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Continuation of Commentaries

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

by Fr. Bruno Cocuzzi, ocd

Maxim 77  (Part B).

Twelve stars for reaching the highest perfection: love of God, love of neighbor,  obedience, chastity, poverty, attendance at choir, penance, humility, mortification, prayer, silence, peace.

We began the reflections on this Maxim as the second part of the previous conference.  There we spoke of the twelve stars mentioned in the Maxim as forming a constellation called Highest Perfection.  We said that Highest Perfection is attained only when all the faculties and powers of our human nature, soul and body, are occupied with their proper objects in complete and perfect conformity with God’s Will for us.  As a start, we dealt with the first two “stars” in the constellation, love of God and love of Neighbor, and we said that the Virtue of Religion is what enables us to keep the various faculties of our humanity occupied with God, according to His Will, and that the Virtue of Justice enables us to keep those same faculties occupied with neighbor according to the will of God.  As we look at all the other stars in the constellation, we cannot help noticing that several of them also govern our relationship with God or our neighbor, notably prayer, humility and penance with regard to God, and obedience and chastity with regard to our neighbor.  But we cannot help noticing, also, that all ten, after the first two, require us to be concerned with ourselves.  So we will reflect upon them as representing how the faculties and powers of our humanity are to be occupied with ourselves, according to the Will of God.  The reason ought to be clear to all of us by now.  As we have said many times already in these conferences: “Everything in God IS GOD.”  Hence, GOD’S WILL is GOD.  Since God is indeed the supreme and highest perfection, then His Will is, also, So when we are perfectly conformed to God’s Will in every aspect of our Humanity, we have achieved highest perfection.

We turn our attention now to the third star in the list of those forming the constellation “highest perfection,” which is obedience.  As we said, this virtue, as one affiliated with justice, inclines us to be concerned with certain of our neighbors according to God’s Will, namely, the lawful superiors of the various social units of which we are members.  We are perfect in our relationship with those superiors when we comply with all their directives and expressed wishes as they carry out their duty of coordinating all the activities of their subordinates for the greater, common good of the social unit they are governing.  Insofar as the directives and expressed wishes of superiors calls for the application of our powers and faculties of body and soul to their proper objects and activities for the greater well-being of all the members, obedience helps us to be perfected in loving our neighbor according to God’s will.  We can think of that as the positive aspect of obedience.  Then we can speak of a negative aspect of obedience, by means of which we are concerned with ourselves, in that we exercise care that we both refrain from activities that violate directives and expressed wishes of superiors, and also apply ourselves to activities that do not injure, at least, and which promote, at best, the general well being of each of the entire community to which we belong.  In this way obedience helps us to be occupied with the proper objects of our faculties and powers in those activities where we are free of constraints and free of obligations, but still in conformity to the will of God for us as individuals.

In this example of negative obedience, it seems that we are in an area where our activities only benefit ourselves, personally, and do not benefit our neighbors in society.  But strictly speaking, that is not so.  When I strive to perfect myself as an individual, it is true that I have no direct effect upon the good of others.  Indirectly, though, by striving to better myself, each entire social unit to which I belong is automatically helped and made better.

Before leaving this third star, we must not omit mentioning the proper activity and therefore the proper object of the faculty in which the virtue of obedience resides.  As you know, that faculty is the human will, and the proper object of the human will is “to love”.  Because the human will is free, it is by “choosing freely” that the human will performs acts of love.  Very often that act of love, “free choice” involves commanding one or more of the other powers and faculties of our human nature to act, including the other spiritual faculties of intellect, memory and imagination, as well as the physical powers and faculties of the body, as in talking, walking, crafting, serving, seeing, and hearing, etc.  But even in those instances where the human will cannot command other faculties to complete and effectuate it’s choices, it still remains free in its choices.  That is because another way the human will loves is by “desiring” or “wanting.”  There are so many things around us that our perceptive faculties tell us are “good” for us, and there are so many things our spiritual perceptive faculties tell us will be available, or could become available, sometime in the future, that we often have the opportunity to choose and enjoy a present good, or to forgo the present good for the sake of a greater, though future, good.  These would be the areas in which negative obedience would find full scope.  When we choose among present and future goods for ourselves personally according to God’s will, then this third star in the constellation “highest perfection” is in place and shining brightly.

