Voices from the Tradition Songs for Today: Hearing the Voice of the
Mystic
(Dr.) Kerrie Hide
Oh what woman having ten silver coins,
if she looses one of them
does not light a lamp
sweep the house
and search carefully
until she finds it. (Luke 15:8-10).
In contrast to the woman who lights a lamp, in a recent book, Ronald Rolheiser uses the image of the shattered lantern to describe how the image of the God of religion is shattered. The image comes from a scenario presented in Nietzsche’s novel: The Gay Science where a madman lights a lantern at midday, rushes into a crowd and shouts “I seek God! I seek God !” In the midst of a cynical, unbelieving crowd he screams out, “God is dead! I tell you we have killed him you and I.” Surrounded by chaos he becomes silent, and smashes the lantern on the
ground.1 This violent fracturing enacts how our belief in God is shattering. God is absent from the conscious and ordinary lives of believers. The shattered lantern evokes a sense of the blindness of the onlookers and their inability to see God in their midst. The parable powerfully conveys how mainstream religion struggles with a practical atheism. In many cases, even though people still go to Church, religious practices are
routinised, people have forgotten that God dwells in the depth of their beings. Their symbols no longer communicate this reality. The deepest desire of the human heart is being ignored.
Shattered and Scattered
There are shattered lanterns in Australia where ever we look. Flags flying in Canberra June long weekend said far more than the organizers probably ever envisaged. Against and black and white check background words flapped in the wind: “The heart of the nation is racing”. The truth of this statement is chilling. We are living life as if it is a race. There is no time for stillness, for silence, for peace. A nagging sense that ultimately there is no underlying source that unifies and brings all things to wholeness, undermines security. Life has no deeper meaning. Racing in the fast lane is all that there is. We see signs of this malaise in the general discontent and dis-connectedness of people, in the doubt and cynicism that engenders a passivity that just doesn’t care, and a restlessness and existential despair that is endemic to hope. We know only too well the noise in our environment, the way of consumerism where the rich become richer and the poor poorer, where competition and self-centred individualism cause us to shatter like lanterns. At the other extreme, fundamentalism or new age superstition, seek to eliminate our insecurities by offering simplistic black and white solutions. We know that we do not have all answers, we are anything but free. We live in a time where we are being educated towards the unreality of
God,2 towards non-being, no self and no community. Out of harmony with the truth of who we really are, we cannot find peace. We don’t know how to become one with our deepest reality and to claim the divinity of our humanity.
But Affairs are Now Soul Size
There is a counter movement, however, an unprecedented spiritual hunger, a new form of consciousness that thirsts for an understanding of the inner world. Christopher Fry alludes to this primordial shift in awareness when he writes:
The human heart can go to the lengths of God.
Dark and cold we may be, but this
Is no winter now. The frozen misery
Of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move;
The thunder is the thunder of the floes,
The thaw, the flood, the upstart Spring.
Thank God our time is now when wrong
Comes up to face us everywhere,
Never to leave us till we take
The longest stride of soul [we humans] ever took.
Affairs are now soul size.
The enterprise
Is exploration into God.
Where are you making for? It takes
So many thousand years to wake,
But will you wake for pity’s sake?3
Fry’s poem confronts us with paradox. We can shatter the lantern, deny the presence of God, shatter ourselves by living out of harmony with the divine, or like the woman in Luke’s parable we can light the lamp and search the room for the truth we are missing. Fry knows: the human heart can go to the lengths of God. We can choose to see God in our midst. Fry declares clearly and simply: Affairs are soul size. The journey we must undertake is a soul journey. It entails soul work. It involves living with
soul.4 Soul work is critical because in the words of O’Donohue: the soul holds the echo of our primal intimacy and this original echo whispers in every
heart.5 Soul work enables us to live out of the depths of our divinity. It unleashes love. Soul work releases new possibilities enabling healing and growth. The new
millennium invites us to undergo a primordial shift. It invites us to let go of past ways of living out of harmony with the divine ground of our being. This time in history challenges us to claim and to live out of our inheritance. Now is the time. The poetry of the Song of Songs captures the essence of this sacred moment: “Winter has past, the rains are over and gone, flowers appear on the earth the season of glad songs has come.” (Song of Songs 2:11-12). This is a kairos time, the time for the frozen misery of centuries to thaw. It is time to take the longest stride of soul we’ll ever take.
