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Continuation of Commentaries
on the Maxims on Love of St. John of the Cross
by Fr. Bruno Cocuzzi, ocd
Maxim
- 7 - Have an intimate desire that His Majesty grant you what He knows
you lack for His Honor.
The
first question that occurs to me is:
What is the difference between a desire and an intimate
desire?
On
the face of it, we could say that any desire is by its very nature
intimate because desires are internal to us. In this sense, intimate and internal (or
interior) mean the same thing.
But
as we think about it further, we have to admit that there are degrees of
interiority in our human nature, so that an intimate desire would have to
proceed from the deepest center of our human nature. That would be that part of us that is
the most spiritual.
There are less interior desires of our humanity that are
associated with the external senses of the body, and with the resultant
perceptions and memory of those perceptions that are stored in our souls. (When I see and smell a delicious roast
of beef, I desire to eat it).
More interior still would be the desires based on
abstract thoughts and ideas that are formed by the intellect processing the
perceptions just spoken of, or based on thoughts and ideas which are fed in
verbally when we converse and hear others speak. (When I hear of and observe first hand
the power and influence that goes with wealth and prestige, I desire to
enter a profession that will give them to me).
Going deeper still, the most interior desires of our
humanity would be those that proceed from the perceptions and the
memories of them that transcend sense perceptions and the natural powers of the
human intellect and reason. These
have God Himself, a Pure Spirit, and things that pertain to God, as their
object. They are the perceptions or
knowledge of Him as He is in Himself that we have through supernatural
Faith, the theological virtue.
As
you know, the other theological and supernatural virtues of Hope and Charity
have their origin in Faith, but which are all three infused into our souls as
some of the components, so to speak, of Sanctifying Grace, at
Baptism. (When I perceive through
Faith that those who sink deepest in humility are the ones who rise highest in
Sanctity, I desire to possess the virtue of humility). These desires, therefore are the ones
St. John is referring to in this Maxim.
In them, the natural wellsprings of our desiring play little or no
part.
I
believe this understanding of what the most intimate desires are is
corroborated by that part of the Maxim which urges us to desire what God
knows we lack for His honor. These
Again, I think that this understanding is corroborated
by the mention of His (God’s) honor, since the person of the one
desiring is not mentioned. When our
desires for things that only God can give flow from our natural sense
perceptions and the knowledge derived therefrom, they always include what
we think we need for our own personal good or honor.
As
you know, all our desiring is really an expression of our love. Jesus said: Where your treasure is, there is your
heart also. It so happens
that we know where our hearts are in virtue of what we habitually desire,
There is also a relationship between the intimacy
(or interiority) of the desires and the things we desire. What we ought to desire, according to
this Maxim, is solely what is lacking in us for the Honor of God. This desire can only proceed from a very
high degree of supernatural love (or Charity), because the selfish self
participates neither in the desire itself nor the thing desired. The desire is only for what is best
for God who is revealed thereby as the heart’s
Treasure.
When we think about what it is that brings honor to God,
we realize that it is what is known about Him. And allied with this, what it is of Him
that we experience.
Of
course, we do not experience God directly, since as we mentioned above, God
is a Pure Spirit who cannot be perceived by the senses. What we know of Him comes through both
Faith (as we said) and the experience of Gifts He has bestowed upon us.
So,
in effect, when we seek the honor of God, we seek that He become known
to all and by all as the Supreme, utterly Lovable Good. This in turn, comes about chiefly by
knowledge of Him as infinitely Merciful Love. Thus we can believe that by this Maxim
St. John of the Cross wants us to have an intense desire that every rational,
free creature come to know Him as infinitely GOOD and infinitely WORTHY OF ALL
LOVE.
Of
course, this tends to happen whenever a person becomes the object, or the
recipient,
As
we begin to reflect upon the expression, what is lacking [in us] for His
honor, it occurs to me that this is going to be difficult, because if, as
the maxim suggests, we don’t know what things are lacking, how can we say
anything meaningful about those things? Well, we can speculate and come to a
general notion of what those things might be.
Since knowledge of Him depends mostly upon becoming
aware of His extraordinary deeds of Mercy (evidence of His immeasurable Merciful
Love), whether as observed in the lives of others or experienced by ourselves
personally, then what we would lack for His honor would be the lack of those
dispositions, those attitudes of mind, or that life-style that would allow Him
to pour out upon us the Merciful Love that He so desperately would like to. In other words, the lack of the things
we need that would allow Him to raise us up to great holiness of life, that is
to say, the things that would allow Him to unite us to Himself in perfect
Love. What would be particularly
lacking are those things that would enable us to become Victims of His
Merciful Love.
