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Continuation of Commentaries
on the Maxims on Love of St. John of the Cross
by Fr. Bruno Cocuzzi, ocd
Maxim 3.
Keep spiritually tranquil in a loving attentiveness
to God, and when it is necessary to speak, let it be with the same
calm and peace.
The
question we must ask here is, what is meant by “spiritually” tranquil?,
or What do we mean (St. John means) by “spiritual
tranquility”.?
We
all know what physical tranquility means - as for example, a tranquil sea, or a
tranquil night. We speak of people
who are tranquil. A good synonym
for tranquil would be “at rest”.
When the sea is calm, or at rest, it is tranquil. When the night is tranquil, there is
practically no wind and no noises of night creatures. When people are tranquil, it means more
than just “at rest”. Certainly, it
is the opposite of “restless”, but also it means that even in his or her
movements or activities, a person is free of any kind of unevenness or sudden,
unpredictable movements or activities.
We can do many common and ordinary tasks in a tranquil
manner.
So
from our ideas about physical tranquility we can arrive at some notion of what
St. John means by “keep spiritually tranquil”. It means both that we “rest” our
spiritual faculties of intellect, memory and imagination, and will, on the one
hand, and when, we do use those spiritual powers, that we do so in a calm,
peaceful and smooth manner. But
since it is almost impossible for us to shut down completely the operations of
our mind, that is, almost impossible to keep from thinking, and of course,
thinking relies so much on memory and imagination, which almost defies being
shut down and put to rest, so also, it would be next to impossible to put a stop
to the operation of our wills, (or our hearts) because the will always responds
in its own way to the action of the mind and imagination and memory. As we must have touched on before, you
all know that the proper response of the will is to conceive desires for and to
command our entire being to move toward possessing what it perceives (through
the mind and the senses) to be good and a source of happiness and
contentment. Therefore, spiritual
tranquility has to do more with the calm and peaceful and restful exercise of
the powers of our soul.
Thus we surmise what St. John of the cross means by the
entire phrase - “Keep spiritually tranquil in loving attentiveness to
God”. It seems to me he is saying,
in effect, the only way to remain spiritually tranquil is to be lovingly
attentive to God. Or to say it a
different way: “Attentiveness to
creatures (even loving attentiveness) will not bring tranquility to your
spirit: now what is pre-supposed
here by St. John of the cross, is that everyone craves spiritual
tranquility. Perhaps he does not
attempt to say so specifically or to prove that everyone does seek to be
spiritually tranquil because of the well-known saying of St. Augustine: “You have made us for yourself, O God,
and our hearts are restless, (that is, devoid of tranquility) until they rest
(are tranquil) in you.”
So
the next question becomes: What is
meant by “loving” attentiveness to God? But by the way it appears in the maxim,
we can surmise that there can be an attentiveness to God that is not
loving. So we have to ask, what is
meant by “attentiveness” to God?
Certainly part of attentiveness is “awareness”, which
means there is some kind of “perception” of who or what we are aware of. But attentiveness certainly also means
more than “mere” perception, it means “focusing” our powers of perception upon
the person or thing in question. It
therefore means putting ourselves in a state of “receptivity”, expecting that
the person or thing we are attentive to is going to be sending out “signals”
that we want to receive, that we do not want to miss. I am sure we can say that, because that
is what teachers mean when they tell their students to “pay attention” in
class.
And
perhaps from that, we understand the difference between a loving attentiveness
and one that is something other than loving. In a classroom situation, a particular
student may be very fond of a teacher, or very fond of learning, or both, and so
would be focusing his or her powers of perception, that is paying attention in a
loving way. Then there might
be a student who does not have a love for school work, but has learned by
experience that the teacher punishes those students who do not pay
attention. So this student would
pay attention out of fear of harm, and probably would nourish a dislike for the
teacher. Therefore, it is certainly
possible for someone to be attentive to God because of fear of punishment, but
only because that someone really and truly loves Him and has no fear of God
except filial fear, which is not really fear but
reverence.
Is
there a special difficulty involved in being attentive to
God?
As
you know so well, as anyone knows who desires to practice prayer, (a loving
conversation with God or one of the persons of the Trinity, whom we know love(s)
us), God is a pure spirit.
