St. John of the Cross: Session 5

James Finley (0:00)

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

Greetings, everyone. Welcome to our time together, Turning for Guidance to the Christian Mystics St. John of the Cross.

In preparing for today's session, it kind of dawned on me to share with you what I hope will be a way to help you to recognize the ways that these teachings of John of the Cross pertain to you personally. That is, he's clearly speaking of a passage through a dark night and the lofty depths that open out upon mystical union with God.

But what's important is to see that those lofty depths of union with God and the flowering of mystical consciousness, that mystical union, is present in all the stages and phases and aspects of our daily life. And so I want to share with you a meditation to hopefully help you to see how this poetic metaphor of the dark night is a way of putting words to something that you've experienced or something that you're experiencing now, like the transformative power of the dark night being transformed into deeper states of unity, of habitual love. And so I hope this helps. This is a kind of a first draft. This came to me and needs some more work, I guess. But I trust this together enough, like a contemplative spiritual direction here that will help you kind of tune in to see how this pertains to you and in the midst of your daily situation, whatever it might be.

And so I want to start first again by going back to some imagery that we started with Thomas Merton on this contemplative worldview. And we started with this imagery of, imagine you're wading along the ocean shore, ankle deep. It's true you're just ankle deep, but it's also true you're in the ocean. And it's also true, if you just head out to deeper water, it'll get plenty deep soon enough. And in terms of ego consciousness, that deepening as you keep swimming out and the water beneath you is getting deeper and deeper, that depth is a measurable depth. So you're moving in incrementally increasing depths of from one feet to two feet to 20 feet to 50 feet, to 100 feet, 200 feet, deeper, deeper, deeper, is a measurable depth, quantifiable, measurable depth, which is the experience in ego consciousness. We might say then at a more interior level, but what if the ocean in its hidden center, seeing the ocean here is a metaphor for God, the presence of God, but what if the ocean in its hidden center is infinitely deep? And what if the ocean is infinitely giving the infinite depths of itself away, whole and complete, in and as each incremental degree of entrance into it? That is, maybe toward the level of ego consciousness, in measurable objective terms, you're just angled deep. But in terms of grace, in terms of the fullness of God's presence in our life, you're in water way over your head, for you're in the plenitude of the infinite love of God pouring itself out and giving to you completely in and as that most shallow beginning level of your entry into the ocean. So our situation then is that we're living in incremental degrees of realization of infinite generosity of God pouring itself out and giving itself away whole and complete in the very least first stirrings of the awareness of the love of God, the presence of God in our life, the plenitude already perfectly all about us and within us.

There's a poem by Barbara Lutz. It was on my table where I was giving a retreat years ago. And here she's referring to, when she speaks of her, she's referring to her soul. She says, it takes almost nothing to move her, a soft agitation in the rain, an ant going by knowing where it is going. That is, suddenly, you can be blindsided by a kind of quiet amazement of the miracle of some simple thing, the ant going by, the agitation in the rain. The stirring of the wind blowing the curtain, the shadow, a slant of light across the floor, a sleeping infant, the palms of your own hands, the smell of a rose. There are these moments where we're quickened for Thomas Merton and turning to see a flock of birds descending. We get even at the most rudimentary level, a sense that we're already in the immensity of an overwhelming depth of presence manifested in this. The poet St. John, Gerard Manley Hopkins, of Enscape, she's following Duns Scotus, talks about seeing them, the stature of God or the presence of God in a single leaf, in the concreteness of a configuration of stones and your heart, your interior heart recognizes and senses something like that, see the holiness of that.