- St. John of the Cross, Ascent of Mt. Carmel, Book II, XXII:5
Today is the feast day of St. John of the Cross.
- St. John of the Cross, Ascent of Mt. Carmel, Book II, XXII:5
Today is the feast day of St. John of the Cross.
Posted on December 14, 2009 at 07:18 AM in Carmelites: St. John of the Cross | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
A couple of weeks ago, I posted something written by someone else, titled “Everything,” about how God works through Everything, including life’s joys and life’s painful losses, and all of it is in some way a gift from God. While she is Protestant, what she wrote is also very Catholic. We believe the same things that she wrote.
I thought at the time that I would like to write something else titled “Nothing” about another side of the joys and sufferings of life.
I cannot match my friend's very personal tone, as she wrote while going through a very painful time in life. Whatever I could write would have to seem impersonal by comparison. If I tried to match her emotional depth, it would be pretense. In many ways, this post says nothing more than what she wrote, because the point is still God's everything. But I hope that I have found something to say simply that rings true and is worth saying. Here it is:
Nothing that comes into my life should become an idol, drawing my attention or affections away from God. Nothing (people I love, people I find irritating; things I own, things I would like to own; things I do, things I would like to do).
The word Nothing teaches us about the Crucifixion, in which Jesus was made as if nothing, and about what it means to take up our cross and follow Him. (Matt. 10:38)
So I can see in every loss I have had in life a greater understanding of the Cross, a means of experiencing something more of what Christ experienced on the Cross. And everything I have had of joy and beauty can be valued according to whether it has drawn me closer to God, so as to give it eternal worth. “My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion for ever.” (Ps. 73:26)
Col. 3:23-24 Whatever your task, work heartily, as serving the Lord and not men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward; you are serving the Lord Christ. – Nothing we receive in this life can match the eternal inheritance that can only be given by God.
Luke 14:33 So therefore, whoever of you does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple. – Nothing should detain us from doing the will of God.
Phil. 1:21 For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. – Nothing, not even life itself, should matter to us as compared to Christ himself.
Col. 1:28-29 God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. – Nothing gives us eternity except by God’s grace, preventing us from being proud in God’s presence.
I Tim. 6:6-8 There is great gain in godliness with contentment; for we brought nothing into the world, and we cannot take anything out of the world; but if we have food and clothing, with these we shall be content. – Nothing that we have will go with us from this life, so we should be content with what we have.
Rom. 8:35-39 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written, "For thy sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered." No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. – Nothing will separate us from God’s love, and we are conquerors even in our suffering and persecution.
To this can be added the words of the mystics who wrote about how our acceptance of such nothingness can lead us toward a closer relationship in unity with God:
Julian of Norwich: “The saints that be in Heaven, they will to know nothing but that which our Lord wills to show them: and also their charity and their desire is ruled after the will of our Lord: and thus we ought to will, like them. Then we shall will or desire nothing but the will of our Lord, as they do: for we are all one in God’s seeing.” Revelations of Divine Love.
St. John of the Cross: “And thus nothing else is said in Holy Scripture to have been commanded by God to be put in the Ark, where the manna was, except the book of the Law and the rod of Moses, which signifies the Cross. For the soul that aspires to nothing other than keeping the law of the Lord perfectly and bearing the Cross of Christ will be a true Ark, containing within itself the true manna, which is God, when that soul attains to a perfect possession within itself of this law and this rod, without any other thing soever.” The Ascent of Mt. Carmel.
Posted on May 25, 2008 at 08:27 PM in Carmelites: St. John of the Cross, Living Faith | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
This is the second of three posts on my reflections on virtuous topics suggested to me by other people this Lent. The first was Lord, Make Me Faithful.
The word "graceful" is defined by Merriam-Webster online as "displaying grace in form or action : pleasing or attractive in line, proportion, or movement." The linked definition for "grace" offers several meanings, and the first of them is "a: unmerited divine assistance given humans for their regeneration or sanctification b: a virtue coming from God c: a state of sanctification enjoyed through divine grace." Then, even as the dictionary defines the word, "graceful" could mean displaying in form or action God's divine assistance, virtue, and sanctification.
To distinguish the word here from other meanings of "graceful," such as "attractive in line or proportion," I hyphenated the word into "grace-ful," meaning full of grace.
The meanings of the Greek word translated as "grace" in the New Testament, as shown in Strong's online, include that which affords joy, sweetness, loveliness; good will, loving-kindness, favour (including God's merciful kindness by which He turns souls to Christ and strengthens them in faith and the exercise of virtues); and the spiritual condition of someone who is governed by the power of divine grace.
St. John of the Cross wrote of grace as one of the means of God's presence, mentioned in a post a few weeks ago titled Nature, Contemplation and the Beauty of God:
In The Spiritual Canticle, 11:3, St. John of the Cross described three forms of God’s presence:
(1) Presence by essence is God’s presence in all creatures. “With this presence he gives them life and being. Should this essential presence be lacking to them, they would all be annihilated.”
(2) Presence by grace is God’s presence indwelling the faithful who do not fall into mortal sin.
(3) Presence by love is God’s presence to devout souls in ways that refresh, delight and gladden them.
That earlier post talked about God's presence by essence, as He is omnipotent, omnipresent, and by Him all things hold together. This post talks about God's presence as He indwells us by grace. In it, according to St. John of the Cross, God "abides in the soul, pleased and satisfied with it."
Holy Week turns our thoughts of grace to Easter. The price of God's grace was the Crucifixion. It is in taking up our crosses and following Him that we become more like Him, acting in grace toward others: "displaying grace in form or action," to apply the Merriam-Webster definition of "graceful." We reflect upon that Trinitarian grace that indwells us, and ponder the love of Christ who went to the cross to give us that grace.