We must never forget, however, as we look back on the frozen misery of centuries, within the midst of all the heart ache, all the inhumanity, there were times when streams flowed freely, the spirit of wisdom danced upon the face of the earth, the word became flesh. God is present in our humanity. The frozen misery of centuries is cracking, waters are beginning to flow. If we are to hear the thunder of floes, recognize the thaw, the flood, learn to live in spring, we need models, voices of wisdom that can show us the way. Though we need to rediscover the presence of the Holy Mystery in our own time, light our own lamps, find our own authentic voice that speaks our authentic experience of the divine, and creatively engage in a response; it will be to our peril if we turn our back on the centuries of divine presence and harden our hearts to the voices in the tradition that have always known that affairs are soul size. There are voices in the tradition that can show us how to uncover our own voice that sings of divine love. There are voices in the tradition that can inform and inspire our songs for today.
Exploration into God
Fry tells us how to sing our own authentic song. The enterprise is exploration into God. Exploration into God means exploration into our humanity. This exploring cannot be half hearted. It involves all that we are. We must engage in encounter with a love that enfolds us, dwells in us, calls us beyond all that we could ever think or imagine. We must learn how to pray. In this presentation I will explore how we can wake by discovering who we really are and claiming our destiny as the beloved of God. Though the lantern may be shattered in a national sense, and there may be so many competing voices that we are deafened to the one authentic voice, we can choose to make a personal response, to identify with the woman who found a lamp, ignited the wick and began the search. We can choose to go to our hearts and enable God who is in that secret place to enlighten us. And so we pray:
We hear your invitation
and turn our attention inwards,
into our own rooms…
into the depthless, endless presence of you,
our God,
ecstatic love
overflowing compassion
at home in our hearts
making our stony hearts flesh,
transforming all that is cold and lifeless
into an image of you.
The Way of the Heart
Let us begin the enterprise of exploration into God by listening to a voice from the tradition preserved for all time in the great canon of Christian revelation:
But whenever you pray,
go into your room and shut the door
and pray to God who is in secret;
and God who sees in secret will reward you. Mt 6:6
The translation I prefer:
When you pray
go into your own heart
and God who lives in that secret place
will be with you.
Mathew’s invitation to go to our room draws on imagery that traditionally represents the self, the centre of our being where God dwells, the place of depthless endless oneing, of being made one with God, the place where the silence of God meets our silence. This room of the heart stands for the totality of the human person as responsive to divine love incarnated in Christ and in the indwelling Spirit. The room is the inner person, the soul. It is the locus of our freedom and consciousness, the place where we get in touch with the transcendent ground of our being and become open to this presence our lives. This is a place where we embrace the mystery of ourselves, human existence, creation, and God. This room of the heart is the dwelling place of ecstatic divine love, the compassion of God.
Symbolic Encounter
In exploring what it means to go to the room of our heart to discover the presence of the living God, I will speak of this room of the heart as a symbol. My understanding of symbol is influenced by anthropologists such as Mircea Eliade, who discovered the symbolic nature of humanity that is present in all
cultures;6 psychologists such as Carl Jung, who pointed to the archetypal nature of symbols that we all carry in our
psyches;7 and philosophers like Paul Ricoeur, who defines symbol as an image that gives rise to thought and then shapes the thought to which it gives
rise.8 I use symbol in the sense of something that mediates meaning in a way that touches into conscious and unconscious truths igniting invitation and evocation. Symbols are potent and dynamic. They are catalysts that invite participation in a fullness that is beyond words and images. When symbols awaken our appreciation of truth they evoke paradox. They simultaneously reveal and conceal. They mediate absence as well as presence. In the words of Tony Kelly “Great symbols orientate us within the living wholeness of reality and give us both the passion and the patience to grapple with
it.”9 Thus attentiveness to the symbol of the heart orientates us with the living wholeness of our relationship with God. Simultaneously conveying meaning and shaping our response, the symbol of the heart takes us to a place of intimacy with God, of encounter with divine love and compassion, that is both immanent and transcendent, known and unknown. It gives us the patience to grapple with the unfathomable depths of its meaning.
Images of the Heart
There is a rich and long tradition within Christian spirituality that uses images with symbolic force to name and describe this ground that marks our humanity. Ezekial’s poetic imagery has become foundational: “I will give them one heart,” the prophet writes, “and put a new spirit within them; I will remove their heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh.” (Ezek 11:19) Capable of expressing the opposite extremes in human behaviour, love or hate, stone or flesh,
Ezekiel uses the contrasting images of stone and flesh to describe his experience of the heart. Paul also imagines the human potential to have hearts of stone, but takes the image in another direction. The eloquence of his prose creates an icon that again enables us to appreciate the juxtaposition of opposites. “You are a letter of Christ” Paul writes, “Prepared by us, written not with ink but with the spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.” (2 Cor 3:2-3) Paul ignites our imaginations to recognize that the human heart is a letter written with the Spirit of the living God. In
Ezekiel and Paul’s hands these images of the heart become symbols that awaken our collective memory of experiences of the heart, interact with our experience, and shape and inform the way we live.
