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Continuation of Commentaries

on the Maxims on Love of St. John of the Cross

by Fr. Bruno Cocuzzi, ocd

Maxim 63

Strive always to keep God present and [strive always] to preserve within yourself the purity He teaches you.

Upon reading the first part of this Maxim, which admonishes us to work at keeping God present, one might get the impression that God is trying to get away or escape from us, and that it is in our power to hold Him back. To those of us who know by Faith that God is everywhere, that He is omnipresent, that notion seems strange. Often during the four week cycle of the breviary we read: “Where can I go to hide from You? If I fly to the Heavens you are there. If I go to the netherworld, You are there.” Psalm 139 [138]. St. Teresa of Avila mentioned on one occasion how pleased she was to learn from one of her learned confessors that a certain intuition she had that God is present to her in several ways was accurate. The confessor, being versed in Scholastic Philosophy, the handmaid of Theology told her that God is within every creature by Essence, Presence, and Power.

I am not sure how this was explained when I took courses in Scholastic philosophy, but I believe we can say that all creatures partake in some small way in the essential attribute of God as perfect, unlimited, subsisting being and Existence. Thus if God, Who is simple, Who does not admit of parts and is beyond space and dimension, were not within every creature by His essence, the creature would cease to have being and to share in other of His attributes.

Also, God is within every creature in virtue of His Immensity. Immensity is the infinite plenitude of subsistent Being, which means that His Being cannot be confined in any way. Therefore, He fills the entire created universe and is to be found completely and entirely at every point in all of creation and of space. It is this Presence of God within all things that is referred to in Psalm 139 [138]. Jesus also calls attention to this when He tells us to go and pray in secret, because His Father “sees in Secret” (Matt. 6:6).

Finally, God is within everything by His Power because it was His Power that called created things into being. By His power He is present in all things as an agent is present in the effects he is producing. Since every creature is “nothingness” to which has been granted a tiny, tiny share of God’s being and attributes, unless God were to continue to keep the creature in existence, by His Power, it would fall back into nothingness. After all, nothingness, left to itself, has no power to enable it to hang onto the share of God’s being and attributes communicated to it.

All that being the case, then no one of us would have to make any effort at all to keep God present. Since God is Faithful and His decrees are eternal, once He brings a spirit into being, which is not of matter and therefore cannot corrupt, He maintains that spiritual creature in existence forever. That is why our human personhood, subsisting in our eternal souls, will also exist from now on without end. So, the kind of presence that St. John of the Cross is speaking of has to be a kind of presence, different from all of the above, which is a natural presence. So the kind of presence this Maxim is about is a supernatural presence. Thus the presence St. John means would certainly include God’s presence by means of Sanctifying Grace. It is Sanctifying Grace, as you know, that is poured into our hearts (souls) by the Holy Spirit at our Baptism, which is increased by the reception of the sacraments, and restored by the Sacrament of Reconciliation when lost. As you know further, Sanctifying Grace transforms a human being into a new and higher being, causing the baptized to be children of God by adoption. In virtue of that same Sanctifying Grace, the Three Divine Persons, Father, Son (Word) and Holy Spirit take up their abode in the deepest center of our souls.

I said above that St. Teresa of Jesus, Our Holy Mother, had an intuition that somehow God was within every creature while it remained in existence, and this seems to have come about because of her vision, given by God, of the beauty of a soul in which God was present by Sanctifying Grace, and then of how ugly and repugnant it was when God’s supernatural presence by grace was lost through mortal sin. Since the soul without grace did not go out of existence, but remained ugly and loathsome, she guessed that somehow God still remained in that soul. That was when she inquired of one of her confessors and learned of the two kinds of presence of God in all souls, one natural and the other supernatural.

So, then, it seems our task of getting the full meaning out of this Maxim is greatly simplified. Since St. John is talking about the supernatural presence of God in our souls, which takes place in virtue of sanctifying, we keep God present by striving to remain in the state of Grace. And the way to do that is to strive to avoid committing mortal sin. That is something that is so basic and essential to preserving the soul in the state of grace that we are instructed how to avoid serious sin from our early youth. We only have to observe the ten commandments. They are the minimal requirements, after Baptism, to keep the Trinity abiding within us. Along with that, as children we were given a very good reason why we should strive to keep the commandments. We learned that if we didn’t we would go to Hell and suffer excruciating torment forever.