St. Teresa of Avila also wrote about God's indwelling us by grace in Interior Castle, and St. Edith Stein drew from both St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila in her chapter on the presence of God in The Science of the Cross. Applying what they wrote, St. Edith Stein said, "The indwelling by grace is possible only in personal-spiritual beings, for it requires the free acceptance of sanctifying grace by the recipient." We can be grace-ful only by the free acceptance of sanctifying grace. This is seen in the baptism of infants, where the parents freely accept God's grace for their child, and the child later ratifies that free acceptance by a life of faith. The "life of grace and virtue," she says, is an effect of God's life within us.
The entire Trinity indwells us in grace, according to those three saints. The love within the Trinity, as the Father, Son and Holy Spirit love each other in eternity, thus exists within our souls.
We might think of that indwelling by grace particularly as it relates to the union with God in prayer. However, we should think too of how that indwelling works in our "lives of grace and virtue," as St. Edith Stein put it. We live grace-ful lives in relationship with others when we freely accept God's sanctifying grace toward us and then, in turn, show grace freely offered to those around us.
Jesus showed grace to the thief on the cross. He showed grace by dying for us while we were sinners. He showed grace by appearing to His disciples in the Resurrection, even to Thomas who doubted, and to Peter who had denied Him. Grace shows kindness to those who have not shown kindness to us.
St. John of the Cross' life and letters provide an example of how that grace can be lived out in our lives with those around us. During his suffering later in life, he wrote to a Carmelite nun that she should not let what was happening to him cause her grief, for it did not cause any for him (Letter 26). "Think nothing else but that God ordains all, and where there is no love, put love, and you will draw out love," he wrote to her. The love that we can be sure to draw out is God's love. He did not mean to suggest that we would get other people to like us better if we try to treat them well -- that may happen, or it may not, and it was not his point. For love given in grace is not given in neediness for something in return from the one loved.
St. John gave love where there was no love, and was thus the source of the light of Christ in the lives of others in their, and his, dark nights of the soul. He was Christ's grace for them, full of grace, in that he gave love drawing from God's presence indwelling him in grace. He sought thereby to gain a fuller indwelling of God's grace and to draw out more of God's love within himself.
We too are grace-ful when we live toward others in grace, following Christ's example of love, where there is or is not love among people, where other people do or do not love us, knowing that the love of the Trinity is within the innermost part of our being, and that we will draw out love from the Trinity as we live grace-ful lives.
Posted on March 19, 2008 at 10:57 PM in Carmelites: St. Edith Stein, Carmelites: St. John of the Cross, Lent and Holy Week 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
This post will consider the contemplation of the God’s presence in creation, as viewed in Scripture, the writings of St. John of the Cross, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church. It follows both an earlier post titled Art, Detachment and the Beauty of God and my reflections over the past week during a retreat. During that reatreat, Fr. Datius Kanjiramukil, O.C.D., spoke about contemplation and the presence of God, prompting part of this reflection.
Creation and Redemption
Nature, viewed as God’s creation, naturally draws the attention of anyone who contemplates the divine. Metaphors drawn from nature appear throughout the Psalms and elsewhere in Scripture.
The Apostle’s Creed affirms the role of God the Father almighty as “Creator of heaven and earth,” a role that can be seen in the first verse of Genesis, and in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (“CCC”) 279. God the Son and the Holy Spirit were also active in creation, so that the mystery of the Trinity is found in it (CCC 290 to 292).
Jesus, the Word of God, was the mediator of creation, as John 1:3 says, “All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.” Colossians 1:15 call him “the first-born of all creation,” and Colossians 1:16-17 says of Him:
“For in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities – all things were created through him and for him. He is before all thing, and in him all things hold together.”
The latter phrase, that in Christ all things hold together, suggests a universal presence of Christ as creator in creation in the present. A distinction has to be drawn in that it is only of human beings that Galatians 4:6 says that “because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’” However, the omnipresent and omnipotent God is present in creation in a way that differs from His presence in the hearts of believers – a distinction developed in the writings of St. John of the Cross.
Moreover, Christ, the Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end (Rev. 1:8, 17, 21:6), is also called the “first-born of the dead, that in everything he might be pre-eminent” (Col. 1:18). In one of the passages in Revelation in which Jesus is called the Alpha and the Omega, we are told, “The one who sat on the throne said, ‘Behold, I make all things new.” (Rev. 21:5-6). There will be a new heaven and a new earth, a new Jerusalem. (Rev. 21:1-2).
Creation “Groans” Awaiting the Redemption
God’s role in creation is such that St. Paul, in his Epistle to the Romans 8:18-23 envisions all of creation groaning for the glory to be revealed in the redemption when all things will be made new:
“I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God, for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now, and not only the creation, but we ourselves who have the first fruits of the Spirit groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.”
The CCC explains this in sections 1046-1047:
“For the cosmos, Revelation affirms the profound common destiny of the material world and man:
For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God . . . in hope because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay. . . . We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.
“The visible universe, then, is itself destined to be transformed, 'so that the world itself, restored to its original state, facing no further obstacles, should be at the service of the just,' sharing their glorification in the risen Jesus Christ.”
Three related Greek words are translated as “groan,” “groans” and “the groaning” in Romans 8:22, 23 and 26. The first two are in the verses that say that the whole creation has been “groaning in travail” (8:22, sustenazo, a verb meaning to groan together) and that we ourselves who have the first fruits of the Spirit “groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons” (8:23, stenazo, meaning to sigh or groan). The third follows at Romans 8:26-27 (stenagmos, a noun meaning a groaning or a sigh), saying that the Spirit helps us in our weakness, “for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.”