For
starters, therefore, we would have to desire those dispositions, attitudes and
life style that we notice, for example, in the life of St. Therese of the Child
Jesus. Because of them, she
received the assurance from the Holy Spirit that she would spend that portion of
her heaven that precedes the end of the world doing good upon earth, and
making Love loved. It is
precisely these things in her that contributed so much to the Honor and the
Glory God receives from anyone who comes to know and admire
her.
One
final comment on this Maxim 7 before going on. It is that we ask His Majesty to
grant us what we lack. Is there some special reason why St. John of the cross
said that rather than to refer to God as Our Father or to Jesus as
Our Beloved or as the Bridegroom of the human soul? Probably not. Probably St. John was just using an expression
that was common in his time to those who had occasion to speak to people of
exalted rank, such as Kings and Queens, who were to be addressed as Your
Majesty.
But
the majesty of a person is whatever there is about that person that inspires awe
and reverence in people of lesser rank.
Now what inspires in us the greatest reverence and awe is precisely the
fact that God has been so Merciful to us that he has sent His only Son
into the world to redeem us and make us His children by adoption, and therefore
members of His Family through Baptism.
Together with that is the fact that Jesus (our Redeemer and our Brother)
has espoused the faithful soul to Himself as its Bridegroom. This is so mind-boggling, that we are
not surprised that Our Holy Father, St. John of the Cross, would naturally and
spontaneously address God as Your Majesty.
Maxim 8.
Crucified inwardly and outwardly with Christ, you
will live in this life with fullness and satisfaction of soul, and possess
your soul in patience.
Perhaps St. John of the Cross composed this maxim
because what he had just said in the previous maxim was still fresh in his
mind. I say that because he had
just been speaking of intimate (or inward) desires, and that necessarily makes
us think of external or outward desires.
Joining this thought to the possibility that he also had
in mind the admonition of St. Paul that we crucify the desires of this
flesh, we see that it becomes logical for him to place this maxim immediately
after the preceding one. Thus St. John would be asking us to crucify, inwardly
and outwardly, the desires that cannot be reconciled with the intimate desire
for what is lacking [in us and around us] for the honor of God.
This nothing is corroborated, I believe, by the
expression crucified...with Christ.
In addition to all the other desires that would arise out of the
different levels of His Humanity, Jesus had the supreme, overarching desire to
fulfill His Father’s Will with the utmost perfection. Now of course, by fulfilling His
Father’s Will perfectly, He would be making known the infinite Mercy of God,
along with His Wisdom and His Power, and thus contributing in the most perfect
possible way to God’s Honor. Jesus
continually and consistently, therefore, crucified all the lesser desires
of His Human nature whenever they were not also part and parcel of His
desire always to be obedient to His Heavenly Father’s
Will.
Thus, when we crucify ourselves inwardly and outwardly
with Christ, we not only put to death the desire for unlawful and thus
sinful gratification but also our desires for some very good, wonderful
and lawful gratifications.
(Remember that we said in a previous conference that whenever we
get what we desire, we cannot help but experience gratification
therefrom).
Jesus, too, had to have some desires for good and
wholesome gratifications during His earthly life. One of them was the desire to be a good
and dutiful Son to His Most Blessed Mother. He would naturally want (desire) His
Most Beloved Mother to be free of anything that would cause her pain and grief,
especially pain and grief to Her Immaculate Heart.
He
crucified that most laudable desire when, obedient to His Father’s Will, He left
her to begin His Public Ministry of teaching and working miracles for the cure
of bodies and souls. He imposed an
even greater, immeasurably more painful crucifixion upon that desire at the end
of His earthly life when He drew Her into participation in His most atrocious
redemptive suffering. Being the
most perfect of mothers, She could not but suffer in her Heart and in Her
soul, ALL the sufferings that Jesus experienced in His Body, Soul and
Spirit.
Although St. Paul speaks explicitly of crucifying the
desires of the flesh, he is referring not only to the desires generated
by the perceptions of the outward sense, but also to the desires generated by
the intellect and sense for ego gratification.
I
think it is evident that the natural human ego needs gratifications as
evidence of the fact that one if special and worthy of
esteem. As you know, it is
the lack of ego gratification, a deprived ego, that causes a person to
have a very low self-image.
This would be true even in the case of Jesus’ human
ego. And so, this desire would at
times have been lawfully gratified by Him, that is, on those occasions which it
was part and parcel of His Father’s Will for Him.
In
our case, as Discalced Carmelites, we have already crucified ourselves outwardly
and inwardly by living in the spirit of the Evangelical Counsels. It is these that put to death both
lawful and unlawful desires for gratification of both the senses and the
ego. But that is not a guarantee
that we would have put to death or crucified the lawful desires for more inward
and spiritual, but still natural, gratifications.
These would be the desire to be esteemed and respected
by others as valuable contributors of the common good by reason of having and
making good use of the talents and abilities God has endowed us with as we live
out the obligations of our state in life and of our vocation as
Carmelites.