What image best expresses how you feel in the depth of your heart?
The Desire of the Heart
To choose to enter our room, to journey to God within our hearts is to take a path to union with God that is naturally human. We see this innate sense of God’s involvement in human lives freely expressed in young children. Unfortunately we seem to loose this natural affinity for the divine as we enter teenage years and become adults. Our task as we mature is to reclaim our innate sense of God, to enliven our sense of wonder and mystery. If we listen, we will discover a restlessness that urges us to journey into our hearts and reclaim what is already ours. We hear of this longing for fulfilment expressed in Jewish poetry when the psalmist passionately implores:
God, my God, you I crave;
My soul thirsts for you,
My body aches for you
Like a dry weary land. (Psalm 63:2)
Strikingly, the poet’s whole being, soul and body, craves and aches for God. Augustine’s frequently quoted “our hearts are restless until they rest in
Thee,”10 expresses a similar urgent longing. Rahner reiterates this confronting truth: “to be human is to be an immense
longing.”11 It is inherent to our nature to long to fall completely in love, to be fully immersed in ultimate meaningfulness, to be one with God, one with others and one with the cosmic world. Though awareness of this longing may be buried in illusionary obstacles we barely recognize, let alone understand, there is within us a natural desire towards goodness, beauty, truth and union with the divine.
Though like the psalmist, Augustine and Rahner and countless other mystics in the tradition, we may recognize and express our restlessness, what is often less conscious is God’s desire for us. It was God who first loved us (1 John 4:10). It is God who desires for us to be one with divine love. It is God who longs for us to live in the fullness of life with God. God is present in the ground of our longing, seeking us calling us. Mechthild’s poetry poignantly reminds us how absolutely, the deepest desire of our heart is grounded in God’s desire for us. When asking that God love her passionately, often and long, God responds to Mechthild:
That I love you passionately comes from my nature,
for I am love itself.
That I love you often comes from my desire,
for I desire to be loved passionately.
That I love you long comes from my being eternal,
for I am without an end and without a beginning.12
Being love itself, it is intrinsic to the divine nature to passionately hunger for communion with us. Authentic human desire is congruent with divine desire. Although we must take responsibility and respond to the invitation that flows from the ground of who we are in God, we can rest assured that our yearnings, our outward and inward searching uncovered, expressed, and recognized, will lead to the divine beloved. Therefore, if we want to be more fully one with God, we must attend to our desire that has its origins in God‘s eternal desire. God initiates our desire and faithfully leads us in a song of love.
Frequently desire for God begins with a vague attraction to God or something more in life. It arises as we face major life transitions, move into early adulthood, mid- life, face our ageing and mortality. Urgent questions of ultimate meaning confront us when we face illness, failure and death. If we engage with the questions, sift through and quieten external and internal voices that make us deaf to authentic desire, and become responsive to the desire that beckons us to freedom and life, the more our desire will increase. The more attentive we are, the more urgent the desire. St. Gregory the Great captures the expansive nature of desire: “The greater the desire becomes the more a soul rests in God. Possession increases as the same proportion as
desire.”13 The fruit of attentiveness to our longing for God, grounded in God’s longing for us, is an even more urgent yearning that unites us more and more deeply with the longing of God. Accordingly, as our mutual desire grows, openness to allow God to be God, and a freedom to experience God’s love also expand. In this expansion desire becomes hope.
Questions arise:
What is your deepest desire? How do we become attentive to our deepest longing?
How do we develop an inner freedom that enables us to choose to follow our desire for God and to find God in all things?
How do we remain open to the process of transformation to fullness of life that God intends for us?
I wish to suggest that we can cultivate a life stance that is responsive to our deepest desire by adopting qualities of the heart by learning how to see with the eye of the heart and enabling the language of the heart to become our language.