Although the word in Romans 8:26 is translated by the word “sigh” in the RSV translation used here, it is translated by a word closer to the other two elsewhere. The New American Bible thus translates the three words as “creation is groaning,” “we also groan,” and “the Spirit itself intercedes with inexpressible groanings.”
A footnote in the French TOB translation, édition intégrale (1998), mentions the similarity of these three groanings of creation (8:22), the Christian (8:23), and the Spirit (8:26).
A footnote in the New American Bible mentions this groaning for the "full harvest of the Spirit's presence":
“Paul considers the destiny of the created world to be linked with the future that belongs to the believers. As it shares in the penalty of corruption brought about by sin, so also will it share in the benefits of redemption and future glory that comprise the ultimate liberation of God's people (Romans 8:19-22). After patient endurance in steadfast expectation, the full harvest of the Spirit's presence will be realized. On earth believers enjoy the firstfruits, i.e., the Spirit, as a guarantee of the total liberation of their bodies from the influence of the rebellious old self (Romans 8:23).”
In the groaning of creation, I have wondered whether it is the presence of God in creation – the Holy Spirit – that “groans” in awaiting the new heaven and new earth, just as Colossians 1:17 says that in Christ “all things hold together.” It allows for a less metaphoric understanding without attributing thought or voice to inanimate objects. However, the text of Romans 8:22-26 does not draw so clear a meaning, and I did not find an exegetical source to either affirm or reject that interpretation. St. John of the Cross does not suggest it. Rather, I raise it as a possibility and invite comment if anyone cares to respond.
St. John of the Cross and the Presence of God in Creation
In The Spiritual Canticle, 11:3, St. John of the Cross described three forms of God’s presence:
(1) Presence by essence is God’s presence in all creatures. “With this presence he gives them life and being. Should this essential presence be lacking to them, they would all be annihilated.”
(2) Presence by grace is God’s presence indwelling the faithful who do not fall into mortal sin.
(3) Presence by spiritual affection is God’s presence to devout souls in ways that refresh, delight and gladden them.
God’s “presence by essence” is like that described in Col. 1:17. In Christ, St. Paul wrote, “all things hold together.” St. John of the Cross wrote, if God’s essential presence were lacking to anything or anyone, “they would all be annihilated.”
In The Spiritual Canticle, 5:4, he mentions another portion of Scripture from which he drew, which is John 12:32: “And when I am lifted up, I will draw everyone to myself.” St. John of the Cross translated it “I will elevate all things to myself.”
He also drew that view in part from Pseudo-Augustine, Soliloquiorum animae ad Deum. In The Spiritual Canticle 5:1, he mentions St. Augustine and adds: “God created all things with remarkable ease and brevity, and in them he left some trace of who he is, not only in giving all things being from nothing, but even by endowing them with innumerable graces and qualities, making them beautiful in a wonderful order and unfailing dependence on one another.” All of this, he says, God did through the Word of God who created them. In 5:2, he adds that “creatures are like a trace of God’s passing. Through them one can track down his grandeur, might, wisdom, and other divine attributes.”
The view of God’s presence by grace and by spiritual affection in The Spiritual Canticle likewise has Scriptural sources. Among those that support those concepts are John 14:17 (the Holy Spirit shall be with you and in you); John 15:5 (abide in me); Acts 2:4 (they were filled with the Holy Spirit); Gal. 2:20 (Christ lives in me); Eph. 2:22 (built together for a dwelling place of God); Eph. 4:6 (One God and Father who is above all, through all, and in you all); Phil. 2:13 (God works in you to will and do of his good pleasure); Col. 2:6 (walk in Christ).
Nature Draws Our Eyes to the Beauty of the Creator
Despite his view of God's presence by essence in all created things -- and somewhat because of it -- the use of nature in spiritual devotion was, for St. John of the Cross, always a means to an end, and never the end itself. Its purpose is always to draw people into a deepening relationship with God who is both omnipresent and present in the hearts of believers. The contemplation of nature is meant to draw people toward contemplation of God and His presence by grace in the heart of the contemplative.
He wrote that those places by which God moves the will include sites with “pleasant variations in the arrangement of the land and trees and provide solitary quietude, all of which naturally awakens devotion.” (The Ascent of Mt. Carmel, Book III, 42:1). He encouraged prayer either in the quietness of one’s own room or “in the solitary wilderness, and at the best and most quiet time of night” as Jesus prayed in Luke 6:12 (The Ascent, Book III, 44:4). However, he advised people praying in such places to immediately direct their will to God “in forgetfulness of the place itself” (42:1). They should try to be “interiorly with God and forget the place” (42:2).
As in the case of religious art discussed in a previous post, his interest in nature was in its ability to draw our attention to God’s magnificence, and not to the grandeur of nature itself. “Fasten your eyes on Him alone,” he wrote in The Ascent, Book II, 22:5. The beauty of the place served a purpose only if it leads the viewer to contemplate the beauty of the invisible God.
That view is still valid today. In the Concluding Document of its 2006 Plenary Assembly, the Pontifical Council for Culture devoted part of its attention to nature.
Drawing from Wisdom 13:1-5, the Assembly wrote:
"There is an abyss between the ineffable beauty of God and its vestiges in creation, and the sacred author defines the aim of this ascendant dialogue: ‘through the grandeur and beauty of the creatures we may, by analogy, contemplate their Author.’ (v.5) It is a matter of passing through the visible forms of natural things to climb up to their invisible author, the 'Completely Other', who we profess in the Creed: 'I believe in One God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth.'"
