St. John of the Cross: Session 1

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

You're listening to a podcast by the Center for Action and Contemplation. To learn more, visit cac.org.

James Finley (0:08)

Greetings, I'm Jim Finley. Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.

Greetings, everyone. And welcome to our time here together at Turning for Spiritual Guidance to the Christian Mystic, St. John of the Cross.

Kind of based on some of the insights that were shared in the previous introductory reflections. In this session, I'd like to move directly into reminding ourselves on what St. John of the Cross means by the Dark Knight. This is a kind of a visual metaphor for a transformative experience that begins in the loss of the felt sense of God's sustaining presence in our life.

The sense of nurturance, the sense of reassurance, the sense of insight, of aspirations and consolations that have come to us through our faith, sustaining us day by day throughout our life and in prayer, mysteriously begins to fade away and to be replaced with a sense of the absence of the felt sense of God, a sense of aridity.

In his first book, in the collected works, Yusenna Mount Carmel, in Book Two, Chapter 13, he gives three signs by which we can discern in prayer that we're being led into this dark night. A night in which this deprivation of our customary ways of experiencing God opens out upon and draws us into an infinitely richer, more luminous and ultimately boundaryless way of experiencing God. That is, he says in the prologue is the way in which we begin to follow, find our way to the perfect union with God that is possible in this life through love. And so the night then leads us into this light of this perfect union through love. And he gives us three signs by which we can discern this is starting to happen to us in prayer. The first two signs are the signs of the deprivation. And he gives an explanatory note on each. The third sign is the beginnings of this more luminous, spacious, boundaryless light that begins to shine out of that darkness and loss. So, the three signs, the first sign.

The first, and by the way, these are the three signs that we should leave behind discursive meditation. That is, we should leave behind attempting to experience God in a customary way of Alexio Divina, like sitting in the presence of a word of God speaking to us in scripture, whatever the spiritual source is that we hear God's voice accessing our heart. And then in discursive meditation, engaging in a kind of process of reflection illumined by faith, or a kind of an ongoing inner dialogue with God that then leads to the heart center of the prayer, help me with this. So it's through these three signs of the dark night that we're to discern, that we're to leave behind discursive meditation. And so what are those signs, and what are the precautions of how he nuances this transition in our spiritual path? The first sign of entrance into the dark night of leaving behind discursive meditation. The first is the realization that one cannot make discursive meditation, nor receive satisfaction from it as before. Dryness is now the outcome of fixing the senses upon subjects that formerly provided satisfaction. As long as one can, however, make discursive meditation and draw out satisfaction, one must not abandon this method. Meditation, that is discursive meditation, using thoughts and images, must only be discontinued when the soul is placed in that peace and quietude to be spoken of in the third sign. And we can call back to St. Teresa of Avalon, the interior castle on this point. She takes a somewhat different view towards it. She says that she doesn't really think it's ever not possible to engage in discursive meditation. Or we just should abandon it completely. What we can discover is we're unexplainably being led beyond it. And John of the Cross, for him, puts it this way as an impossibility. We can't do it in the sense in which we can't do it and receive gratification from it. I think that's where he and Teresa kind of meet each other. We can do it, but we can't do it without feeling we're forcing the issue. Like we're making ourselves try. But the underlying nurturance that makes the trying meaningful, we can't find it anymore.

He's going to say later in this Chapter 13 that the fact that you're no longer experiencing this nurturance through discursive meditation, recitation, reflective prayer, all by itself is not enough to discern you're being led into the dark night. It's not enough to discern that you're a mystic in the making. For he points out the fact that our prayer is the litmus test of our heart. And so maybe the reason we're having difficulty in prayer are things that are going on in our life. Jesus says you go to bring your gift to the altar, and before you present it at the altar, leave the gift, and go make amends to your brother or your sister. And therefore he says maybe this difficulty in prayer is a kind of a manifestation of unresolved issues, where you're not treating yourself, your attitudes towards yourself, the way you're treating or your attitudes towards your spouse or your child or your brother or your sister, or the community as a whole, the people you work with. Maybe there's certain hurtful attitudes or a way of treating yourself and others that are hindering you from being the Christ-like loving person you're called to be. And therefore it's a call to go tend to that, to take care of that. It's an ongoing process. But let's say you check that out. You say, I don't think that's it really. You know, like no more sinful than usual. I think of just me, I'm an infinitely loved, precious, broken, fragile person. And I try to walk my walk, be sincere and real, and make amends. So I don't think that explains adequately, basically, how to understand what this aridity is about. The second sign.