveals the beautiful paradox that lives in God’s work in our humanity and in our humanity’s grace filled effort in God. Such questions point us to the great mystery – the Word made flesh.
John of the Cross points to this answer in his work Ascent to Mt. Carmel, Book I, Chapter 13.  He teaches that if we  really want to encounter the Lord, if we really want to find Him, we must resolve first of all to imitate Him in all things.  Then, he explains, if we are to be successful in our imitation, we must also carefully study the life of Christ out of devotion to Him.

This is where his doctrine gets tough.  He observes that when we study the life of Christ we discover that the Lord renounced every satisfaction that was not purely for the honor and glory of God. Saint John of the Cross believes we can enter into deep intimacy with the Lord if we will resolve to do only that which gives God glory and honor – which means renunciation of any delight or comfort which does not give glory to God.  

Most everyone questions this logic. Many are frightened by it to some degree. Few understand it. Even fewer live it.  
To really understand what St. John of the Cross is saying, we must go beyond a pre-critical guess.  The deeper mystery in this teaching is only unveiled if we consider who Jesus is to him and what he means when he invites us to study Christ’s life.  What does it mean to study the life of Christ Jesus for St. John of the Cross?
St. John of the Cross believed that study of the Scriptures and contemplation, sacred reading and meditation, silent attentiveness to the Word and wonder filled exploration of sacred doctrine; that all of this must be an integrated effort of the heart.  He believed in a theology carried out on his knees and in constantly rendering himself vulnerable to the demands of the Gospel of Christ.  Such is the power of the Gospel: the more we encounter Christ, the more He animates our innermost being and transforms us in his love.  
St. John of the Cross describes the kind of study we should take up as “gazing” at the Lord with eyes of faith – a search for the eyes of the Lord who looks at us in love.  It is with this living hope that he himself searched for Christ in prayer and study, contemplation and constant conversion. Conversely, any study that does not ultimately lead to the interior peace that God produces is be a waste of time and a distraction.
Christ for him is the Word of the Father who has come as the Bridegroom of Creation — the perfection of which is the Church Herself. Each soul that participates as a unique endpoint in this ecclesial life reconstituted as the People God, the Body the Bride of Christ. To live for the Bridegroom like this is to begin to live a life that is not one’s own. It is to be animated with the life of Christ within.

The Eternal Word communicates everlasting life – wounding, slaying and raising us up all at once. Whoever He touches, by word and sacrament, by inspiration and presence, He wounds. The Word who was wounded for the sake of love wounds us with love. A soul so wounded wants to live by love and to die by love, to make an offering of self in love.  This is because a heart wounded by the Word aches to have been loved so much, and aches over how wonderful the One who so loves.

The Bridegroom gives such souls his own Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity to sustain such souls in these noble desires.  Anyone who has met the Bridegroom yearns for the wedding feast and for the wonderful things that God has in store for those who believe.  For those who ache for love of the Lord, the work of renunciation, of dying to oneself–this is as nothing.   What is love if there is no sacrifice and how do we love but at our own expense?

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Liturgy and the Discipline of the Christian Life

The Society of Catholic Liturgy meets this week in St. Louis and for information click here.  There will be a lot of wonderful presentations and we are especially glad to have his Eminence Raymond Cardinal Burke give our keynote address.  The theme is the Liturgy and Asceticism.   If you cannot come, please join us in prayer.  This is part of my presentation. 

High atop the Carthusian Mountians overlooking Grenoble, France, out of the silent darkness hidden voices rise, chanting psalms from memory, feebly making present for a few moments a sign of the resounding praise eternally offered at the Throne of the Lamb. In the movie, Into Great Silence, the camera focuses in on a vigil lamp burning in the sanctuary of the chapel of the Grande Chartreuse. The frail flickering light suggests what the discipline of prayer is in the Church and at the same time what the presence of Christ in the Church appears to be to the world. At this hour and in the icy harsh environment in which they live, we cannot really say how consciously aware the monks are of all that is going on in this liturgy. They are vulnerable – vulnerable to the cold, to the dark, to the silence, to the loneliness and to God. They hope in the Bridegroom. They await His coming. And, they know their hope will not be disappointed. As they chant, the Carthusians surrender to something beyond their awareness, to a mystery greater than what they are able to really know. Their liturgy is enveloped in great silence, a silence pregnant with God’s hidden presence, a silence that waits for their voices and a silence that continues their prayers long after their own words have ended.