Among their Pastoral Proposals was that "particular attention to nature helps discover in it the mirror of the beauty of God" by "listening to creation that tells the glory of God" and by listening "to God who speaks to us through his creation and makes himself accessible to reason, according to the teaching of the First Vatican Council (Dei Filius, Ch. 2, can.1)."
I lift up my eyes to the hills,
From whence does my help come?
My help comes from the Lord,
who made heaven and earth.- Psalm 121:1-2
Posted on February 23, 2008 at 11:00 PM in Carmelites: St. John of the Cross, Prayer | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Art and Truth
In a chapter titled “Wounded by the Arrow of Beauty,” in Pope Benedict XVI's book On the Way to Jesus Christ (meditations written while he was head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith), he wrote about hearing a Bach concert conducted by Leonard Bernstein in Munich. Following one great aria, he and Lutheran Bishop Hanselmann, sitting next to him, looked at each other and said, “Anyone who has heard this knows that the faith is true.”
The Pope described the totality of true beauty in the paradox presented in the two antiphons for Psalm 45 in the Liturgy of the Hours for Lent and Holy Week, in Evening Prayer for Monday of Week II in the four-week Psalter. The antiphon for Lent (“Yours is more than mortal beauty; every work you speak is full of grace”) is the same antiphon used the rest of the year, drawn from third verse of the Psalm (“You are the fairest of the children of men and graciousness is poured upon your lips.”) The antiphon for the same Psalm in Holy Week, paradoxically, is “He had neither beauty, nor majesty, nothing to attract our eyes,” drawn from Isaiah 53:2. The contrast points to the beauty of the truth of Christ’s suffering. “Beauty is knowledge,” the Holy Father wrote, “indeed, a higher form of knowing, because it strikes man with the truth in all its greatness.”
Art as Motivation toward the Transcendent
In the Final Document of its Plenary Assembly, in 2006, the Pontifical Council for Culture drew from the first volume of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s The Glory of the Lord, in which von Balthasar spoke of the value of beauty compared with the good which “has lost its power of attraction” and the proofs of truth which “have lost their conclusive character.”
Drawing from von Balthasar and other sources, the Council for Culture stated:
“The way of beauty replies to the intimate desire for happiness that resides in the heart of every person. Opening infinite horizons, it prompts the human person to push outside of himself, from the routine of the ephemeral passing instant, to the Transcendent and Mystery, and seek, as the final goal of the ultimate quest for wellbeing and total nostalgia, this original beauty which is God Himself, creator of all created beauty.”
St. Edith Stein observed the truth of such art in Finite and Eternal Being, mentioning “the artist, who penetrates through the purely external and factual to the primordial archetype” who “can present more of the truth than the historian who remains within the limited circumference of external data.” The work of such artists who remain within the bounds of tradition, she said, “will be truer even in the sense of historical truth than the work of a historian who does not penetrate beyond the surface of external facts.” The historian presents facts, while the artist presents the essence of what a subject should have been and was destined to be. Although artistic truth is bound to the human work of the art itself, its existents have transcendental truth.
St. John of the Cross wrote of the importance of art in The Ascent of Mt. Carmel. He contrasted art as a path to the transcendent with a more materialistic and worldly view of art in which some people would look at the art for its value as material wealth, or for the honor given to the artist. In Chapter 35 of Book 3 of The Ascent, he wrote of “delightful spiritual goods,” in which he included the “motivating goods” of “statues, paintings of saints, oratories, and ceremonies.”
St. John spoke of works of art as “vital to the divine worship and necessary to move the will to devotion.” He said that “we should always take advantage of them in order to be awakened from our lukewarmness.” However, he also warned that “many rejoice more in the painting and ornamentation than in the object represented.” He thus encouraged that our focus should be on the devotion to which such art draws us, rather than on “the elaborateness of the workmanship and its ornamentation.”
The message of St. John of the Cross is that contemplatives should always look at religious and liturgical art such that we are drawn by the art’s transcendent motivation toward an experiential knowledge of the divine, rather than looking at it with materialistic eyes.
The Pope, similarly, in On the Way to Jesus Christ, contrasted the Christian view of beauty with “two fires” to be opposed: (1) the “cult of the ugly” which sees the beautiful as a deception and sees only what is cruel and vulgar as true, and (2) “deceptive beauty” that gives rise to “a desire for possession” as when Eve in Genesis saw the fruit of the tree as beautiful.
Both St. John of the Cross and the Council for Culture considered art’s effect of drawing people toward the divine depicted in it. God who draws us toward the transcendent is in our inner selves, drawing us toward friendship and union with Him, toward the divine.
Our True Desire Is for the Beauty of God
God is who and what we truly desire, and the artistic truth of religious art serves its purpose when it guides us toward God and into contemplation of the divine.
The Council of Culture wrote, “For the believer, beauty transcends the aesthetic and finds its archetype in God.” All Christian artwork, they said, leads along a path that reveals the meaning, origin and end of our terrestrial journey, a passage that “becomes real in Jesus Christ, who is Himself ‘the way, the truth and the life,’ (Jn 14, 6) the ‘complete truth.’ (Jn 16, 13)”
St. Catherine of Genoa’s The Spiritual Dialogue ascribed these words to the Soul:
“The beauty and goodness and joy of created things
are means for knowing and enjoying things divine.
(Once it had tasted those joys, however, it asked itself:
And yet, what must heavenly things be like?)
Ultimately, what we enjoy is not the art itself, but rather a taste of the divine. When art has motivated us toward that joy, the object of the art itself may no longer serve its purpose for the moment. The transcendent toward which it motivates us will always surpass the work of art that drew us there.
Art and Detachment
Art thus serving the purpose of drawing us toward the divine, we may consider whether the art itself ever becomes unnecessary. The answer is no. While devotion to God, and detachment from material things, can enable someone to accept the loss of a work of art that has been meaningful to them, we never reach a point where we no longer need art at all.