Now we consider the next star, which is chastity.  As in the case of obedience, chastity is a virtue that governs our relationships with other people in the social units to which we belong.  As such, it can be considered as allied to the virtue of justice.  Instead, chastity is assigned a place under the umbrella of Temperance, the virtue which helps us, or rather, inclines us, to be moderate in our enjoyment of necessary or useful pleasures of sense, particularly those of touch and taste.  And so chastity is chiefly concerned with individual self-control.

When speaking of obedience a while ago, we said that even in the realm of “desires”, it is possible (and necessary) to make free choices.  In my opinion, the star called “chastity” is concerned chiefly with our desires.  Although we didn’t say it then, it is our desires which motivate us, particularly desires for a future good we have chosen to pursue.  As you know, every human being is under an obligation to be chaste.  Everyone is free to marry or not marry, but no one is free to be “not chaste”, “un-chaste”.  When we spoke of chastity as allied to the virtue of obedience it was because we owe it to everyone else in our social units never to make of them a source of tactile sense gratification.  We can relate this to God’s general will that we avoid demeaning human beings, made in His image and likeness, by using them as means of deriving gratification of one kind or another for ourselves.  Really, no decent person would ever overtly and publicly try to exploit a fellow human being for the sake of deriving sense gratification at that person’s expense.  But all of us, who are at least decent persons, know that even against our most sincere desires based on Faith, we cannot avoid the experience of such cravings which proceed from our fallen human nature, and over which we have no control.  They come and go despite our not wanting them, and all we can do is reject and deny them whenever they show their ugly heads.

Having said this, it now appears that the virtue of chastity is much wider in scope than traditionally believed.  And it desires from the fact that our desires motivate us.  We all know that there are people whom we love to be with because we find their company so enjoyable.  The joys in question are invariably spiritual joys.  Joys that we experience with our minds because of the intellectual beauties associated with these people.  Then there are joys that we experience with our hearts because of the goodness evident in what these people say and do.  None of us have any qualms of conscience enjoying the company of these people because we know instinctively that they help us to be better persons ourselves, and besides, did not God create our intellects and make intellectual beauty, another term for TRUTH, their object and their happiness?  And did He not create our Wills and make GOODNESS their proper object and happiness? 

Well, fallen human nature is so pervasive in us that we could easily let the enjoyment we derive from the company of such wonderful people become the main motive for our seeking them out and being with them, rather than doing so because and to the extent it is God’s will that we do so for our greater spiritual good and His honor and glory.  Thus the more we can relate to others, especially wonderful people, out of pure motives of love of God and only because it is His Will that we do so, in which desires of deriving enjoyment plays no part, then the more surely this fourth star in the constellation of highest perfection is in place and shining brightly.

The next star in the constellation of “highest perfection” is Poverty.  So it behooves us to consider which of the faculties of our humanity is most involved in the practice of this star called poverty.  We are treating clearly, with an inner disposition called “poverty of spirit”, which Jesus includes in the Beatitudes when He speaks of the “poor in spirit”, and not the actual physical poverty of possessing little or nothing.  As you know, our Secular Carmelites do not, are not allowed to, make a promise of poverty, but they do promise to practice poverty-of-spirit, or to be poor-in-spirit, when they promise to live according to the spirit of the Beatitudes and the Evangelical Councils.  The reason being, of course, that as lay-Carmelites, it is imperative that they own property and possess resources, without which they cannot fulfill the obligations of their state in life within civil society and within the Church. 