Of
course, to crucify (or mortify) this desire does not mean that we cease being
law abiding citizens and contributing members to the good of our families and to
the Common Good. What it does mean
is that even this lawful desire must be subordinated to the higher spiritual
good of ourselves, our families and others. In particular, the satisfaction of this
desire for esteem must not be the sole motive for using our gifts for
good purposes.
It
must be concomitant with our primary desire to do so in fulfillment of
God’s Will for us. We must
admit, though, that on rare occasions, even this most laudable desire to
subordinate our personal interests to the legitimate interests of our relatives
and society must be sacrificed (crucified) when God’s Will clearly demands
it.
That those rare occasions do occur is evident from the
words of Jesus: Anyone who
loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me. And also: I have not come to bring peace but
division. The enemies of a man
are the members of his own household:
Father against son, son against father; mother against daughter, daughter
against mother; mother-in-law against daughter-in-law, daughter-in-law against
mother-in-law...etc.
We
have now to speak of the more inward, more spiritual and supernatural
gratifications resulting from satisfying the most intimate desires of our
souls. These would have to do with
being esteemed, respected and loved as valuable contributing members to that
highest of all good things: the
good of the Church, the Mystical Body of Christ.
Thus it is most noble, lawful and laudable to seek the
gratification (or better, joy) that accompanies the exercise of the Supernatural
virtues of Faith, Hope and Charity, along with all the natural and supernatural
moral virtues. Of course, this kind
of gratification or joy is very subtle, as we have had occasion to say in a
previous conference.
Not
only even here, but also especially here, it is possible for our desire for
this gratification to be disorderly, that is to say, not consistent
with God’s Will for us. It is
these desires that more than the others that need to be crucified. When in other places in His writings,
St. John of the Cross speaks of spiritual gluttony, it is precisely these
kinds of desires that he has in mind.
To
give an illustration of how it is possible to be most inwardly crucified with
Christ, we can recall something that happened concerning the Feast of Corpus
Christi.
We
have been told that when the then reigning Pope decided to establish that Feast,
he asked both Thomas Aquinas (a Dominican) and Bonaventure (a Franciscan) to
compose the liturgical texts to be used in the Divine Office and Mass of the
Feast. Both prepared their texts
and brought them in person to have them reviewed by the Pope and the Cardinals
of the Congregation for Divine Worship (or it’s then
counterpart.)
We
are told, further, that Thomas Aquinas read his text first, and after hearing
it, Bonaventure tore up his text, saying that what he prepared could not measure
up to the text of Thomas Aquinas’.
He didn’t even allow the others to hear what he had
prepared.
We
can suppose that Bonaventure did this because he experienced a desire to have
the satisfaction of allowing the others to admire his talent as a composer of
sacred liturgy; his choices of scriptural texts, his responsories, his hymns,
and his theological commentary in the non-scriptural reading. It would not have been unlawful for him
to have done so, given what we know of his very profound and tender love for the
Sacred Heart and for the Eucharistic Jesus, because that would have contributed
greatly to the Honor of Jesus and His heavenly Father. That would have been so even if his text
was not the final choice of the Pope. As I say, I believe that that
action on the part of Bonaventure represents a very generous and profound way of
being inwardly crucified with Jesus.
Finally, from all that has been said thus far, we can
begin to appreciate what St. John of the Cross means by: living this life with fullness and
satisfaction of soul, and possessing your soul in patience. Since all satisfied desires do generate
gratifications, that is, enjoyable feelings of satisfaction and fulfillment, the
satisfaction of the desire to do God’s Will over and above all other legitimate
desires certainly brings a most blessed and ecstatic kind of joy with
it.
Therefore, it is this precise fullness and satisfaction that is identified with possessing one’s soul in patience. Patience has to do with the endurance of suffering. The suffering here would be caused by the crucifying of the lesser desires. Since these are much more noticeable than the very subtle joy we have spoken of, the expression possession of one’s soul is apt, because the most intimate desire to do God’s Will remains in control, and the life of the soul (Sanctifying Grace, Charity), is not dissipated by the powerful influence of the less intimate desires.
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MISSION STATEMENT:
This web site was created for the purpose of completing the work of Fr. Bruno
Cocuzzi, O.C.D These conferences may be reproduced for private use only. Publication
of this material is forbidden without permission of the Father Provincial
for the Discalced Carmelites, Holy Hill, 1525 Carmel Rd., Hubertus, WI 53033-9770.
Texts for the Maxims on Love were taken from The Collected Works of St. John
of the Cross, by Fr. Kieran Kavanaugh, O.C.D. and Fr. Otilo Rodriguez, O.C.D.
1979 Edition. Copies of the book are available at ICS Publications, 2131 Lincoln
Rd., N.E., Washington, D.C. 2002-1199, Phone: 1-800-832-8489.