This remarkable priest prayed for hours every day while carrying on an active ministry, directing hundreds of souls, leading academic institutions, going in and out of imprisonment and helping to reform of the Carmelite Order in the 16th Century.  His writings are filled with beautiful poetry and solid teaching for the spiritual life.  His doctrine constantly focuses on Christ Jesus, and he invites his readers to ponder Christ in everything that happens to them, in all the different experiences of prayer, even the most arid.

It is in living in solidarity with what Christ suffered for oursakes that his doctrine takes on its riches proportions.  In the mystery of Christ, John of the Cross teaches that there are the most precious treasures of wisdom and knowledge of God waiting to be discovered.  To see the world, those we love, and even oneself with the eyes of God: nothing in life is as precious as this kind of knowing, this vision of the whole.  

This is why contemplation, beholding the mystery of Christ in our hearts, is for him the most important human activity – so essential that all other human activity finds its fullest meaning in being directed to this end.  This means life should be ordered around prayer.  (But how often do we approach prayer as something to fit into our busy lives instead?) No matter how much we know about Christ, there is always more beautiful and wonderful to know in Him – truths He knows we need and that he yearns to share.  His mystery is inexhaustible and holds everything we need to thrive, to live life to the full.

John of the Cross is a realist about this achievement and what it costs – although it is primarily God’s work, the soul must cooperate in faith even in the most difficult trials.  No matter the cost, he insists, what is to be gained is worth it – for we gain the Lord himself.  In the Office of Readings, the whole Church ponders his words on this point:

The soul cannot enter into these treasures, nor attain them, unless it first crosses into and enters the thicket of suffering, enduring interior and exterior labors, and unless it first recieves from God very many blessings in the intellect and in the senses, and has undergone long spiritual training … it is quite impossible to reach the thicket of riches and wisdom of God except by first entering the thicket of much suffering, in such a way that the soul finds there consolation and desire.  The soul that longs for divine wisdom chooses first, and in truth, the thicket  of the cross.  
Spiritual Canticle, 36-37.

In our last post, John of the Cross described an experience of seeking the Lord, fired by the urgent promptings of love in one’s heart, free of the normal concerns that normally trap us within ourselves.  Such freedom for seeking the the Lord is “sheer grace.” Is there anything we can do to prepare our hearts for such a gift?

In Ascent of Mt. Carmel, Book 1, Chapter 13, Fray Juan de Yepes y Alvarez proposes practices, which in his own experience, have helped people find this freedom.   While many have heard of his doctrine of nada, very few really understand it in a beneficial manner.   Here, we will consider a good foundation for a proper understanding and personal appropriation of this teaching.

The first thing to remember is the “sheer grace” by which we find the freedom to seek the Lord with our whole hearts – this grace is exactly that, a grace, a gift, something entirely undeserved.  This is why John of the Cross emphasizes that they way to come to know the Lord is more “passive” than “active.”  The passivity he has in mind is not the absence of activity, but an active receptivity, a generosity of heart that is ready to make a total response to the Lord.  Gratitude, humility and love of God form the dimensions of such generosity.  Such is the only proper response to the Lord for the price He paid for the freedom He yearns us to know.   In Salvation History, the best example of this response comes from Mary in her encounter with Gabriel, “Let it be done to me according to your will.”

Once we see that all the counsels of this doctor of the Church concern principally the river of grace flowing from the side of Christ, then any practices or disciplines we take up on our part are simply subordinate to the Lord’s work, a humble response to a generous gift.   How can we repay the Lord for his goodness to us?  How can we say no to his invitation to friendship?  Everything we do for the sake of this friendship is a simple cooperation with what He has already done for us: it is love in the face of Love.

St. John of the Cross provides excellent counsel for how to begin to live by faith alone.   In his work, Ascent to Mt. Carmel, he uses his poem “Dark Night” as a description for the spiritual life.  In the first strophe, the poem describes a romantic adventure that begins in the stillness of a dark night.  When silence befalls his household, a lover sneaks out to find his beloved.  The stillness and darkness that cloak him are all sheer gift because in this he is completely hidden, unable to be distracted from his passion.  

One dark night,
fired with love’s urgent longings
— ah, sheer grace! —
I went out unseen,
my house being all still.