The Language of the Heart
If we want to respond to our desire that is the desire of God for us, and journey into the room of the heart, we must use the language of the heart. It is only the language of the heart that can enlighten us and teach us how to respond. O’Donohue wisely warns us, that though we may want to light the lamp and begin the journey inward, the modern consciousness is frequently anything but gentle and reverent. It lacks graciousness in the presence of mystery. He likens the contemporary search for insight to vision that comes through seeing with the white light of a hospital operating theatre. This instant, invasive neon light is too direct, too aggressive, to befriend the shadowed world of the soul. The surgeon armed with scalpel ready to cut and sever is too analytical to see the intricacies of the soul. In fact, these ways of seeing blind us to the language of mystery. The gentle light of the candle, O’Donohue advises, is the only way to see the soul. Gertrude of Halfa’s insights are helpful here. “By your light may I see
light.”14 Gertrude prays. It is divine light that enables us to see the intricacies of the soul. The lamp that we must light to take a soul journey must be subtle, gentle, able to befriend darkness and gradually reveal glimpses of the divine.
Augustine describes the vision that we seek as we journey to our heart as seeing with the eye of the soul. In Soliloquies he presents some helpful insights into what seeing with the eye of the soul might mean. As he implores God to give him vision, to see with the eyes of his soul, he realizes that vision that comes through the inner eye integrates all ways of knowing. There is not a split between intellect, will, emotions, senses, mind and body but a holistic sense of knowing. He prays to perceive the smell of life, to seek it in its essence; to taste the sweetness of God and experience the infinite delights of wisdom. He desires that his mind and thoughts tend continually towards God, that his heart constantly love and his memory render God ever present in his mind. He prays for an intelligence that contemplates God without turning away and a reason that can cling to immutable truth. He implores for a love so perfect that he may love nothing but
God.15 Thus when we see with the eye of the heart, all our ways of knowing are activated, and yet we experience something deeper than bodily knowing. We begin to see below the surface into the heart of all that is. We learn how to wait, to look for the unexpected. This seeing enables us to be intimate with ourselves, intimate with God and intimately united with all that is. We learn not to distinguish God as a separate reality but to see the presence of God at home in the human heart. Gradually we behold with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of God as though in a mirror so we may be transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another (2 Cor 3:18). When we see with the eye of the heart all reality has a symbolic force that can lead us into the heart of God. In this enlightenment we find meaning.
Teresa’s Journey to the Heart: The Interior Castle
In order to explore further how affairs are soul size, how the way to God is by way of the heart, using the language of the heart, I will present insights from the writings of Teresa of Avila (1515-1582). Teresa envisages her inner room, her soul, as a glorious, interior
castle.16 She shows us how to take the great pilgrimage into the heart through to the inner chambers of the soul, to the centre of the self where the Trinity dwells. Let us focus on Teresa’s insights into how we journey into the room of our hearts. Teresa imagines her soul or inner self as like an interior castle made entirely out of a diamond or very clear
crystal.17 She describes the castle as brilliantly shining and beautiful, …a pearl from the orient, a tree of life planted in the very living waters of life - that is – in
God.18 Inside the castle are many dwelling places. Although Teresa focuses on seven predominant dwelling places, there are in fact many more. The centre of the castle is full of light and love as it is the dwelling place of God.
Entering the Castle
Those who enter the castle are like pilgrims journeying to the place where the human and the divine
meet.19 Teresa explains what she means by entering the castle: It seems I am saying something foolish. For if this castle is the soul clearly one doesn’t have to enter it since it is within oneself…. But you must realize there is a great difference in the ways one may be inside the castle. For there are many souls who live in the outer courtyard…and don’t care at all about entering the
castle.20 Once we venture from the courtyard, however, though some rooms in the castle seem a long way from the centre, each place we enter is a sacred place that partakes of the centre and will give us the wisdom to continue to journey to the centre. The only way to enter the castle is through prayer. Teresa advises: as far as I can understand the gate or entry to this castle is prayer and
reflection.21 Prayer enables us to leave the courtyard of superficial, surface living and to begin the inner journey in earnest. Prayer is the doorway that opens us to mystery of God’s presence in each room. Prayer prepares us, giving us strength and courage to go from room to room. Prayer frees us to love.
Commitment to prayer changes our perception of ourselves and engenders self-knowledge and humility. Teresa stresses how critical self-knowledge is in order to undertake to the journey to the centre of our self. In Teresa’s words:
Knowing our selves is something so important that I wouldn’t want any relaxation ever in this regard, however high you may have climbed into the heavens. So I repeat that it is good, indeed very good, to try to enter first into the room where self-knowledge is dealt with rather than fly off to other
rooms.22
There is a direct relationship between knowledge of self and knowledge of God. We will discover the key to all the other mansions of the castle in the room of self-knowledge. Growth in self-knowledge enables us to find the way to the heart of God.
