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Contemplation in the Spiritual Canticle: the Program of St John of the Cross

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Contemplation in the Spiritual Canticle: the Program of St John of the Cross The Published Articles of Ernest E. Larkin, O.Carm. Contemplation in the Spiritual Canticle: The Program of St. John of the Cross Contemplation in The Spiritual Canticle: The Program of St John of the Cross This chapter is the skeleton of a the gratuitous crowning of the divine-human seminar, designed as a primer on Carmelite collaboration in the gift of mystical union with spirituality. The opening verses of John of the God and sacramental communion with all of Cross’s poem, “Spiritual Canticle,” are used creation. as the framework. The first fifteen verses, John of the Cross’s two point program stanzas of this poem, allow us to formulate of prayer and penance might profitably be some basic programmatic themes of St John of related to Bernard Lonergan’s teaching on the Cross as well as call on St Teresa of Avila conversion. For Lonergan the state of grace is for concrete applications in the area of the primordial gift of religious conversion contemplative prayer and human defined as being in love with God and relationships.1 appropriated by ongoing self-transcendence on the several levels of consciousness.3 The The Spiritual Canticle redeemed status of the child of God needs to be taken seriously and affirmed and owned The “Spiritual Canticle” is about divine union, “stanzas between the soul and through living out the transcendental imperatives: be attentive, be intelligent, be the bridegroom.” The first fifteen stanzas of reasonable, and be loving. This process is the total forty of version B recapitulate the sweep of the journey in the scholastic intellectual and moral conversion and brings the religious conversion to completion. categories or “ways” of purification, illumination, and union. John’s didactic John reduces the imperatives to prayer and penance. In their active or ascetical form teaching is set in this developmental they are meditation and mortification; in their perspective, as is illustrated in the fifteen stanzas (QB.22.3). passive or mystical form they are contemplation and poverty of spirit. In both The first five verses of the poem pertain to purification, specified in the forms the basic double principle enunciated in ascetical language at the beginning of the commentary as “meditation and Ascent (A. 1.13. 3-4) is being implemented. mortification”: verses 6 to 12 describe illumination or “the contemplative way”, Here is the call to search out and make one’s own the truth about Jesus Christ (n.3) and to which analysis shows to be the state of contemplation and poverty of spirit or the live by this knowledge through individual choices (mortification) or by the freedom of wholesale renunciation of desires; the rest of total renunciation (poverty of spirit). The the poem is about divine union under the symbols of spiritual betrothal and marriage, beginner studies the life of Christ in order to put on the Lord Jesus Christ with the building sampled in verses 13 to 15.2 In the first two ways or stages there are blocks of one by one choices. The total renunciation envisioned in n.4 is the long- both a positive and negative thrust, the move range goal, but it will be achieved only by toward God in prayer and the dealing with obstacles through mortification and poverty of contemplation. The challenge to act always in pure faith, hope and love with no regard for spirit. The code words, prayer and penance, sum up this dialectic. They are the two arms one’s own self-satisfaction (A. 2-3) is a that reach up and embrace God and lead into Page 87 The Published Articles of Ernest E. Larkin, O.Carm. Contemplation in the Spiritual Canticle: The Program of St. John of the Cross realistic possibility only through the infused Some decree of this desire for God is light and love of contemplation. at the root of every spiritual journey, Poverty or nakedness of spirit, which Experientially the condition may be goes by a rich series of names in John (see, for embryonic, only partially recognized, or, as in example, F. 3.34), is both the condition and the present instance, the love of God may have fruit of contemplation. Human and divine been tenderly and resolutely cultivated. In elements work together in various both cases the point of departure is the combinations to achieve this state, which frees orientation to God celebrated in the famous the person and maximizes the union with God words of St Augustine: “You have made us in knowledge and love (CB. 1.11). The search for your self, O Lord and our hearts are for God is a life project, not just a prayer restless till they rest in you.”4 project; God is not found only in isolated acts The yearning for God lies dormant in of formal prayer and specific works of many people, buried under the distractions and penance but in the total daily life of the person preoccupations of life. It needs to be brought and the community. Thus the project of into consciousness and fostered and nurtured transformation embraces all the relationships by prayer and penance. Original sin, according of one’s life. What is going on in human to the Greek Orthodox theologian Alexander relationships is happening in one’s prayer life Schmeman, is precisely the blunting of this and vice versa. This existential aspect is desire for God and the loss of true sacramental addressed in human community and ministry. communion with creation. 5 Personal sin adds There are thus four programmatic themes: to this debility (Rom 5:12). prayer, penance, community and ministry. The sanjuanist project makes the desire These themes are summarized in this chapter, for God the organizing principle of life. The but are also treated elsewhere in this volume desire becomes a single-hearted search for at greater length separately and at length. God and there is no room for any deviation or compromise or any lesser goal that is not Desire: Foundation for the Journey integrated with the desire for the pure honor The poem opens with a statement of and glory of God. We are dealing with a keen sense of God’s transcendence and the will to intense desire for the beloved. The life situation of the author at the time of fit one’s life into God rather than fit God into one’s life. composition was the painful experience of the A new beginning starts the journey. A Toledo prison that mirrored interior desolation. This suffering was the prelude to new burst of love for Christ gives the energy to rise above the pleasure principle, which to the mystical exaltation that takes up the major part of the poem. this point has been a large factor in the person’s life. Personal pleasure is no longer The desolation describes the interval the issue. The “new and better love” of the between the two dark night and the spiritual betrothal and marriage. The purified soul has heavenly bridegroom (A. 1.14.2), further strengthened by “longings of love,” gives a entered the “deep caverns of feeling” but has not yet received the full communication of new focus to life. This love is the human response to God’s prior love (I John 4. 10: God in mystical union (F. 3.18). There is the Rom 5.5; Gal 4.9) and fuels the “urgent experience of the infinite emptiness of the human spirit and the felt absence of the only longings” (“Dark Night”) that move the person to nakedness of spirit and Reality than can fill this cavity. The desire for 6 God is at a fever pitch, the pain transformation in Christ. overwhelming. Page 88 The Published Articles of Ernest E. Larkin, O.Carm. Contemplation in the Spiritual Canticle: The Program of St. John of the Cross This second conversion is more than These are all human goods indeed, but only if the dramatic experience of “baptism in the they are pursued in their truth (A.3.20.2) with Spirit” or the good resolutions in a cursillo or the “eye of love” that is faith. As personal a retreat. It is the intention to pursue the total satisfactions unconnected with the larger commitment of the Ascent, chapter 13. “Have picture of the love of God they are a habitual desire to imitate Christ in all your competitors and hazards and need to be deeds by bringing your life into conformity renounced; in this sense the cost of divine with his.” (A.1.13.3). The real challenge is to union is “not less than everything” (T.S. implement this proposal by fidelity to ongoing Eliot). The reward is the “hundredfold,” the graces. Fidelity is the project of the spiritual. re-possession of a fully human life organized Life. around faith. Divine fullness and human The desire for God puts feeling and emptiness are co-extensive and mutually psychic energy at the service of the love of inclusive (Interior Castle, “V11 Dwelling God. The desire itself is an act of loving faith, Places” 2.7). i.e. an act of understanding and will in Beginners by definition are engaged in response to God’s offer of God’s very self, the balancing act of living by faith and “doing Faith engages the feelings but not in any one one’s own thing” at one and the same time. particular way; both positive and negative They endeavor to sugarcoat their faith. This feelings are dealt with. Faith is the measure makes for ambivalence. Their choices are and the only point of contact, encounter, and partly for God, partly for themselves.
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