The Mystical Doctor interprets this stophe to mean that the soul sings the grace it had in departing from its “inordinate sensory appetites and imperfections.” This gets to  big obstacle in the life of prayer specifically and the discipline of the Christian life in general.   There are so many distractions in our hearts and in our lives that we often forget about what is truly essential.  This is because rather than surrendering to the gentle movement of the Holy Spirit in our hearts, we live driven by irrational cultural and psychological forces.  The desires of our heart are selfish and out of order, not directed to that which will make us thrive.  John of the Cross calls these often subconscious psychological forces “inordinate sensory appetites and imperfections.”  The truth is our spiritual life is often choked out by a myriad of anxieties and concerns – most of which are rooted in the silliness of our own immaturity.   Those who want to break passed this are hungry for practical counsel on how to move forward.  John of the Cross provided this in Book 1, chapter 13 of the Ascent of Mt. Carmel. 

But before we go to this counsel, there is one more element that is key to understanding what he is trying to say.   Namely, the soul that does enter into the stillness of the night, that no longer lives by inordinate passions, but instead lives by faith alone — this soul sings!   It rejoices with jubiliation and cannot contain itself.  I emphasize this because most people think the dark night is about being somber and depressed.  But quite the opposite is true.  Those who live by faith are on a journey to ever more profound kinds of joy — and their joy is contagious.   It is not the glee of a simply psychological state — although it might feel this way at first.  It is the deeper joy of realizing the deepest desires of one’s heart, of becoming profoundly authentic, of thriving in the fullness of one’s natural capacities – now expanded in a supernatural way.

So what is the first step to find this joy?  What is the quickest, surest way?  John of the Cross says the desire to imitate Christ must become a habit of soul that takes up and consumes one’s whole life.   The way to foster such a desire is to prayerfully study the life of Christ in order to know how to imitate him and behave in all events as he would.  His life is dynamic.  That means that the more we attend to it, the more it evokes a response from us.  The only proper response to the life of Christ is love – and friendship love desires above all else to imitate the beloved until the lover and beloved are of one heart.

From this we can better understand the Mystical Doctor’s second counsel (one which most misunderstand or otherwise freak out over): to be successful in this imitation, renounce and remain empty of any satisfaction which is not purely for the honor and glory of God.  Do this out of love for Jesus Christ.  In his life he had no other gratification, nor desired any other, than the fulfillment of his Father’s will. 

Most people today want to read this counsel within the context of Buddha’s four noble truths where the elimination of suffering is caused by the elimination of desire.   I am no expert on Buddhism, so I cannot speak accurately on whether westerners really understand that teacher.   But I do know that the popular understanding of this doctrine in the West provides a huge misconception and misapplication of St. John of the Cross’s Carmelite doctrine.   John of the Cross really is not interested in eliminating suffering or desire.  He is interested in making room in the heart for Divine Desire – and in the work of salvation, God’s yearning takes up not only every human suffering but every joy and endows these with meaning beyond what this world can contain.   This is the life of Christ poured out for us on the Cross.  To realize it, the Carmelite Mystic is telling us that we must choose to live His life and not our own.  

Those who really think about this claim find it astounding.  They ponder whether it could possibly be true.  And those who embrace its truth soon find that they too sing.  They discover an ineffable and suprising joy which must break forth in total jubilation.

(Translation of St. John of the Cross from The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, trans. Kavanaugh and Rodriguez, (Washington. D.C.: ICS, 1991)).
 

Hunger for silence is the sign of spiritual maturity. This saying is attributed to John Paul the Great and reminds me of the program he proposed to the Church after the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000. He called the Church to gaze on the face of Christ. Learning to gaze on the face of Christ takes us into a mystery of great silence – not just the absence of noise, but a peaceful silence of heart that only the Lord himself can produce. The Carmelite mystics explain that it is in Christ’s adoring silence that a Lamp of Fire begins to burn within.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church #2628 identifies adoration as one of the forms of prayer encompassing an attitude primary to all authentic prayer, an attitude that blends humility and hope in our approach to God. Externally, adoration expresses itself when we kneel down, fold our hands, and close our eyes. But more important than these external gestures that dispose us to adore the Lord is the interior movement of heart, a movement that should inform everything we express in prayer.

When we glimpse the incomprehensible transcendance of the Lord, His holiness, over anything and everything else that is, especially over “self”, a certain awe grips our hearts and we fall humbly silent before Him. Those who surrender to this awe more and more through their faithfulness to prayer discover a deep yearning for this adoring silence. That is because this silence is not a mere therapeutic experience of non-activity. For the overworked and exhausted, such silence can be very important but it is not the adoring silence of Christian prayer. Rather the silence of adoration is a humble openess to the Lord’s super activity, an active receptivity to the overwhelming and unimaginable power of God. Those who embrace the mystery of the vigilant silence have a sense of exaltation in their hearts. They understand the words of Mary, “My spirit exalts in God my savior.”