In The Ascent of Mt. Carmel, St. John of the Cross said that people who direct their devotion to God and the saints depicted in Church art do not need many images. Instead, they “seek the living image of Christ crucified within themselves,” and when works of art are taken from them (as would have happened to many people in his era, when churches were stripped of art during the Reformation), “they remain calm.” They are not attached to the object of art itself, but rather to God and to spiritual things depicted in the art, and those are not taken from them.
Yet such detachment does not reach a point where we have no more need for art. In the same era, his fellow Discalced Carmelite founder, St. Teresa of Avila, explained in Relation V that she had learned from the Lord that it was wrong to deprive herself or her nuns of artwork as the Protestants did:
“I had read in a book that it was an imperfection to possess pictures well painted,— and I would not, therefore, retain in my cell one that I had; and also, before I had read this, I thought that it was poverty to possess none, except those made of paper,— and, as I read this afterwards, I would not have any of any other material. I learnt from our Lord, when I was not thinking at all about this, what I am going to say: ‘that this mortification was not right. Which is better, poverty or charity? But as love was the better, whatever kindled love in me, that I must not give up, nor take away from my nuns; for the book spoke of much adorning and curious devices—not of pictures. What Satan was doing among the Lutherans was the taking away from them all those means by which their love might be the more quickened; and thus they were going to perdition. Those who are loyal to Me, My daughter, must now, more than ever, do the very reverse of what they do.’”
Thus, she and St. John of the Cross both supported the need for art and its motivation toward the transcendent. Living the beatitudes and even the monastic vow of poverty never reaches a point where a person should abandon art. Detachment from the object can enable people to accept the loss of a particular picture or statue, as a lost object of value, and a contemplative may want fewer items, but that does not mean we should deprive ourselves of the motivating value of art.
Art and Evangelism
The proper use of beauty as a pathway to the transcendent has an evangelistic aspect, which has been seen in the recent Vatican Masses at which Pope Benedict XVI has presided. His view of the evangelistic value of beauty is seen in On the Way to Jesus Christ. There, mentioning that icons and great works of Christian art lead us “on an interior way, a way of transcendence,” he added:
“I have often said that I am convinced that the true apologetics for the Christian message, the most persuasive proof of its truth, offsetting everything that may appear negative, are the saints, on the one hand, and the beauty that the faith has generated on the other. For faith to grow today, we must lead ourselves and the persons we meet to encounter the saints and to come in contact with the beautiful.”
The use of beauty in local parishes can similarly become a means of leading parishioners and those who may visit at Christmas, Easter, or an occasional wedding or memorial service, to contemplate the transcendent. Whether or not parishes are designed, and parish art selected, to look contemporary, a high priority should be the choice of art and architecture that reflect the transcendent, and the beautiful that draws people to contemplate the beauty of God and heavenly things.
Beauty as a Statement of Faith
I think the use of beauty as a statement of faith might also affect our selections of clothing and religious jewelry that we wear to Mass, and the rosaries we use in churches and other public places. St. John of the Cross pointed out that every rosary works the same way regardless of the expense of the materials. That makes the greatest sense in the context of consecrated religious life, in which the rosaries may be seen only by other cloistered nuns and friars, and in which the greatest evangelistic impact may result from living ordered lives of simplicity and poverty.
Outside of that context, other factors might also affect the selection of rosaries and religious jewelry, and even the clothing we wear to Mass. All of those things can reflect a worshipful reverence for God. They reflect our priorities, in a context in which the money spent on a rosary may be viewed in comparison with what we spend on other things. Without becoming materialistic, a layperson could communicate the artistic beauty that reflects the transcendence of the beauty of God, in the choice of a beautiful Bible, jewelry, rosary and other items that other people see.
In all of this, the beauty of a life lived in relationship with Christ Himself is what we should most seek, and what we want others to see in us. Where the art in our environment serves that purpose in our lives, in our prayer and in the choices we make, we are living contemplatively and evangelistically in relationship to beauty.
Posted on February 03, 2008 at 09:18 PM in Art, Carmelites: St. John of the Cross | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
"God could answer as follows: If I have already told you all things in my Word, my Son, and if I have no other word, what answer or revelation can I now make that would surpass this? Fasten your eyes on him alone because in him I have spoken and revealed all and in him you will discover even more than you ask for and desire. . . . If I spoke before, it was to promise Christ. If they questioned me, their inquiries were related to their petitions and longings for Christ in whom they were to obtain every good, as is now explained in all the doctrine of the evangelists and apostles. . . . fix your eyes only on him and you will discern hidden in him the most secret mysteries, and wisdom, and wonders of God.”
St. John of the Cross, The Ascent of Mount Carmel, Book Two, 22:5, 6. From The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, translated by Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez Copyright (c) 1964, 1979, 1991 by Washington Province of Discalced Carmelites ICS Publications 2131 Lincoln Road, N.E. Washington, DC 20002-1199 U.S.A., www.icspublications.org.
Posted on December 16, 2007 at 08:24 PM in Advent, Carmelites: St. John of the Cross | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
December 14 is the feast day of St. John of the Cross. As with the short biography I did of St. Teresa of Avila some time ago, this one is longer than the others.
Juan de Yepes, known to us as St. John of the Cross, was born around1542 in a small town in Old Castile. His father was Gonzalo de Yepes, orphaned at an early age. He was from a wealthy family of silk merchants whose Jewish ancestry had been hidden to gain legal privileges. John’s mother, Catalina, had been an orphan since infancy, and she was from a poor family thought possibly to have had Moorish ancestry. She had supported herself by weaving textiles in Toledo before she met Gonzalo and they fell in love. As a result of their marriage, in 1529, the Yepes family disinherited Gonzalo, leaving the two in poverty.