The journey through the interior castle is delightful and full of indescribable blessings. Yet it takes fidelity and courage because leaving the courtyard, wandering through the rooms and moving into the next room is painful. It involves the torturous struggle of letting go of deficient ways of being and living. It is like experiencing the passion and death of Christ and waiting for resurrection. Nevertheless, in the midst of the struggle, glimpses of resurrection sustain us as we move from room to room, giving us a maturing appreciation that our sinfulness and incompleteness are being immersed in the unconditional love of God who is in union with us at the centre of the castle. Thus, the aim of the pilgrim is to learn to see with the eye of the heart, to listen, and to journey through the rooms in the rhythm of the heart-beat of God until we meet the Trinity who dwells at the centre. Once we have entered the castle there is no doubt that it is the Trinity who summons us to union because as Teresa explains, “God places God’s self in the interior of the soul in such as way that when the soul returns to itself it can no way doubt that it was God and God was in
it.”23 God who dwells in the centre of our beings, desires to be one with us and beckons us to come home to our self in God.
The first three dwelling places mark the beginning of the inner journey. When we first decide to enter this dwelling place there is a distracting business that keeps us from being still because the demands of the outer world have a great influence on our lives. A long way from the centre, the rooms are dark and cold. Prayer is active, requiring decision and effort. The second dwelling places are rooms set apart for those who have decided to spend time in prayer. Here desire begins to increase and prayer becomes less active. Though easily distracted by the outer world, the attraction to the centre begins to motivate. When we open the door into the third dwelling place a critical stage occurs because we must de-centre in order to re-centre on God who dwells in the depths of our being. This pull to the centre brings great inner and outer tension. Teresa identifies how fearful we become: “… everything offends us because we fear everything; so we don’t dare go
further.”24 Though we seem to maintain a surface harmony, an inner disquiet begins to undermine certainties. Overwhelmed by this instability, many people cling to past ways of relating to God, too fearful to let go of the hold they have on life and become de-centred. Insecure and groundless, those who refuse to take the next step feel weighed down “with this mud of human
misery.”25 If the pull to the centre continues to attract, however, prayer begins to change from active saying prayers and engaging in discursive meditation, to a desire for more passive expression. In this transition prayer becomes dry. Like drawing water from a well with a bucket to water dry earth, prayer seems like a chore because the drought is severe, the well deep, and the bucket heavy. Barren and desolate compassion is our only response. Show them compassion in their affliction, Teresa
counsels.26 In this major stage of transformation we must be compassionate with ourselves and others, to honestly name our fears, and to abandon our fears into the hands of Christ.
Our interior life begins to flourish in the fourth dwelling places. Here Rahner’s sense of being human is to be an immense longing is more deeply
realized.27 Our desire to be one with the centre becomes stronger than external desires. We seek solitude. As we begin to recognize our centre and grow in awareness of our wounds and all that distracts us from the centre, we begin to experience the prayer of recollection. In the prayer of recollection desire increases as divine love summons and we noticeably sense a gentle drawing inward. “… I have read where it is compared to a hedgehog curling up or a turtle drawing into its shell,” Teresa
explains.28 A growing outer and inner stillness evokes a more effusive loving openness to God. Divine presence creates a fragrance and warmth within our being that is felt, but is deeper than the feelings of the senses. Consequently, faithfulness to drawing inward gradually evolves into the prayer of quiet. As the name suggests this is quiet peaceful prayer where ego activity becomes minimal. The prayer of quiet engenders an expansion and dilation of the soul. “What an expansion and dilation of the soul is,” Teresa explains, “may be clearly understood from the example of a fount whose water doesn’t overflow into a stream because the fount itself is constructed of such material that the more water there is flowing into it the large the trough
becomes.”29 The prayer of quiet gives a permeating sense of the soul expanding the length and the breadth, the height and the depth of our being. This expansion is so all encompassing that Teresa qualifies her explanation: “I don’t think the experience is something, as I say, that rises from the heart, but from another part still more interior, as from something deep. I think this must be the centre of the
soul.”30 The prayer of quiet enables the interior presence of the divine that is deeper than our heart to arise and overflow into all parts of our being. When this new powerful centre emerges our sense of self and our understanding of who we are in God undergoes a major transformation. The new centre draws attention to itself and demands a response. This deeper absorption into God brings peace to the soul and a new inner and outer freedom.