When we are moved like this, it is such a personal experience that we are tempted to think we are the only ones who have ever had it. But then we notice others folding their hands and closing their eyes after a powerful homily or during a beautiful hymn. I have seen some people not move for hours, they are so enveloped in this prayer. Others, like the Carthusians, have accepted vocations in which their whole way of life is centered in this prayer. Very few are willing to share the movement of their hearts at these moments.

Those who begin to pray soon discover that adoring silence characterizes their conversations with the Lord. Elisabeth of the Trinity, a twenty six year old Carmelite nun, just weeks before her death in 1906, identifies this movement of prayer as an “ecstacy of love” and the “beautiful praise” that is “sung eternally in the bosom of the tranquil Trinity.”

Ecstacy is not merely an emotional trip but a spiritual journey. The word actually means “to go out from oneself.” Elisabeth well understood how adoration rescues us from self-preoccupation. It makes God the center of our hearts. At the same time, it involves us in a search for the face of Christ within us, within those painful places – memories, feelings – we would rather avoid. When we discover the face of Christ gazing on us in love in the midst of our own brokeness – the brokeness has no more power over us. Before Christ, human misery can no longer imprison us within ourselves. We discover real freedom when the Lord leads us out through this misery into the abyss of his mercy. For the Christian, true ecstacy in prayer is like the journey revealed in Psalm 23, “though I walk through the valley of death, I fear not for you are with me.”

If we consider adoration as a going out of self, we better understand what Elisabeth intends to convey when she attributes adoration to the inner life of the Trinity. In the bosom of the Trinity, that is in the very communion of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Elisabeth ‘hears’ adoration as a song of praise.

Notice that her vision of heaven is not something static or boring. I think anyone who actually believes God is like that will never learn to pray. Why should anyone pray if in the end we wind up with something lifeless? In us, there is a passion to thrive the rebels against the temptation of nihilism. Even under the shadow of the certainty of death, we do not want to perish, but to live. This passion was put there by God himself. God is himself the thriving happiness which is the source of all beatitude. He is so filled with life and love that only those with great passion can find Him. And yet He yearns for us to find Him and in Him to realize the perfection of all our noble human potential. We are talking about the total freedom to love – to give oneself to God and others in a communion of unending love. To live like this is completely opposed to anything boring or static.

Heaven is a place where nothing inhibits love. And we all know our finest moments in life are precisely those moments when we love without counting the cost, when we give everything for the sake of the beloved – whether a spouse, a child, a stranger or God. These moments of strength, courage and freedom are such gifts. They allow us to glimpse who we really are. Imagine yourself in your finest moment — only this time the moment never ends. It is with this kind of love the Jesus adores the Father from all eternity — it has all the force and power of great music, or rather, this is the source of all music. Flowing from the heart of the Trinity, Elisabeth ‘hears’ a symphony of love in which our own silent adoration somehow participates. Elisabeth understands this graced participation as Christ adoring the Father within us through our faith in Him.

Perhaps the most beautiful attempts to express this idea is contained in the writings of St. John of the Cross. Especially in Living Flame, the Spanish mystic describes an intimate experience of God in terms of “Lamps of Fire” (LF 3). Those who fully enter into the prayer of adoration discover that their journey into God has allowed God to journey into them – that is, has allowed God to be present in new ways. The warmth and light of God permeates their every action – this to such an extent their very presence strengthens and enlightens those around them. Elisabeth would say that even in their most weakest and human moments, the Lord’s eternal resounds through them.

How does silent adoration lead to a life filled with such love? Elisabeth and John of the Cross speak about a humble loving acceptance of persecutions, tribulations, nights, dryness, and other tests. By having the courage to continue to adore in the midst these great trials, joining his song of praise in those crucifying moments of our lives, we learn the secret of gazing on the face of Christ crucified by love. This allows us to be completely surrendered to God, because keeping our eyes fixed on Him, nothing can overwhelm us but His infinite love. And so the reason we come to yearn for adoring silence. When we catch, even for an instant, the look of love in his eyes, that powerful yearning for our happiness, nothing can separate us from Him and his warmth and light in us becomes, even in the most bitter cold darkness, a Lamp of Fire.