John was still a toddler when Gonzalo died in an epidemic. Gonzalo was buried in the parish church next to John’s brother Luis, who is thought to have died of malnutrition. Catalina was left with two sons, Francesco and John. She went to her late husband’s family seeking help and found little.
They moved, first to Arevalo for four years and then, in 1551, to Medina del Campo, where Catalina continued to obtain necessities with her weaving, aided by the children. During their time in Arevalo, Francesco was among the youth who roamed the streets late at night, playing a guitar and carousing, sometimes sleeping in a local church not from piety but rather because a local cleric would give him a place to sleep off his late night revelry. Around that time, Francesco underwent a profound conversion. Under the guidance of a priest in Arevalo, the eighteen year old Francesco developed the habit of going into the fields and vineyards at night, praying for long hours. He married and settled into a stable life, an uneducated laborer who worked to help the sick and the poor. John was six years old at the time of his brother’s conversion. He remained close to his brother all his life.
John was 9 years old when his family moved to Medina del Campo, where he remained for 13 years. There, he received an elementary education at the School of Doctrine, part of a program to educate poor children, expecting them to learn a trade and thus to be less prone to crime. He quickly learned to read and write, but never settled on a trade. Attempts at carpentry, tailoring, carving and painting all were unsuccessful, perhaps due to his greater interest in books. After trying various trades, he took a job as a servant at the Hospital of the Conception, a charitable center that treated the poor and patients with sexually transmitted diseases.
The Jesuits had recently established a school for pre-university studies in Medina, the kind of school where Jesuits educated their members, paying students, and a few students accepted in charity. The hospital administrator noticed his abilities, his dedication to his work, and his love for books, and gave him permission to take classes there while still working at the hospital. He took classes there from about 1559 to 1563, studying a little in the morning and more in the evening. His mother sometimes found him in the middle of the night studying in the hay stacks.
John’s teacher took particular interest in him, and he soon became a good Latinist and rhetorician. The hospital administrator had hoped that when John finished his schooling with the Jesuits, he would become the hospital’s chaplain and confessor to the poor.
Instead, he was attracted to Carmel’s Marian character. In 1563, he secretly went to the Carmelite Monastery of Santa Ana and asked for the habit, which they gave to him at once. He took the name of Fray John of St. Matthias (Juan de Santo Matia). During his one-year novitiate, others noticed his love for solitude, prayer and repentance, although some considered him overly zealous. After making his profession, he received permission to observe the order’s primitive European rule.
He then traveled to Salamanca for four years of study at the Carmelite College of San Andrés and the city’s celebrated university. The university had one of the most renowned theological faculties in Spain. He studied philosophy and theology, but he remained first and foremost a Carmelite contemplative, still spending long hours alone before the Blessed Sacrament. He was appointed prefect of students, a position in which he gave lectures and debated with the faculty. Although successful in that academic environment, he was not satisfied, perhaps feeling too much alone in living by the primitive European rule and in his zeal.
He was ordained in the fall of 1567 and went to his home monastery of Santa Ana in Medina to chant his first Mass. While there, he met Teresa of Avila. He confided that he was thinking of leaving the order for the Carthusians, who lived a life of greater solitude and contemplation. Teresa asked him to wait until the Lord would provide a monastery for friars of her Carmelite reform.
One year later, John and two other friars founded the first Discalced Carmelite house for friars, in a two-month novitiate in Valladolid. In the fall, he set out to found a new house in a secluded place called Duruelo. Teresa briefly visited that house, writing in her book The Foundations about a little cross made for the holy water fount there from sticks with a paper image of Christ. Although the happiness of the friars despite their environment impressed her, she asked them to be less severe in their penitential practices. The reform was still built on austerity, which appealed to the mentality of the time.
On November 28, 1568, in the presence of the provincial, John accepted the Discalced Carmelite life, changing his name to Fray Juan de la Cruz (John of the Cross). In May 1572, Teresa sought him out to be the confessor and spiritual director for the nuns at the Incarnation in Avila, where she had been made prioress in a controversial decision. The Incarnation was not a monastery of the reform, but rather one of the mitigated rule. Near collapse when Teresa arrived, the house began to transform. Teresa credited John with the change, calling him a saint and her spiritual father, and saying that there was “no one like him in all Castile.”
He could direct people with different temperaments differently, adapting what he did for each individual, secular people as well as religious. He taught children who lived nearby how to read from a primer, and helped them with their catechism and prayers.
When Teresa left the Incarnation, the nuncio ordered John to remain there, despite new political tension. He lived in a hermitage with one other Discalced friar, isolated from the Carmelites of the mitigated rule, some of whom believed that he was destroying the order. They arrested him for the first time in December 1575, releasing him in January 1576.
John offered to resign, but the nuns appealed for him to stay, and the papal nuncio Nicolas Ormaneto ordered him to remain there. Ormaneto died in June 1577, leaving John vulnerable. He was in his hermitage there on the night of December 2, 1577, when he and the other Discalced friar were both seized. John was this time taken to Toledo and imprisoned for 9 months. His imprisonment in the monastery was not uncommon for a friar accused of being rebellious and contumacious, as he was. He was subjected to physical mistreatment intended to force him to abandon his rebellion. However, he did not agree with the accusations. For the first six months, he had nothing but a tiny cell with an unsympathetic jailer who would not allow him to have a book, ink, paper, or change of clothing. The jailer’s successor took more interest in John, allowing him to have writing materials so that he could begin to write down some of the poetry already partly composed in his head. In a harsh prison cell, the beauty of God’s love enfolded him, and he wrote the first part of his poem Spiritual Canticle and his Romances on the Gospel.