And so we see that the spirit of poverty is related to the virtue of Hope.  And that is what enables us to identify the faculty wherein this star called “poverty” resides.  It resides in the Memory.  It is chiefly through the exercise of our memory that we practice “reliance.”  Or maybe it is more true to say that the memory presents to the free will the resources available for achieving or complying with God’s Will, and the free will then chooses to rely upon those resources.  When the memory reminds the will that one is “completely devoid” of “created” resources of material value which might be used to carry out God’s will for the individual, then it is able to “rely entirely” upon the goodness of God to supply what is needed.  That is the reason why the Vow of Poverty, along with the vows of chastity and obedience place a Religious in a Canonical “state of perfection.”  But they do not attain actual “perfection” unless they let the powerful help of the vows become operative in acquiring the virtues of poverty, chastity and obedience to the highest possible degree.

For lay people it is more difficult to acquire poverty of spirit for the simple, but obvious reason that they are obliged to own and have available material resources of value.  In most cases, a good Catholic lay person remembers it has those material resources available, that is, “ready to hand”, and so that person tends spontaneously to choose among them the specific created resources it relies upon to carry out God’s Will.  Because the person is using them to carry out God’s will, then such acts of reliance, of natural hope, pertain to perfection for that good, Catholic lay person.  So then, to attain highest perfection, the good lay Catholic would have to train its memory to look beyond and beneath the available material (created) resources, and see and acknowledge that even these are directly attributable to God’s love and mercy, kindness and poor, and to acknowledge further, that God, as Father, has obliged Himself to be always there when we need Him, that He will never fail to give us all we need, when we need it, to carry out His Will.  In that way the memory helps the human will rely directly and totally upon God and His supernatural power and goodness, and only indirectly, or secondarily, upon the created resources He has given an individual.  But that is precisely the role of supernatural Hope in our lives.  And so we see that poverty-of-spirit, being poor-in-spirit is intimately and necessarily associated with the theological virtue of Hope.  We can say that it is through poverty-of-spirit that God Himself and God alone becomes the object of the powers and faculties of our humanity whenever the will, under the influence of Theological Hope, commands them to do their part in fulfilling the Will of God.

Before leaving the subject of this star called Poverty.  I think we can make a few pertinent remarks about the expression “the purification of memories.”  I am thinking of something different from what St. John of the Cross teaches regarding “the Purification of Memory” by the Theological Virtue of Hope.  In the outline of the Ascent-Night of Fr. Kieran Kavanaugh of the 1979 edition (p. 63 (b) (1) we read: “The three kinds of apprehensions of which the memory must be purified in order to reach union with God through Hope.”  Then on page 381 of that same edition (Book II, Dark Night, Ch. 21, p. 11) we read further, “Hope empties and withdraws the memory from all creature possessions, for as St. Paul says, hope is for that which is not possessed.  [Romans, 8:24].  It withdraws the memory from what can be possessed and fixes it on that for which it hopes.  Hence only Hope in God prepares the memory perfectly for union with Him.”

I think it is clear from those quotations that it is possible for possessions to remain in the memory and yet for those same possessions to be absent from the memory according to the meaning of St. John of the Cross just given.  In so far as possessions are in the memories as resources given by God to carry out His will perfectly in our daily lives, they do not impede union of memory with God, but actually help the soul to rely upon Him alone as our guarantee that one day we will possess Him perfectly by means of the Beatific Vision.  So, through Hope and Poverty of Spirit the memory is in possession of God alone already, as present source and cause of future blessedness.  At the same time poverty and hope prevent the memory of resources presently possessed from becoming present causes and sources of happiness and retain God alone as the Blessedness to be possessed in eternity.

But let me get back to what I started to say about “purification of memories.”  This term could easily be confused with the “healing of memories.”  It seems to me that the latter expression is related to a process of regaining mental health.  As you know, mental illness is an impediment to holiness because grace/holiness builds upon nature, meaning a “healthy” human nature.  We all know that memories can poison our relationship with God because sometimes they are such as to incline us to hate or to wish evil things to befall the persons who have caused the memories that have injured the soul.  If I am not mistaken, these memories are healed by focusing on them one by one and by forgiving the persons who caused them, and by eliciting acts of love and benevolence toward those persons.  On the other hand, if one remembers that he himself has wounded others by his own sinful conduct, he is supposed to seek reconciliation, or at least forgiveness from the injured party, otherwise that fact is an impediment also to union with God.  As evidence of that we remember what Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount: “If you are about to offer your gift upon the altar, and remember that your brother has a grievance against you, leave your gift before the altar, go first and be reconciled with your brother.  Then come and offer your gift.”  (Matt. 5:23,24).  I think, then, that poverty-of-spirit can also be of help in changing those damaging memories into good ones by looking at them as proof that we can find peace and happiness only in doing God’s Will, and as proof of our inability to do the least thing capable of salvation all by ourselves.  In other words, if these memories can be changed into powerful helps toward acquiring humility and distrust of self on one hand, and in relying totally on God and His promises on the other hand, then this star called poverty really goes a long way toward keeping our memory free of contamination and any other obstacle to highest perfection.