That means that our physical faculties of sense are unable to perceive
God. But also, God utterly
transcends our intellect, there is no way we can understand Him, or comprehend
Him as He is in Himself under the aspect of Truth.
God
as He is in Himself transcends the imagination and memory because only those
things can be in our imagination and memory that were at one time perceived by
our senses. God as He is in Himself
transcends our will, our faculty of loving, because its proper object is the
good that is presented to it, or as understood to be good by the
mind or perceived to be good by the sense
experience.
From this we see how utterly necessary was the
Incarnation for us to be lovingly attentive to God. Because Jesus is a Divine Person who has
hypo-statically united to Himself a true and perfect humanity, whoever perceives
or experiences Jesus’ humanity perceives God. Whoever is acted upon by Jesus,
therefore, is acted upon by God.
Jesus can speak to us and convey knowledge, so we can be taught by
God. Jesus can do loving things for
us and so we can be loved by God.
Therefore, it is only in and through Jesus that we can be attentive to
God, and because in Jesus we see the love of God revealed to the fullest extent
possible in and through human conduct, we can be lovingly attentive to God most
surely by being lovingly attentive to Jesus. That certainly is why St. Teresa tells
us that no matter how advanced one may be in the degrees and phases of Mystical
Prayer, one can never ever let go of the humanity of
Jesus.
Of
course, Jesus is not with us now as He was prior to His Resurrection and
ascension, so loving attentiveness to Him requires the use or exercise of the
Theological Virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity. Faith in the Intellect and Hope in the
memory and imagination are what nourish charity in our hearts. It is by means of these that we are
lovingly attentive to Him, and thus to God. So, because here and now we do not
actually perceive Him, loving attentiveness to Him, and through Him, to God
requires that we withdraw all attentiveness from what is not God, or what is not
“of God”. And thus, once attentive
to God, who alone sets our hearts at rest, we enjoy the spiritual tranquility we
all crave, by the mere fact of being human, whether we realize it or
not.
The
rest of this third maxim also tells us something about spiritual
tranquility. St. John states
“....and when it is necessary to speak, let it be with the same calm and
peace.”
It
seems to me that St. John is telling us that the act of “speaking” interrupts
the loving attentiveness to God that gives us our spiritual tranquility. But if we are speaking to God, to Jesus,
it seems that we have to be directing our attention to Him, so therefore, I
think that he means here “speaking to other people:” is what does or
maybe could interrupt a loving attentiveness to
God.
Just a few minutes ago I said in order to facilitate our
attentiveness to God we would have to withdraw our attention from what is “not
God” or not “of God.”
Clearly, the obligations and duties of our state in
life, no matter what it is, must be recognized as being “of God”. So when we are required to speak in the
course of being Faithful to our particular vocations, we are not necessarily
interrupting our spiritual tranquility.
This latter part of the third maxim would then suggest that only by
speaking calmly and in a peaceable manner can we be sure we are not losing our
loving attentiveness to what is “of God”.
So if it turns out that our speech betrays annoyance, or resentment, or
anger, disrespect, and more seriously, if the words we speak provoke
disagreement and controversy and division, or more seriously still, if they are
spoken with the intention to hurt another’s feelings or to damage that person’s
reputation, then clearly, one has not been attending, in the course of living
out his or her vocation/state in life, to what is “of God”. After all, our God is a God of
Peace. Our Jesus came to reconcile,
not to foster dissension.
Therefore when St. John says: “let it (your speaking) be with
the same calm and peace”, he is
telling us that this is within our control. It means each occasion whereby we must
speak is accompanied by some kind of temptation. The evil temptation would be to choose
one’s selfish self rather than what is “of God” on that particular
occasion. Because, after all,
selfishness seeks what is mine.
To be of God, we must seek what is “ours”. Thus all selfishness causes division and
separation. All selfishness
destroys peace. When peace is gone,
so also calm and orderliness depart.
Fourth Maxim.
Preserve an habitual remembrance of eternal life, recalling that those
who hold themselves the lowest and poorest and least of all will enjoy the highest dominion and glory in God.