By August, 1578, afraid he was dying, John made a plan of escape. Little by little, he loosened the bolts on the lock, in such a way that it was concealed from his jailers. One night, he broke it readily and tied linens together to a pre-measured length. He climbed out of a window and slid down the linens, jumping the last few feet to the top of a wall, and eventually found his way to a house of Discalced nuns. Finding him very weak and frail, they began to nurse him back to health.
The Discalced Carmelites then appointed John to be superior of the monastery of El Calvario in Andalusia, far to the south, where those seeking to re-arrest him would be unlikely to do so. He was still weak when he began his journey in late 1578. On June 13, 1579, he left El Calvario for Baeza, where he became the rector of a new house for Discalced Carmelite students. Baeza had a deeply spiritual city life. John was consulted by the clergy and also by ordinary people who wanted his instruction. He showed charity toward the sick, especially during a flu epidemic of 1580, when his mother died, and in another epidemic in 1582. On June 22, 1580, Pope Gregory XIII made the Discalced a separate province of the order, resolving much of the conflict that had led to John’s move south. However, the province was still under the direction of the same general as the Carmelites of the mitigated rule until after John’s death. John he did not return to live in Castile for another 8 years.
He began to write commentaries on his poetry and eventually wrote his great incomplete works, The Ascent of Mount Carmel and The Dark Night of the Soul. He completed his Spiritual Canticle and A Living Flame of Love. Other writings from those years have been lost. He carried his Bible with him regularly, analyzing and meditating on it. He continued to live an ascetic life rich in contemplation. Yet, while in Baeza, he drew careful distinctions between the mysticism of Baeza’s Alumbrados and that of the Discalced Carmelites. Applying what he knew of St. Thomas Aquinas and the Dominicans about the necessity of reason, he articulated the need to apply faith and reason to distinguish God’s true workings from false mysticism.
Teresa died in 1582. Meanwhile, John moved further south. He entered Granada in January 1582. There, in the country, there were no students. As superior, he first sought to build a relaxed and trusting atmosphere, observing that virtue cannot be fostered by harsh means. He spoke of contemplation, the virtues, and other spiritual things. One of the nuns in Granada kept a pile of notes from John’s talks and counsels about an inch high, but it was almost all lost or later destroyed for his protection in 1591.
In 1584, John became vicar provincial for Andalusia. He traveled extensively during those years, covering at least 15,812 miles in the course of his life, and sometimes 30 miles a day. He took his Bible, sometimes reading while on mule back on level ground. He walked much of the way. He sometimes had horses. He took shortcuts through rough terrain, and many of the roads were not suitable for wheels.
On June 27, 1587, Pope Sixtus V approved Doria’s Constitutions, and the Discalced became a congregation. While the conflict between the Discalced and the mitigated rule was ebbing, there was mounting conflict within the Discalced congregation. A scandalous power struggle erupted for control in the wake of Teresa’s death. Gracian, who had been her favorite, was seen as a threat by Doria, who took control. John, too, had enemies, including some other friars who believed that he had disciplined them too harshly when they were younger.
Despite John’s opposition to Doria’s mistreatment of Gracian, John was given high positions of authority. In 1588, he was elected third councilor to the vicar general for the discalced. Also superior of the central house of Segovia, he finally returned to Castile. The positions gave him great administrative duties and left no time for writing. His great books remained unfinished. He developed an enthusiasm for a building project for the monastery, and he built a garden for meditation. He spent long hours in prayer in a cave, or on his knees by the Blessed Sacrament at night, and working with directees. As before, both religious and secular people sought his guidance. Students came to him during the summer.
His time in a position of prominence did not last long. At the chapter of 1591, John was made provincial of Mexico. He had volunteered for the missionary journey, but there were some who had seen it as a convenient way to remove the threat he posed to the direction Doria wanted to take the order. John’s health began to deteriorate soon after the appointment, and he was moved instead to a small community at La Penuela, where he could again devote himself to prayer and spiritual direction. At the same time, he was subjected to a campaign seeking to destroy his reputation. One of those friars who held a grudge against him for a past rebuke assisted Doria in that effort. On July 6, 1591, John wrote in a letter not to let what had happened to him cause grief. Rather, “Think nothing else but that God ordains all, and where there is no love put love, and you will draw out love.” Many of his letters and other writings were then destroyed by correspondents who feared that John’s political enemies might use them against him.
On September 12, 1591, John began to suffer from a fever prompted by an infection in his leg. The infection spread, and he had to leave La Penuela to seek medical treatment. He chose to go to Ubeda, where no one knew him. The prior in Ubeda was reluctant to spend money on medical care and healthy food. Some of the friars disagreed. They complained to the provincial, who happened to be Anthony of Jesus, one of the other two friars who had lived with John in founding the first Discalced house for friars 23 years earlier. The young friars at Ubeda listened as John and Anthony spoke, mentioning the order’s earliest days. The prior, Crisostomo, became one of John’s admirers and later died with a reputation for holiness.
As doctors concluded that John’s decline was irreversible, he knew that death was approaching. He wanted the letters about the persecution burned to preserve the reputations of all concerned. In his last hour, he asked to hear a reading from the Song of Songs. He asked to have the bell rung for Matins, and said he would be chanting Matins in heaven. The bell rang at midnight. He died in the first minute after midnight on December 14, 1591, at the age of 49. People sought relics from his body. Litigation ensued over which city would keep it. Nine months after John’s death, his tomb was opened for the move to Segovia. His body was found to be fresh and was returned to the tomb. Again, on April 28, 1593, his body was found to be incorrupt and fragrant when finally moved to Segovia. His body was viewed for 8 days before being re-buried.