The next star is “attendance at choir”, and is the sixth on the list of twelve.  The presence of this star in the constellation shows that this Maxim was given primarily to those Friars and Nuns under St. John of the Cross’ spiritual guidance.  So the first thing we have to do is to figure out what would be the equivalent in the life of a lay-Carmelite.  That appears to be rather easy.  It was in choir that the Friars and Nuns said the Divine Office in Common.  It was also there, where, until recently, the Friars and Nuns did their daily times of mental prayer in common.  Finally, there they attended the Conventual Mass.  So let us say that this star really means fidelity to the daily recitation of the Breviary, fidelity to daily mental prayer, and fidelity to attendance at Holy Mass.

Going back to what we said at the start of this conference, namely that “highest perfection” involves applying all the powers and faculties of our humanity to their proper objects in accordance with God’s Will, we see that in the recitation of the Divine Office one is really and truly lending many powers and faculties of his humanity to the Whole Christ, Head and Body, and using them to offer a sacrifice of praise to God our Heavenly Father.  Whenever we do recite the Breviary, we kind of disappear, God the Father does not see us as the individuals we are.  He sees Jesus united to His Bride, the Church making verbal acts of adoration, love, thanksgiving, repentance, humility and petition.  This is not just pious imagination or wishful thinking.  The Church’s teaching on the Liturgy of its nature speak of it as something real and substantial.  Thus, insofar as dying completely to self and living for God is part and parcel of highest perfection, in that same degree, attendance at choir, or rather, praying the Breviary daily is a star in that constellation.

Although we cannot say that in mental prayer we disappear and the Mystical Christ appears in our place, we can say that it is the practice of mental prayer that is the Royal Road to union with God.  So in that sense it leads to our disappearing completely, although what appears in our stead is not the Mystical Christ, it is Divinity itself.  As St. John and St. Teresa both tell us, the complete union with God that is the ultimate fruit of Mental Prayer is comparable to the union of a drop of rain with the body of water into which it falls.  The raindrop disappears, and it becomes impossible to separate the two again.

Nevertheless, during the time we practice mental prayer we are supposed to progress gradually from applying intellect, memory and will to God as their proper object, to that state of soul where we are open and exposed to the action of God upon those same faculties and in that way dying to personal initiative and letting God do in us what He knows is best for our souls.  According to St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa, our gracious God will not fail to communicate Himself in one way or another to the soul that is surrendered completely to Him.  St. Teresa is confident that He will even grant the grace of infused contemplation, whereby He flows into the soul and allows it to experience “one-ness” with Himself.

What was said above about the Divine Office is even more true when applied to the Highest act of the Whole Christ, Head and Members in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.  I said that God the Father “sees” Jesus the Head and the Church, His Body, every time we recite the Breviary.  At Mass Jesus is sacramentally present as Priest, as the altar and the Lamb of Sacrifice.  In all the Faithful attending, the Church is present sacramentally.  Then too, receiving Jesus in the Eucharist is an essential, indispensable part of Holy Mass, and He is a supernatural food who changes us into Himself.  So again, a fruit of Holy Mass is the eventual disappearance of self by transformation into Jesus.  In that way we become totally conformed and consecrated to God’s Will, not only for us but for all humanity.  Rightly then,  “attendance at choir” is reckoned among the stars in the constellation “highest perfection.”

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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.