It
should be easy to comply with this maxim if one has been able to give to God the
loving attentiveness we have just spoken about. After all, God is Life, God is
eternal. However, if we focus our
attention on God as a Trinity, and specifically on Jesus, the Incarnate Second
Person of the Trinity, we do not often think of Him as eternal life, or of the
fact that He is living, we usually recall Him as a Person, i.e. or
another human being, or as our Savior or as the Bridegroom of the Human Soul, or
as He relates to us according to our frame of mind or according to what we are
experiencing in our souls.
Therefore, maybe it is not so easy to have an habitual remembrance of
eternal life.
There is possibly a bit of a problem here, since we only
“remember” what we have already experienced, and we do not experience eternity
until after we die. So I guess a
better, or clearer way to say this would “be mindful of eternal life”. Then again, St. John is really asking us
to “remember” what our Faith tells us about eternal life. As I write this, I am trying to remember
what I have learned from Christian Doctrine about eternal life, and I invite you
also to try to recall what you have been taught.
Among other things, we know that eternal life never
ends, that there is no suffering, nothing to cloud over or interrupt unending
joy and happiness, that our Happiness consists in our seeing God face to face,
that God is our everything, no Temple, no sun or other lights, because God is
the Temple, He is the Light, etc.
Also we know that we will enjoy the company of the angels and saints,
particularly the company of Jesus and Mary in their glorified bodies and that
only after the Final judgment will those already in heaven, receive in turn
their glorified, risen bodies.
From the writing of St. Therese we know that all in
Heaven will be completely happy.
That is, filled to capacity with happiness, even though different saints
will have different capacities to be filled with happiness. Canonized saints obviously have a much
greater capacity to hold the Life of God poured into them than will those who
just barely make it to Heaven.
And
this is where we can situate the latter part of this fourth maxim. In it, St. John asks us to recall the
teaching that those who were most “humble” on earth are the one’s who have
the greatest capacity for happiness in eternal life. Humility is spoken of here by telling
us how to be humble. It
is by holding oneself to the lowest and the poorest and the least of all.
This is certainly true of Our Lady.
She was surely the most gifted, the one Full of Grace, the Immaculate
Conception who kept herself free of all stain of Sin, the Mother of God, yet
she was the most humble because she was able to empty herself of any reason
to think of herself as great, as if her greatness were of her own merit or
making. She
was able to see that everything about her was a gift of God, even the gift,
the grace of being able to correspond perfectly with all those gifts exactly
as God willed for her to correspond.
Jesus, too was humble, because He could say the same as
Mary concerning His Humanity. It
was a gift not only from His Father and Holy Spirit, but also a gift from Mary,
His Mother. Also, His humility has
to do with His setting aside the right to be adored and praised and esteemed as
God and becoming the servant of those who are obliged to adore and praise
Him. Mary, of course, did and
continues to do that, to serve us, not only by giving us Jesus, but by
continuing to be the Mother of all who are members of the Whole
Christ.
St.
John mentions something else that has to do with heaven, (eternal life), when he
speaks of dominion. Dominion means
being in charge of, or governing.
This reminds us that what is true of the angels in their personal
relationships will be true of all the human beings who attain eternal life. According to St. Thomas Aquinas, the
higher Orders of Angels, who see more of God and thus know and love Him more,
share that knowledge with the lower orders of angels. So, dominion among the saints means that
the greater saints will teach the saints lesser (in their capacity to hold God’s
life and to learn from seeing Him face to face), the things they see and learn
from their Beatific Vision of God.
Thus, they have the joy of sharing, and come closer to Jesus and Mary’s
joy of sharing their knowledge of divinity with us. Of course, God’s happiness in sharing
Himself with us is what makes Him infinitely Happy and Blessed. This should not be a surprise to us,
because God is love. Since to share
good is the essence of LOVE, there has to be a sharing of good
really sharing - giving God - to others in some way.
As
Jesus said: this is eternal
life: to know You God,
eternal Father, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.
What we know of God can be made the foundation of Humility:
God created us so that He could be our happiness, that is, to serve
us. To remember that habitually - always
to have that in the back of our minds, is to have the remembrance of eternal
life of this Maxim 4. He
became lowly (a Servant) , so we are most like Him when we become lowly (servants).
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