Whatever their understanding, whatever their consciousness about what they are doing, they eloquently witness to the mystical prayer of the Church at the heart of the liturgy. If we were to ask how these contemplatives are able to pray this way, nothing of the art, architecture, preaching, chanting or liturgical practices suffices for an explanation. In fact, all these things are merely the fruit of something much deeper. What permeates their liturgies with such prayerfulness is their austere discipline of life, an asceticism they take with them into the liturgy. We are confronted with their continual faith filled effort at prayerfulness as that which allows their silence to be filled with the power of God’s Word.

Many pastoral initiatives have been taken up to render the liturgy more intelligible with the hopes of instilling a more deliberately conscious participation. But is this kind of participation what liturgical renewal is really all about? St. John of the Cross’s doctrine on ascetical practices when applied to liturgical participation indicates an even fuller and more active form of participation than we might imagine if we limit our concept of participation to only those activities of which we are conscious. His doctrine helps explain the Carthusian liturgy, why it is so intense and real. There is a deeper participation in Christ’s priestly prayer, in his work of redemption, an intense participation that extends beyond the vague light of our conscious awareness. It is the realm of supernatural faith where yearnings of love lead our understanding to places with which it is totally unfamiliar. It is a theological habit of mind which unceasingly seeks God in complete trust and surrender to the saving presence of the Risen Lord.

In St. John of the Cross, the ascetical discipline of the Christian life is ordered what he calls the Dark Night. Just like the Carthusian’s vigil suggests, he sees in this dark night all kinds of encounters with Christ which exceed one’s own conscious awareness. It is not about anything we can experience. It is about being completely vulnerable to the Lord. If you have ever held the hand of a loved one struggling to pray in the grip of death, you know exactly what he is suggesting. That faith filled but agonizing silence is raised up by an aching desire to see the face of God. It is so deep, so heartrending, so solemn. Yet the one offering this prayer is barely aware of what he does. If he questions why the Bridegroom is delayed, he also knows that his hope will not disappoint. Similarly, the Carmelite Master describes a secret search of lovers one for the other in which heart-piercing glances and wounding touches are fruitfully exchanged for the salvation of the world. So important are such encounters for spiritual maturity, this Doctor of the Church orders his whole ascetical doctrine to them. Liturgical asceticism, the mental prayer we offer during the liturgy, is ordered to these encounters with Christ in the night of faith — it is this kind of faith above all that will renew the liturgy.

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The Foolishness of God in St. John of the Cross

“The soul that walks in love neither tires others nor grows tired.” St. John of the Cross is a saint passionate about love to the point of foolishness in the eyes of the world.  But this foolishness is a family trait.  Gonzalo, his father, left everything out of love for Catalina, his mother and Gonzalo’s brothers despised him as a fool for love.  The friendship of Gonzalo and Catalina, their holy marriage, was filled with the radiant beauty of what it means to really live. True love is never half-way.  It never grows tired in its devotion.   For someone living by love, besides the beloved everything else is rubbish.  Real love fears no sacrifice and is ready for every hardship.  His father would die in destitution and yet his widowed mother never lost hope.  They were rich in love, and in the evening of our lives, nothing else really matters.  Their home was held together through every hardship and disappointment by living faith, a faith alive with love.  This love, this hope and this faith formed the soul of a future saint.  

John of the Cross was a fool for love like his parents, and in his foolishness lived life to the full just as they did.  Like his father he too was impassioned by love’s yearnings and in that passion found courage to make every sacrifice for the one he loved.  The only difference between father and son was that for John of the Cross his beloved was God alone.  God’s love radiates from his poetry and evokes urgent desire, profound peace and uncontainable jubilation.  Fired up with love, driven by love, given over to love, friendship with God was his life’s priority and a zeal to lead others into this same divine friendhsip burns throughout his writings.  He chose poverty and a disciplined life so that he would have the freedom to love.  This is why he embraced the the hungry, the sick and the dying.  It is why he made himself radically available to the spiritually poor as well.  Something of the foolishness of God lives in St. John of the Cross’s foolishness for love.