Riches, treasures and delights we did not know existed become ours in the fifth dwelling
places.31 Within these rooms we experience union with God surely knowing that God is in the depths of our soul and our soul is in God. There is a sense of being mutually enfolded and enclosed in God. Though difficult to describe, in this experience of union there is a certitude remaining in the soul that only God can place
there.32 Now our deepening relationship with God produces a container where transformation can occur. Teresa uses the image of the life cycle of a silk worm to describe this metamorphosis:
The silkworms come from seeds about the size of little grains of pepper…. When the warm weather comes and the leaves begin to appear on the mulberry tree, the seeds start to live, for they are dead until then. The worms nourish themselves on the mulberry leaves until, having grown to full size, they settle on some twigs. There with their little mouths they go about spinning the silk and making some very thick little cocoons in which they enclose themselves. The silkworm which is fat and ugly, then dies and a little white butterfly, which is very pretty, comes forth from the
cocoon.33
In order to reach the centre we must draw opposites together, integrate our memories, draw all life experiences into a harmonious rhythm weaving, until we create a cocoon that contains all that we are. Teresa continues to expand her image: “Well once this silkworm is grown …it begins to spin the silk and build the house wherein it will die. I would like to point out that this house is Christ… our life is hidden in Christ or in God (both are the same), or…our life is
Christ.”34 The cocoon creates a container where we discover that ultimately at the depth of our being we are hidden in Christ in God. “Let it die; let this silkworm die as it does in completing what it was created to do,” Teresa now
counsels.35 The detachment this calls for is excruciatingly painful. Ultimately we must allow the silkworm to die because its death enables the birth of the butterfly that is our new creation in Christ. This being hidden in Christ, dying in Christ, is like being in the tomb with Christ awaiting resurrection. The butterfly that emerges from the cocoon is indicative of the healing process that has taken place in the depth of our being. In its birth we experience a new sense of wholeness within ourselves, one another and all creation. Recognition of our being hidden in Christ in God drawing us into a unity that surpasses our wildest imaginings increases our desire. Having glimpsed the unfathomable depths of our union in God desire becomes ecstatic drawing all that we are towards the centre and forcing us out from the centre to engage and integrate all that is not aligned to the centre. Now the butterfly will not be satisfied until it comes home to rest in God. The fifth dwelling places engender
tranquillity and an irrevocable knowing that ultimately nothing can afflict us because we live in Christ in God.
Knowing that ultimately our life is in Christ in God we enter the sixth dwelling places and strive for more opportunities to be alone, to rid ourselves of everything that can be an obstacle to solitude. We now experience and understand Gregory’s dictum: The greater the desire becomes the more a soul rests in God. Possession increases
desire.36 In Teresa’s words, “the beloved makes us desire vehemently by certain delicate means the soul itself doesn’t understand… These are impulses so delicate and refined, for they proceed from the very depth within the interior part of the
soul…”37 Teresa continues: “This action of love is so powerful that the soul dissolves with
desire.”38 We are now wounded with a love so deep that we feel we will dissolve:
I was thinking now that its as though from this fire that is enkindled in the brazier, that is my God, a spark lept forth and so struck the soul that the flaming fire was felt by it. And since the spark was not enough to set the soul on fire, and the fire is so delightful, the soul is left with that pain; but the spark merely by touching the soul produces that effect…just as the soul is about to start, the spark goes out and the soul is left with the desire to suffer again the loving desire the spark causes.
39
The intensity of pain and joy magnifies, nourishes and inspires. Having experienced a real sense of what awaits us at the centre of the castle our restless yearning that arises from God’s passionate desire for us leads us into seventh dwelling places. Here we arrive at the centre where God, Christ and Holy Spirit mutually indwell the soul. Union takes place in this deepest centre of the soul where the Trinity makes its home:
In this seventh dwelling place the union comes about in a different way: Our good God now desires to remove the scale from the soul’s eyes and let it see and understand, although in a strange way, something of the favor he grants it. When the soul is brought into that dwelling place, the most Blessed Trinity, all three persons, through an intellectual vision, is revealed to it through a certain representation of the truth. First there comes an enkindling of the spirit in the manner of a cloud of magnificent splendor; and these persons are distinct, and through an admirable knowledge the soul understands as a most profound truth that all three persons are one substance and one power and one knowledge and one God alone. It knows in such a way that what we know by faith, it understands, we can say, through sight – although the sight is not with the bodily eyes nor with the eyes of the soul, because we are not dealing with an imaginative vision. Here all three persons communicate themselves to it, speak to it, and explain these words of the Lord in the Gospel: that Christ and God and the Holy Spirit will come to dwell with the soul that loves and keeps the
commandments.40
We experience a profound sense of the presence of the Trinity in our hearts, and an undeniable appreciation of being grounded in God from origin to fulfilment. Now we know that we can never be separated from God’s unconditional love: “Each day this soul becomes more amazed, for these persons never seem to leave it any more, but it clearly beholds…that they are within it. In the extreme interior, in some place very deep within itself, the nature of which it doesn’t know how to
explain…”41 Critically, however, in this joining of two things into one, in the end the two can be separated and each remain
itself.42 Within this experience of oneness Teresa explicitly identifies Christ as the spouse describing her intimacy with him as a spiritual marriage.
