News about our Community Heritage Grant from the National Library of Australia

 The Carmelite Library has been successful in its application for a Community Heritage Grant from the National Library of Australia, in the 2021 round of applications. 

The project is a ‘Significance Assessment of the Carmelite Library Rare Books Collection’. We are very excited about this recognition and look forward to working with an assessor in the coming year. The Library holds an important and growing rare books collection, with titles from every century since the 16^th century. 

Community Heritage Grants provide non-profit community organisations with funding to assist with the preservation of locally owned, but nationally significant collections. The grants are also aimed at making these collections more publicly accessible. 

Pictured: The librarian, Philip Harvey, with the Community Heritage Grants certificate from the National Library of Australia.

Photograph: Susan Southall

 

The Library closes 16th December. Re-opens 18th January 2022.

The Carmelite Library closes for the Christmas break on Thursday the 16^th of December at 4 pm.

The Library re-opens for the new year on Tuesday the 18^th of January 2022 at 10 am.

The Experience of the Poetry of Saint John of the Cross

Here are Philip Harvey’s words about the poetry of Saint John of the Cross, given via Zoom at Carmelite Conversations on the morning of the 1^st of December 2021. The four poems under discussion can be found in this blog’s previous posting: https://thecarmelitelibrary.blogspot.com/2021/11/three-poems-by-saint-john-of-cross-and.html

 The man we are reading this morning was born in1542. In that year Mary became Queen of the Scots at the age of six days, the Spanish established the city of Guadalajara in western Mexico, and Pope Paul III created the Holy Office in Rome, with jurisdiction over the Roman Inquisition. The friar named John of the Cross died 49 years later in 1591. In that year William Shakespeare was just starting to put on plays in London and it was three years since the Spanish Armada had been defeated by a combination of the English navy, bad planning and terrible weather. But inside Spain itself by then John of the Cross, through his words and actions, had become a most active and positive long-term influence on his own society. It is an influence that continues to this day.   

When John made up these poems he was locked in a cell, by order of the Carmelites, where he had to remain. The politics of that situation need not concern us here now. The words interest us. Each line in the poem of the dark night states one particular moment and movement away from an enclosed space to something else. Each line is like shorthand for the state of relationship he has with the person described in Spanish as ‘amada’, the lover, the one whose love is transformative of the beloved. We know these lines are shorthand for all sorts of personal states because John started to compose a commentary on each line, later on in his life. Although we may read the lines as a single sequence of experience, and that’s fine, I believe we are invited to contemplate the lines of the poem in the same way as we read Saint Teresa’s ‘Interior Castle’ (‘Las Moradas’), where we may find ourselves at any time at any place on our way through the Castle. In terms of our own relationship with God, Lover and Beloved, we may identify with particular lines of the poem, states that we know ourselves, or have even observed in others. While the poem reminds us of storylines in The Song of Songs and The Book of Wisdom, it is unquestionably a Spanish love poem, drawing on Spanish poetic tradition, a poem in which both the erotic and the spiritual are at play and where it is simply best to recognise that accommodation from the start.

Rowan Williams, someone who has written extensively on John and Teresa, recently spoke at a seminar in his homeland of Wales as follows: “There is a long-standing assumption within the world of faith that there is some kind of territory where you can actually let the emotions and the imagination run. You don’t have to check it for being safe. So when in the Psalms you find the Psalmist saying ‘Blessed be he that taketh thy children and dasheth their heads against the stones.’ The point of that is not, this is a godly thing to think. The point is there is space for someone to express the most murderous rage and get it out there and look at it.

“Or similarly, in the poetry of Saint John of the Cross, arguably the greatest writer about contemplation in the history of Christianity. The poetry is about loss and frustration, brick walls, and then it’s about something like erotic fulfilment, and then it’s about absence and darkness and then it’s about the blazing sense of presence in the world around, and so on and so on, as if he’s saying I’ve got to have somewhere to get all of this out, because it all has to do with something about my basic stance.”