If someone were to ask what made his love for God so intense, at least part of the answer must include his devotion to prayer and the Word of God.  He memorized the Scriptures and loved to comment on them, especially the Song of Songs.  He loved silence and he loved to search for the Lord in the silence of his own heart.  It was in the silence of his heart that he heard the Lord speak to him, “The Father spoke one Word, which was his Son, and this Word he speaks always in eternal silence, and in silence must it be heard by the soul.”

Understanding the yearnings of love which moved in his soul provides insight into his friendship with Teresa of Avila, his zeal for the reform of Carmel and his fierce fortitude when imprisoned in Toledo.  It explains why hundreds of the faithful sought him out for spiritual direction and why he would walk for miles to hear confessions.  It sheds light on why he enjoyed camping in the wilderness and solitude in the countryside.    If he demanded rigor in religion, the friars he formed were gratefully loyal to him because his devotion was contagious.  At the same time, he was so rooted in love that he really did not care what others thought of him or whether those who were closest to him treated him poorly — although he always cared about them and would sacrifice anything to make sure they knew they were loved.  After his miraculous escape from the harsh torments he suffered in prison, he was asked about his experience.  His words were washed with wisdom, “Where there is no love, put love, and you will find love.”

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The Flower of Love

One of my favorite poets is Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit also known as Jessica Powers.  She lived from 1905 to 1988.  She became a Carmelite in her thirties.  In her poem Flower of Love she reflects on St. John of the Cross’s saying, “Where there is no love, put love and you will find love.”

The difficult labor of putting love where there is no love is described in terms of a planting a flower.  This flower has the potential of recreating Paradise in our hearts.   These last strophes seem to offer particular encouragement to those who struggle to plant such a flower in their own lives:

Blessed are they who stand upon their vow
and are insistent
that love in this bleak here, this barren now
become existent.
Blessed are they who battle jest and scorn
to keep love growing
from embryo immaculately born 
to blossom showing.
Primarily for them will petals part
to draw and win them,
It, when the pollen finds their opened hearts,
will bloom within them.
(1948) 
Selected Poetry of Jessica Powers, Ed. Regina Siegfried, ASC and Robert F. Morneau, Washington D.C.: ICS Publications (1999), 41.
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You are a Temple of the Holy Spirit

Some points for prayer-
Since the Blessed Trinity is living in you, 
you are the temple of God.  
You are also a holocaust, a word of unending praise, 
a flower of great beauty offered up to God.   
Francis Xavier Cardinal Nguyen Van Thuan, 
The Road to Hope: A Gospel from Prison


Here there is an interiority, 
a depth which lies beyond the merely natural, 
as far beyond the natural depth of soul 
as the “realm” where God is enthroned, 
and where our “glory to God in the highest” seeks Him, 
and is beyond all thoughts and feelings of natural sublimity.  
This interiority has been given to us by Baptism, 
and now Christian practice must lift it 
beyond the natural world of feeling and thinking.  
Romano Guardini, 
Learning the Virtues that Lead you to God

The Father spoke one Word, which was his Son, 
and his Word he speaks always in eternal silence, 
and in silence must it be heard by the soul.  
St. John of the Cross, 
Sayings of Light and Love

In the heaven of her soul, the praise of glory 
has already begun her work of eternity.  
Her song is uninterrupted, 
for she is under the action of the Holy Spirit 
who effects everything in her; 
and although she is not always aware of it, 
for the weakness of nature does not allow her 
to be established in God without distractions, 
she always sings, she always adores, 
for she has, so to speak, 
wholly passed into praise and love 
in her passion for the glory of her God.
Blessed Elisabeth of the Trinity, 
Heaven in Faith
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Theological Contemplation and the Lord’s Gaze of Love

There are many ways to enter into silence.  Teresa of Avila was told to think about scenes of the Lord’s passion.  St. Augustine in the first nine books of his Confessions reflects on the patient presence of the Lord in his life, even throughout the time he rejected his faith.  St. John of the Cross also mentions a contemplation on the doctrines of our faith – a kind of mental prayer he describes in Spiritual Canticle, stanza twelve.  Because it is a way of prayer which involves reflecting on sacred doctrine, I like to call this theological contemplation.

