St. John of the Cross: Session 2

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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James Finley (0:08)

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

Greetings, everyone. Welcome to our time here together, turning for guidance to the Christian mystic, St. John of the Cross. In his teachings, we enter into perfect union with God in a passage through a dark night. We're trying to understand what this dark night is of which he speaks, so that we may benefit from it, and find guidance in it in our ongoing search to deepen our experience of and response to God's presence in our life. In the previous session in the Center of Mount Carmel Book 2, Chapter 13, we saw how we can begin to discern and respond to the emergence of the dark night in prayer and meditation. And we saw, too, that in that experience of the dark night in prayer, that there's a passive aspect and an active aspect. The passive aspect is it happens to us as the loss of gratification of the sense of God's presence in our life in prayer. We're not gratified in thinking of the things of God. There's the loss of the felt sense of God's presence and so on. And the act of night is we actively cooperate with that. As we hand ourself over in our powerlessness to experience God, we hand ourself over to God.

And in that act of cooperation of surrendered openness to God in our helplessness, it begins to emerge in us this general loving awareness, this sense of resting in God resting in us, beyond words, beyond thoughts and so on, beyond emotion, the gate of heaven, a foretaste of eternal life. Insofar as possible in this life through this love. So now I want to turn in the Ascent of Mount Carmel Book 1, how John of the Cross then takes this initial sense, this taste of a loss of the gratification of the things of God and our customary ways of experiencing that through our emotions, through our insights, through our aspirations and all that. Through the loss of being gratified in that, to see how the loss arises from God weaning us off our dependency on these finite ways of experiencing the infinite love of God. So that in that loss of those finite ways, we might begin to experience an infinite union with the infinite love of God. In the depths of our powerlessness.

And so in the Ascent of Mount Carmel Book 1, he then takes that stance, this willingness to be surrendered over in this powerlessness of how it can be actively chosen as an attitude that we can carry through the whole day towards sensory experience. Towards what comes to us through the senses. And more particularly, what he refers to as the appetites. The appetites are the five senses fueled by the desire for gratification. As of St. John of the Cross, as the Center of Mount Carmel Book 1, Chapter 3, he says, the eye feeds upon its objects by means of light, in such a way that when the light is extinguished, the eye no longer sees them. Similarly, similarly does a man by means of his appetite feed and pasture on worldly things that gratify his faculties. When the appetites are extinguished or mortified, he no longer feeds upon the pleasure of these things, but lives as in a void and in darkness with respect to his appetites. Article 1 and Article 2, next paragraph. Let us throw some examples from each of the faculties. An individual, by depriving himself of his appetite for the delight of hearing, lives in darkness and emptiness in this sense faculty. In depriving himself of the pleasures of seeing things, he lives in darkness and poverty in the faculty of sight. In denying himself of the fragrance pleasing to the sense of smell, he abides in emptiness and darkness with this sense faculties.

So what's this about? These are hard sayings. When I first started reading John of the Cross in the monastery, I had this image as he's saying, like go ahead, go to one of the finest restaurants in town. Get a window table with a lovely view. Take in the ambiance. Get some more appetizers. Order the finest wine to pleasure your palate. Get the most elegant meal. Sit there and all that. Just don't enjoy it. But he's clearly not saying that. So then what is he saying? See how do we find our way through to what he's saying, which is actually understanding the ways of love, I think, and insight into the subtleties or depths of love, of consummating unconsummated longings.

And I want to get at this. See how can we get at this, not just at this level that John of the Cross is talking about, of this point of being carried over into more contemplative, mystical modes of experiencing God's presence insofar as possible on this earth through love, but to see how the energies, those transformative energies, kind of rain down into and are actually present in all the layers and dimensions of love in our life, wherever it is found, the ways of love. And this is where I'd like to start, so we can get a sense of what he's talking about, about deprivation and so on. Because it's subtle, actually. But when we reflect on it, we can see what he's, he's trying to put words to something that's hard to talk about. So I'd like to give an example from this.