What God communicates here to the soul in an instant is a secret so great and a favor so sublime- and the delight the soul experiences so extreme- that I don’t know what to compare it to. I can say only that the Lord wishes to reveal for that moment in a more sublime manner than through any spiritual vision or taste, the glory of heaven. One can say no more – in so far as it can be understood- than that the soul, I mean the spirit, is made one with
God.43
In the deepest part of the human soul is the spirit that is one with God. Though silence is the only response to this most sublime of mysteries Teresa continues to engage our contemplative imaginations with rich evocative imagery:
Let me say this union is like the joining of two wax candles to such an extent that the flame coming from them is one, or that the wick, the flame, and the wax are all one. But after that one candle can be easily separated from the other and there are two candles; the same holds for the wick. In the spiritual marriage the union is like what we have when the rain falls from the sky into the river or fount; all is water, for the rain that fell from heaven cannot be divided or separated from the water of the river. Or it is like what we have when a little stream enters the sea, there is no means of separating the two. Or like a bright light entering a room through different windows; although the streams of light are separate when entering the room, they become
one.44
Once we experience this oneness the butterfly joyfully dies of love. Quoting Paul Teresa adds: “For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. The soul as well, I think, can say these words now because this state is the place where the little butterfly …dies, and with the greatest joy because its life is now
Christ.”45 Having experienced union at the centre the butterfly can now die because its life is totally in Christ. Once we have journeyed to the centre we remain in that centre and if we attend to the centre the divine presence is immediately evident. Therefore although we may experience outer difficulties and pain the centre enables us to experience deep peace in the midst of suffering. This interior joy leads to great self-forgetfulness because we understand that we are endowed with the life of God. The energy at the centre is like the ebb and flow of the waves in the sea drawing in and flowing out. Grounded in our centre all that we do flows into the centre and out from the centre. Now we experience centered living. The fruit of the journey to the centre is the birth of good works, good works. We become like Martha and Mary, balanced and wholly engaged in prayer and good works.
Implications
I hear some of you say, “What has this got to do with me and my school?” And I want to respond. “Everything.” Unless we recognize and live out of our centre where the ground of our being is one with the divine we will have nothing authentic to say or to contribute to the Church and wider world. I was educated in the Catholic schools, taught in that system and continue to educate teachers to teach in the system. I love the Tradition that it stands for and know that what it has to offer can make Australia a more humane and just society. Unfortunately, over the past ten years or so I have become more and more aware of cynicism, discontent and disconnectedness within the system that is thrusting teachers into an abyss of meaninglessness. We have more and more teachers incapable of living out of their true selves, half trying to communicate something they don’t believe in, in language they don’t understand. We have to name this for what it is. But this darkness, this moment in history is a kairos time, a time to take the most challenging journey of soul we will ever take. We must give people the opportunity to discover their true selves in God, to find symbols and language that is expressive of their deepest desire and nurture them as they struggle for peace and wholeness. There are people in the tradition who can show the way. Ultimately however the journey is ours. We must take the risk to let go of ways of being and living that deafen us to divine presence in our lives. We must uncover our deepest desire that can lead us to find our own voice and sing loudly our song composed in the depths of the indwelling Trinity.
This journey to the centre that Teresa describes is not the journey for a select few. It is the journey of every Christian to live out of the divine, who makes a home in us at the centre of our being. Teresa shows us how to befriend our inner landscapes, the landscape of the soul. She uses images from everyday life to tell the fundamental story of humanity, the story of the heart seeking fulfilment and experiencing a graciousness that concords with the deepest desire of our longing. Teresa’s images give us a way of describing our journey, of articulating the grief, loss and transformation that we experience as we are gently held and nurtured from the centre. Her reflections invite us to tell our stories, to find our own images so that they may become symbols which inform us of the sacredness of our lives in God and the journey of oneing that we are all invited to undertake. Our task is to encourage and support others so they may discover the wonders that await them as they live their lives
centred in the God who calls all to freedom life and love.