St. John of the Cross uses a beautiful image to illustrate what happens when we prayerful ponder sacred doctrine in deep silence. He describes this prayerful reflection on the content of our faith as peering into the reflective surface of a spring of water.  When our faith is pure, when we faithfully receive the teachings passed on to us through the Church, he suggests this opens up a deep loving knowledge of the Lord which matures us and raises our friendship with Him onto a whole new level.

The basis for this description is the fact that the propositions of our faith, the articles we believe, are “truth-bearing.”  These doctrines (like the Incarnation, or the Trinity, or Christ’s work of redemption) bear First Truth, the ineffable mystery of God Himself.  Another way to consider this is that the articles of the faith are like veils which disclose the substance of our faith.  They are like silver plated gold jewelry explains St. John of the Cross.  The golden substance under the shining silver of the propositions we believe is the Living God.  Like all veils, the content of what we believe serves to both protect and disclose something unspeakably beautiful.   The veil of our faith protects God from being misunderstood.  It also discloses Him to us, as we learn to see Him in it.

In this life, limited and frail human intelligence lacks the capacity to behold the incomprehensible love radiating from the face of God.  So the Lord has adapted Himself to our capacity, permitting himself to be reflected in truths we can understand.  In other words, we believe what we believe because this faith helps us find the Lord.  He has chosen to reveal himself, to allow Himself to be reflected, through sacred doctrine.

Now St. John of the Cross’s description of a reflection on a watery surface comes in.  A prayerful reflection on sacred doctrine is like looking into a pool of water that your friend is looking into.  If you are patient for the water to smooth out, if you allow your grasp of the faith to be pacified by prayer, you will see the eyes you search for.  What a wonderful description of the truths of our faith!  As we assent to them, they make a enchanting spring in the soul where a beautiful encounter is meant to take place, where friends find a mirror into each others heart.

St. John of the Cross describes this reflection in terms of a remarkable presence of God.  While God is reflected in all creation, this special reflection of the Lord in sacred doctrine pierces the heart.  It is a look of love that binds us to the Lord in a new way.  John of the Cross describes seeing the eyes of the Lord gazing on us in love.   Our gaze meets His gaze.  Something of God is impressed deep into the soul.  We realize He has been searching for us, waiting for our friendship.  This loving gaze of God captures the heart.  For those who glimpse this presence, catch a glimpse of the Lord in the truths we believe, this experience of the substance of our faith is sketched into their hearts.

Anyone who has experienced this theological contemplation can never live the same way again.  It not only changes the way one thinks, but it goes deeper, transforming even the affections of one’s own heart.  Everything that once seemed so important in life takes second place to a new priority of the heart, a new hunger and thirst for God.  The heart turns to the Lord with love enflamed.

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The Peaceful Stillness of Prayer

A very contemplative monk of the Grande Chartreuse reads the writings of Elisabeth of the Trinity because they have helped him sustain a life of deep prayer.  She leads into theological contemplation.  Her spiritual vision combines beautiful doctrine of great mystics, the Sacred Scriptures, and discrete references to her own life experience.   She does not present her ideas as an organized treatise.   Her thought instead is musical – in fact, it is a lot like 19th Century classical music with intricate interwoven themes repeating in new ways almost rhythmical throughout her reflection.  Each beautiful idea is surrounded by contemplative silence.  By this, I mean that the words pull one into prayer.  Some of those who read her works describe how they cannot read even a full paragraph without being moved to pray, overwhelmed with a longing for the Lord.  Helping her friends enter into deep prayer is exactly what she believed her mission from God to be. 



Probably she is most known for her Prayer to the Trinity, a prayer that has helped many contemplatives grow in devotion to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.   This prayer begins with a petition asking the Lord to establish one’s own soul in a peaceful stillness.  Whenever we forget about ourselves a little and look to the Lord, it is refreshing.  And we need this kind of refreshment on a regular basis.  Without it, we compromise ourselves in a thousand petty ways, and we feel trapped in our own egos – and this is a foretaste of hell.  When we make time for God, allowing our hearts to rest in Him, if only for a few moments, it is refreshing because it is a foretaste of the perfect freedom awaiting us.  For this is what heaven is – the state of being where we are completely free to thrive: free of pettiness, pride, anger, and all selfishness, of everything that impedes our ability to love.  It is exactly this stillness and peace, this sacred silence out of which love flows, that Blessed Elisabeth is teaching us to seek from God.  

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