“Spiritual reading is a regular, essential part of the life of prayer, and particularly is it the support of adoring prayer. It is important to increase our sense of God’s richness and wonder by reading what his great lovers have said about him."
- Evelyn Underhill (What are you reading these days? How does spiritual reading contribute to your
growth?) |
1 Thes 3:7-13; Ps 90:3-5a, 12-13, 14 and 17 Mt 24:42-51 Jesus said to his disciples:
"Stay awake!
For you do not know on which day your Lord will come.
Be sure of this: if the master of the house
had known the hour of night when the thief was coming,
he would have stayed awake
and not let his house be broken into.
So too, you also must be prepared,
for at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come. "Who, then, is the faithful and prudent servant,
whom the master has put in charge of his household
to distribute to them their food at the proper time?
Blessed is
that servant whom his master on his arrival finds doing so.
Amen, I say to you, he will put him in charge of all his property.
But if that wicked servant says to himself, 'My master is long delayed,'
and begins to beat his fellow servants,
and eat and drink with drunkards,
the servant's master will come on an unexpected day
and at an unknown hour and will punish him severely
and assign him a place with the
hypocrites,
where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth."
Reflection on the Scriptures
Matthew 24:42-51 (Faithful servants) We now begin to reflect on Jesus’ promise to return again. Stay awake” he counsels us, for we do not know when he will come nor when we will die. But the best reason for being faithful is not fear of punishment; we are to be faithful because it is essential
to our wholeness. • During a ball game, a saint was asked what he would do if he knew that the Lord would return to earth in fifteen minutes. I’d finish this game of ball,” he replied. Does this describe your
attitude? • One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living,” Dale Carnegie wrote. Resolve to make the most of this day.
- from Praying the Daily Gospels
St. John of the Cross and the Beginning of Contemplation by James Arraj From St. John of the Cross and Dr. C. J. Jung, Part II, Chapter 3. Inner Growth Books, 1986.
Writings on the Passage to Contemplation
Three of St.
John's four major works concern us directly because they each contain a long passage devoted to the beginning of contemplation: the Ascent of Mount Carmel, its companion piece the Dark Night of the Soul, and the Living Flame of Love. The latter deals with the highest reaches of mysticism, and its treatment of the passage to contemplation is incidental to the main theme of the work. In the Ascent and Dark Night, however, this doctrine is found in the context of
the development of the whole life of prayer.
Reading St. John
St. John was not primarily a writer, and he did not set out to create systematic treatises of mystical theology. In the prologue to the Ascent of Mount Carmel, after enumerating some of the problems that demand attention, he explains:
"Our goal will be, with God's help, to explain all these
points, so that everyone who reads this book will in some way discover the road that he is walking along, and the one he ought to follow if he wants to reach the summit of this mount."(1) The accent is on this practical work of
how to actually climb the mountain, and St. John had little time for people who proposed to travel to God in pleasant and delectable ways. Since there was nothing that could compare with this goal, everything else must be left behind. St. John's writings have often been called negative and privative because of this thoroughgoing detachment. Yet when he wrote, he had already climbed high on the mountain and was trying to guide his penitents to the same height and did not want them to dawdle on
the road distracted by non-essential things. The apparent complexity and the detailed landscape of the Ascent and the Dark Night resolves itself into a single-pointed vision once we take up St. John's perspective. The end is divine union, and all else must be laid aside. This union cannot be achieved by means of sense knowledge, nor even by spiritual ideas and feelings about God. The Ascent and Dark Night devote themselves to subtly and exhaustively analyzing how our
attachment to worldly things and even spiritual goods can hinder the attainment of the highest good. In fact, it is the attachment to spiritual blessings in the form of the consolation of prayer, visions and revelations that pose the most dangerous obstacles because they are felt to be good and are clung to.
|
|