He was beatified in 1675, canonized in 1726, and declared a doctor of the church in 1926.
Bibliography
Dodd, Michael, O.C.D., “John of the Cross: The Person, His Times, His Writings” from Carmelite Studies VI: John of the Cross (available for free download online).
Kavanaugh, Kieran, O.C.D., Introduction to The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross.
Kavanaugh, Kieran, O.C.D., John of the Cross: Doctor of Light and Love
Ruiz, Federico, O.C.D., ed, God Speaks In the Night: The Life, Times and Teaching of St. John of the Cross (a collection of biographical and historical essays by various authors).
Posted on December 13, 2007 at 10:42 PM in Carmelites: St. John of the Cross, Church History: Biographies | Permalink | Comments (0)
"God is the supernatural light of the soul, without which it abides in darkness. And now, in the excess of its affection, it calls Him the light of its eyes, as an earthly lover, to express his affection, calls the object of his love the light of his eyes. The soul says in effect in the foregoing terms, 'Since my eyes have no other light, either of nature or of love, but You, let them behold You, Who in every way are their light.' David was regretting this light when he said in his trouble, 'The light of my eyes, and the same is not with me;' and Tobit, when he said, 'What manner of joy shall be to me who sit in darkness, and see not the light of heaven?' He was longing for the clear vision of God; for the light of heaven is the Son of God; as St. John says in the Revelation: 'And the city needs not sun, nor moon to shine in it; for the glory of God has illuminated it, and the Lamb is the lamp thereof.'"
- St. John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle of the Soul and the Bridegroom Christ, Stanza X.
December 14 (Friday) is the feast day of St. John of the Cross.
Picture: The crucifix in the chapel at El Carmelo Retreat Center, Redlands, California.
Posted on December 12, 2007 at 09:52 PM in Carmelites: St. John of the Cross | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
"Like all genuine mystics, St. John sees that the Church itself and everything in it was instituted by Christ to bring us to our Heavenly Father, and to give Him the glory that is His due. The Incarnation itself had that end in view: 'ut dum visibiliter Deum cognoscimus, per hunc in invisibilium amorem rapiamur.'"
- Father Gabriel Barry, O.C.D., "The Writings of St. John of the Cross"
"Vere dignum et justum est, aequum et salutare, nos tibi semper, et ubique gratias agere: Domine sancte, Pater omnipotens, aeterne Deus: Quia per incarnati Verbi mysterium, nova mentis nostrae fulsit: ut dum visibiliter Deum cognoscimus, per hunc in invisibilium amorem rapiamur. Et ideo cum Angelis et Archangelis, cum Thronis et Dominationibus, cumque omni militia caelestis exercitus, hymnum gloriae tuae canimus, sine fine dicentes:
SANCTUS, SANCTUS, SANCTUS..."
- The Preface for the Nativity of Our Lord, from the Extraordinary Form of the Mass
"Matters concerning the Godhead are, in themselves, the strongest incentive to love ['dilectio,' the interior act of charity; cf. 27] and consequently to devotion, because God is supremely lovable. Yet such is the weakness of the human mind that it needs a guiding hand, not only to the knowledge, but also to the love of Divine things by means of certain sensible objects known to us. Chief among these is the humanity of Christ, according to the words of the Preface [Preface for Christmastide], "that through knowing God visibly, we may be caught up to the love of things invisible." Wherefore matters relating to Christ's humanity are the chief incentive to devotion, leading us thither as a guiding hand, although devotion itself has for its object matters concerning the Godhead."
- St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae
"[I]f we are to please God and He is to grant us great favours, it is His will that this should be through His most sacred Humanity, in whom His Majesty said He is well pleased. I have learnt this indeed by repeated experiences; the Lord has told it me. I have clearly seen that it is by this door we must enter, if we wish His sovereign Majesty to reveal great secrets to us."
- The Life of St. Teresa of Avila.
"The son of God is, in the words of St. Paul, 'the brightness of His glory and the figure of His substance.' God saw all things only in the face of His Son. This was to give them their natural being, bestowing upon them many graces and natural gifts, making them perfect, as it is written in the book of Genesis: 'God saw all the things that He had made: and they were very good.' To see all things very good was to make them very good in the Word, His Son. He not only gave them their being and their natural graces when He beheld them, but He also clothed them with beauty in the face of His Son, communicating to them a supernatural being when He made man, and exalted him to the beauty of God, and, by consequence, all creatures in him, because He united Himself to the nature of them all in man. For this cause the Son of God Himself said, 'And I, if I be lifted up from the earth will draw all things to Myself.' And thus in this exaltation of the incarnation of His Son, and the glory of His resurrection according to the flesh, the Father not only made all things beautiful in part, but also, we may well say, clothed them wholly with beauty and dignity."
- St. John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle.
Posted on September 19, 2007 at 07:13 PM in Carmelites: St. John of the Cross, Christmas | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
"Do not think that he who lives
the so-precious inner life
finds joy and gladness
in the sweetness of the earth;
but there beyond all beauty
and what is and will be and was,
he tastes I don't-know-what
which is so gladly found.
Whoever seeks to advance
takes much more care
in what he has yet to gain
than in what he has already gained;
and so I will always tend
toward greater heights;
beyond all things, to I-don't-know-what
which is so gladly found."
- St. John of the Cross,
from "A Gloss (with a spiritual meaning)", in The Collected Works of Saint John of the Cross
Photo: A creek-bed at the bottom of Bryce Canyon, taken by me during a hike, June 1993.
Posted on May 01, 2007 at 09:59 PM in Carmelites: St. John of the Cross | Permalink | Comments (0)
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