St. John+, however, was not speaking to children, he was speaking (and continues to speak) to Carmelite Friars and Nuns, and to devout lay people called to holiness of life. As Friars and Nuns, and folks striving for holiness, they no longer kept the commandments for fear of punishment, but rather because they loved God very much and did not want to offend Him in the least way. Indeed, the Friars, Nuns and devout laity were striving not only merely to keep God present by avoiding sin, they also wanted to intensify and magnify that presence, so to speak, by striving to open their souls more and more to the continual influx of transforming grace so that, in their own humanity they might come to resemble more and more Jesus as He lived by His humanity while He was on earth. So by striving to keep God present, as St. John+ advises in this Maxim, all Carmelites will strive to advance in the way of prayer and to follow all St. John’s teaching on how to reach the summit of Mt. Carmel, which is the fullness of Jesus Christ.

Now we can ask some questions about the second part of this Maxim. It states: “Strive to preserve within yourself the purity He teaches you.” We can ask: How are the means used to keep God present identified with His teaching the soul? Also, we can ask: Is purity the only thing He teaches through His presence? And finally: Does the purity God teaches differ from the purity other teachers would teach?

Since we said earlier that Carmelites strive to open their souls more and more to the influx of grace that will cause them to resemble Jesus more and more, the way to do that is to strive to grow in love for God more and more. But to do that, we have, in turn, to keep always looking at and keeping in mind the evidence of how much God loves us. That is because God created us in such a way that we cannot love unless we first experience that others love us. And experience teaches us also that the greater and greater the love we experience, the greater and greater becomes our ability to return a deeper and deeper love toward those who love us. And that is why striving to keep God present and thus grow in His love requires prayer, especially contemplative prayer. We arrive at contemplative prayer through the practice of keeping before our eyes Jesus Christ in His pre-risen humanity as the highest and most convincing proof of the infinite love that God has lavished upon us, individually and collectively, over a long period of time. St. John of the Cross is very explicit about this. He says, in paragraph 3 of chapter 13 of Book I of the Ascent: “... have an habitual desire to imitate Christ in all your deeds by bringing your life into conformity with His. You must then study His life in order to know how to imitate Him and behave in all events as He would.”

Obviously, the result of study is learning, so by studying Christ, as we review frequently everything He did and said and taught, we learn not only the immense love God has for us, but also we learn more and more about all the virtues and attributes manifested by Jesus in and through His Sacred Humanity. In that way He teaches us about all His virtues and among them is the virtue of purity. That answers the first two questions above. But before we begin to talk about the purity He teaches, let me just point out that contemplative prayer can only begin when we have learned all that we possibly can about God’s Love for us through remembering and picturing the life of Jesus in its entirety, so that we can no longer get anything new out of all that by meditation and reflection. For in contemplative prayer we sit quietly with our souls filled with the vague, non-verbal awareness of all the fruit of our years of getting to know Jesus, and the Father who sent Him, and we remain passive and inactive in loving adoration and gratitude before Him. It is then that the doors of our souls open wide to the Merciful, transforming love of God, and allow Him to communicate more of Himself and His life to us. What we come away with when our daily times of contemplative prayer are completed must surely constitute the “secrecy of conscience” that is the subject of Maxim 61.

Now we can consider or reflect upon what St. John of the Cross means by “the purity He teaches you.” We can get a hint as to what this is by considering that it is something that can be easily lost, because St. John of the Cross does say strive, meaning to exert some effort, to preserve it. Also, because we spoke, just now, of the times we give ourselves to contemplative prayer, the difficulty encountered in preserving that purity occurs between those times.

Thus I’m sure that the purity Jesus teaches us is different from the purity, (or in the case of married people, the chastity) that preserves one from sins of the flesh. Surely, none of the Carmelites to whom St. John of the Cross was speaking then, and to whom he is speaking now, would easily lose that kind of purity. It seems to me that such folk, and we are among them, would have to go out of our way to expose ourselves to temptations grievous enough to cause us to fall. So the purity He teaches is of a different kind.

One kind of purity St. John+ may have had in mind is “purity of intention.” This purity has to do with motivation. Why do we do what we do? What end or objective do we have in mind as we freely enter into various activities and forms of conduct, and so respond to the events beyond our control that come up every day of our lives. Among the things we would freely choose to do each day would be the “little speaking” and “not meddling” that we spoke about when reflecting on Maxim 62.