Let us return to the image we began with. A woman lights a lamp and goes into the room of her heart. We have the choice to be like the madman and shatter the lantern or we can undertake the painful and challenging, wonderful and delectable journey to the centre of our hearts where the Trinity dwells. In the centre the flame we carry that is ignited from the oil of our lives, becomes one with the living flame of love. Ultimately our journey is to be love with Love. And so with John of the Cross we pray:
O living flame of love
that tenderly wounds my soul
In its deepest centre! Since
Now Consummate! If it be your will:
Tear through the veil of this sweet encounter!
O sweet cautery,
O delightful wound!
O gentle hand! O delicate touch
That tastes of eternal life
And pays every debt!
In killing you changed death to life.
O lamps of fire!
In whose splendors the deep caverns of feeling,
Once obscure and blind,
Now give forth, so rarely, so exquisitely,
Both warmth and light to their Beloved.
How gently and lovingly
You wake in my heart,
Where in secret you dwell alone;
And in your sweet breathing,
Filled with good and glory,
How tenderly you swell my heart with love.46
We are all called to be mystics in this time in this place, to light our lamps and journey to the light of lights that dwells in the depth of our beings. Light of wisdom enflame our lamps, and by your light may we see light. Amen.
References:
1 Ronald Rolheiser, The Shattered Lantern. 2nd ed. (New York: Crossroad, 2001).
2 This is a phrase used by Moore. See Sesbastian Moore, The Fire and the Rose are One (London: Darton Longman and Todd, 1980), 144. He suggests original sin is the state of disharmony that causes the unreality of God.
3 Christopher Fry, “A Sleep of Prisoners” in Barbara Fiand, Prayer and the Quest for Healing: Our Personal Transformation and Cosmic Responsibility (New York: Crossroad, 1999), 2.
4 Wilkie Au, The Enduring Heart: Spirituality for the Long Haul (New York: Paulist Press, 2000). See Chapter 1: Living with Soul, 1-21.
5 John O’Donohue, Spiritual Wisdom from the Celtic World (Great Britian: Bantam Books, 1997), 51.
6 Mircea Eliade, Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism. Trans. Philip Mairet, (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1969).
7 Carl G. Jung, Man and His Symbols (New York: Dell, 1968).
8 See Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil (Boston: Beakon Books, 1967), 348.
9 Tony Kelly, The Bread of God: Nurturing a Eucharistic Imagination (Melbourne: Harper Collins Religious, 2001), 107.
10 See Confessions Book 1, chapter 1.
11 Harvey D. Egan, Karl Rahner Mystic of Everyday Life (New York: Crossroads, 1998), 60.
12 Mechthild of Magdeburg, The Flowing Light of the Godhead. Translated and introduced by Frank Tobin. (New York: Paulist Press, 1998), 1.24.52.
13 Jean Laclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God (New York: Fordham University Press), 85.
14 Gertrude of Helfta: Spiritual Exercises, Translated and introduced by Gertrude Jaron Lewis and Jack Lewis (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1989) V.30.74.
15 Augustine, Soliloques of St. Augustine. Translated by L.M.F.G. (Edinburgh: Sands and Co, 1912), 4.
16 Teresa describes the journey through the castle as a journey into the heart to the soul that is deeper than the heart, to the centre where the Trinity dwells.
17 Teresa of Avila: The Interior Castle, Translated by Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez (New York: Paulist Press, 1979). The reference indicates chapter number, paragraph number and page number. I have used inclusive language in references to God. 1.1.35.
18 1.2.39.
19 See John Welsch, Spiritual Pilgrims (New York: Paulist Press, 1982).
20 1.1.37.
21 1.1.38.
22 1.2.9.
23 1.1.8.
24 3.2.8.
25 3:2.9.
26 3.2.2.
27 See n.10
28 4.3.3.
29 4.3.9.
30 4.2.5.
31 See John Welsch, Spiritual Pilgrims (New York: Paulist Press, 1982), Chapter 6:
Butterfly an Image of Wholeness, 136-164.
32 5.1.9
33 5.2.2.
34 5.2.5.
35 5.2.6.
36 See n. 12.
37 6:2.1
38 6.2.4.
39 6:2.4
40 7.1.6.
41 7.1.8.
42 7.2.4.
43 7.2.3.
44 7.2.4.
45 7.2.5.
46 The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, Translated by Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez. (Washington: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1973), 578-579.