I do believe that we have already said in a previous conference that our intentions and motives are pure when they are devoid of all self-seeking, all selfishness. Another way of expressing this is to say that our motives and conduct are pure when they are free of all traces of pride. And still another, a positive way to express it is to say that our intention is pure when love of God and neighbor is the only reason why we act as we do. Now, certainly, this is a purity that can be easily lost, and just as certainly this is a purity God, through Jesus, teaches, because He said the only reason He acted as He did was because His Heavenly Father so willed it. Self-will, the essence of selfishness and self-seeking was totally absent from Jesus’ intentions and motives. And since doing the Will of God is the most perfect way to show our love for God, then it is evident that Jesus acted only out of love for God and for us (because God wills that all men be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth), and self-love never entered into anything He did, or said or taught.

I said above that this purity can be easily lost because we all know how pernicious pride is, always urging us to want our own way of doing things, that is, showing up in our druthers, even in regard to deeds that are good and laudable in themselves. Pride and self-will show up whenever we give God one good thing, when He really wants some other good thing from us. So yes, purity of intention that we see in Jesus can easily be lost, so that we have to strive continually to preserve it.

And yet there is another purity that Jesus teaches us as we recall all His words, deeds and instructions. And that purity is captured by the statement in Scripture: “As the heavens are above the earth, so are God’s ways above our ways.” It is captured again in the saying of St. Paul: The weakness of God is stronger than men, and the foolishness of God is wiser than men. In other words, since the weakness and foolishness of God is manifested most clearly in the Cross of Jesus, His Passion and death, then it is the wisdom of the cross that is the purity Jesus teaches us. Just as purity of intention resides in the will, so the purity that is the Wisdom of the Cross resides in the intellect. When we allow human thinking and human reasoning to contaminate the Wisdom of the Cross, then we have lost this second kind of the purities that Jesus teaches us. How difficult it is to preserve this purity is evident when we think about how difficult it is for us to practice some examples of the Wisdom of the Cross contained in the Sermon on the Mount, in the Gospel of Matthew. There Jesus teaches: “Do not resist one who is evil. If someone strikes you on one cheek, turn and offer him the other. If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two. If someone wants your cloak, give him your tunic also.” (Matt). All of which is summed up when Jesus said: “Love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you.” (Matt.) And St. Paul echoes this when he says: “Do not return evil for evil, but conquer evil with good.” Still other examples of this pure Wisdom of the Cross, God’s Wisdom, is found in the Beatitudes. What worldly thinking would have us reject and endeavor to avoid is, in the Wisdom of God, a great blessing: Blessed are the poor, the meek, the sorrowing, the merciful, the unselfish (pure of heart), etc. Yes indeed, it does require daily, even constant effort to preserve this kind of purity. Thus far the reflections on Maxim 63.

Maxim 64 - Do not excuse yourself, nor refuse to be corrected by all; listen to every reproof with a serene countenance; think that God utters it.

When commenting on Maxim 62, we said that it followed Maxim 61 probably because by it one would have help keeping the “secrecy of conscience” that was enjoined by Maxim 61. I do believe we can say the same about Maxim 64 in relation to Maxim 63. By following Maxim 64 we are helped to keep God present as well as helped to preserve the purity He teaches us.

Let us begin with the last phrase: “think that God utters it,” that is, every reproof that we receive. If we got into the habit of telling ourselves, each time we received a reproof, that God Himself was uttering it, then obviously He would be right there speaking through the person who delivered it. And it probably would not be very long before the habit of attributing reproofs to God would carry over into the habit of hearing the voice of God in everything that is said to us, except, of course, that God Himself, who is LOVE, would never say anything uncharitable or lacking in virtue. If such un-Godly things were said to us, we could then at least keep God present by thinking: “God is allowing these words to be addressed to me as a challenge. Since I claim to be a disciple of Jesus, God wants to see if I will respond as Jesus would have responded in this situation.”

In fact, we could say that God is thereby offering us a chance to show the purity that is the Wisdom of the Cross that we mentioned in reflecting upon the previous maxim. So whether we think that God utters other things besides reproofs that are addressed to us or not, we can always see God Himself behind every event at every moment of our lives offering us opportunities to prove our love for Him by choosing what we believe, in Faith, is His Will for us at that moment. Thus, the final phrase of Maxim 64 could well have been intended by St. John of the Cross specifically as one of many means to keep God present, not only in our souls by Grace, but also in our intellect, memory and imagination as someone we remember, relate to and converse with in the course of our daily lives.

Going back to the beginning of Maxim 64, let us see whether the first three admonitions are any help in our effort to preserve within us the purity God teaches us.

“Do not excuse yourself.” At first glance, we might think that St. John is forbidding us ever to say “Excuse me.” But that cannot be included in the maxim because when we do say “Excuse me,” it is addressed to another person, to whom we have been discourteous, or inconsiderate, or perhaps even may have offended. In doing that, we are admitting a fault. When St. John says “do not excuse yourself,” he means: “do not look for a way to prove to yourself or to others that you have done nothing wrong.” A person who excuses himself is refusing to admit he has erred, (at a minimum) or that he has sinned (at a maximum). In other words, such a person does not want to accept blame or responsibility for some mistake he has made or for some misconduct he has fallen into. This tends to happen where no one expressly blames the one excusing himself. One simply sees that a mistake has occurred or a problem has arisen that somehow flows from his personal conduct, but despite his knowing that he is the one technically responsible, he refuses to admit moral responsibility.

In trying to escape owning up to blame or responsibility, usually a person blames circumstances beyond his control, or perhaps tries to shift the blame to someone else. How would this destroy the purity that the presence of God (Jesus) teaches us?

We saw earlier in this conference that one of the purities is “purity of intention,” and we stated that our intention is pure when our will is in perfect conformity with God’s will, excluding any other motive for our conduct. Well, one thing God wants us to do at all times is be ready to acknowledge we are sinners. St. John the Evangelist states: “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.” And: “If we say we have not sinned, we make Him [God] a liar and His Word [pure Truth] is not in us.” (1 John 1, 8 & 10). Since God wants us to believe and embrace all He tells us in Scripture, by excusing ourselves we are refusing to comply with His will for us in that regard. It is not a question of having more than one motive, namely, God’s Will and some other motive besides, we don’t even have the doing of His will as one of those motives.

“Nor refuse to be corrected by all.” What we said about not excusing ourselves applies here as well. As already mentioned, if we excuse ourselves on occasion it is because we ourselves notice the mistake or the misconduct, but try to shift the blame or explain it away. Here someone else calls our attention to our mistake or misdeed, and again, we refuse to accept the correction by trying to prove to the other that we do not merit a correction because we are not the one responsible morally, even if we are responsible technically.

“Listen to every reproof with a serene countenance.” All of us know that this is not easy. That is because a reproof often differs from a correction. A correction always calls our attention to a mistake we have made, but it does not necessarily levy an accusation of doing so deliberately and on purpose. A reproof is the same as a scolding. To listen serenely is more difficult than to never excuse oneself or never refuse to be corrected because we remember the saying of Jesus: “How can you say to your brother, Let me take the speck out of your eye when there is a log in your own eye.” (Matt. 7:4). This same chapter says at the very beginning: “Judge not, that you may not be judged.” Thus, upon being reproved and scolded our hackles rise and we think: “You have no right to judge me,” and that thought shows up on our faces as resentment. Because of our pride, it is really impossible, or next to impossible, naturally speaking, to maintain a serene countenance in such instances. Thus it is that St. John of the Cross adds the final admonition: “think that God utters it.” We do have to admit that God has the right, and even the duty as a loving Father to reprove us when we do wrong. He is, after all, the Supreme, utterly sinless, and thus utterly truthful and unbiased judge. Although in a sense He is biased since He calls upon His Mercy to over-rule His justice whenever He passes judgment. How can anyone possibly mind being rebuked by such an infinitely Good and loving Father? We know He is doing us a favor.

One example to illustrate this is found in the life of King David. On the occasion when he and his loyal servants were fleeing from Absalom, his son, who had himself declared king and was out to kill his own father David, a relative of Saul, Semei, walked along a parallel ridge and threw dirt and stones at David, cursing him and calling him a murderer. When one of David’s servants, Abishai, asked permission to go over and lop off Semei’s (or Shimei’s) head, David replied: “If he is cursing because the Lord has said to him ‘curse David,’ who then shall say, ‘Why have you done so?’” (2 Samuel 15:10b). And again: “Let him alone and let him curse; for the Lord has bidden him” (Ibid, 11b).

And so we see that, in another way, this Maxim 64 helps us comply with Maxim 63. There we said we keep God present through prayer and taking Jesus as our teacher as we contemplate Him in our prayer. That taught us the purity of intention and the pure wisdom of the Cross. Now, by really attributing all correction, all reproof, all accusations of blame to God Himself present in the accusers, little by little we can rid ourselves of the faults we are told about, and gain finally purity of conscience.

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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.