This is helpful, as Rowan Williams also invites us to read the poem not just literally as some homoerotic outburst, which is valid in its own terms and there to see, but as John’s only way of saying what he knows of the encounter with the God of Love. His motives in making the poem become central and we need to keep in mind that the gender of the speaker is left completely open, it could be he or she, it could you or me. While we keep to the very modern perception that this is some personal confessional poem from John, we miss the poems main activity, namely that the person speaking is the soul. It is the soul who speaks of God and to God.   

The Carmelite Library contains many published translations of John’s poetry. I have read eight different translators of this poem, finding that each one places different emphases and even different meanings on the Spanish lines. All the translations are valid, thus reminding us of the different ways in which we can read and understand such a beautiful and deceptively simple poem. I have chosen John Frederick Nims’ version, made in 1958, for this morning’s session. I have done so not because Nims is the best translation, there is no best translation, but because he has rendered certain stanzas in a way I find well represents the sinuousness and multiple implications of the Spanish verse. He attempts to deliver the compact, autonomous nature of each line.    

[En una noche oscura]

After reading this poem several times, without John’s commentary, I see him presenting me with a range of states. I will say what they seem to be, in my reading. The opening verse speaks of being in darkness and yet filled with the longing of love. Such is the power of this longing, there is nothing for it but to break free. The night, in this setting, is a place of possibility, indeed we are in a place where things are happening. This is one state of being we experience in our relationship with God. We continue by a ladder secretly and in disguise, yet it is ‘sheer grace’ (to quote one translation) that assists us out of the house. The house itself may be read as all those things that contain us, hold us back from being with God. But the house may also be the body, simple material existence holding us from all the possibilities that we seek, including love. With only the light of love that burns in the heart, we find our way through the dark. Darkness here can be every kind of challenge, such as depression, loss, uncertainty, distraction, but darkness is also where we can find understanding. John brings us into the presence of the lover, someone who has been waiting for the beloved, i.e. us in our search for the lover. This occurs before sunrise, so is an illumination given in the night. The poem then spends two verses describing the pleasure and joy of being there with the lover, before speaking of being wounded by the gentleness of the caress. This moment makes the poem different from any conventional love poem, especially as the poet is grateful for this wounding, which can be thought of as necessary for the growth of their love, a lesson borne of suffering, but also the inevitable change brought about by an encounter with God. The poem concludes by speaking of a suspension of the senses, i.e. experience that is more than simply sensory and sensuous. Speaks too of forgetting ourselves, losing that former self in the love that now envelopes us. Speaks of letting go of all care, which I take to mean amongst other things, the overcoming of all fears. Thus we are left asking where we, and others, find ourselves in a relationship with this God, a lover who transforms our lives.

In the second poem this morning, John of the Cross finds a second way of expressing relationship with God. This time he starts by speaking of a living flame. The flame has the power to soothe, to enliven, to erase all debt, and to be there at any time. The flame also has the power to wound us, this same wounding that we heard about in the first poem. This is the suffering that teaches us more, so that we grow in relationship, suffering that is unavoidable in life and must be lived with and understood. The wound is where we learn more about God, about the wisdom that comes with such wounding. Although Christ is never named in the poem, it is Christ’s own wounding on the Cross, and the life-giving that comes from that wounding, that the poet is meditating upon in his words.

[Oh llama de amor viva]

John of the Cross was born into a conversos family, that is his ancestors were Jewish. This is an important fact to have in mind when reading him, as Jews had been outlawed by the Spanish Crown in the generation before John’s birth. In my view, this central form of identity feeds his thought and his writing. The sensuousness of his poetry, its profound biblical basis, the yearning and belonging he describes, are redolent of Jewish ways of life. John lives with an inheritance from which he has been ostracised. Many readers of John also regard John as Buddhist in his thinking, even though he would have had no encounter with Buddhism itself. We see this, for example, in John’s explanation of finding God in ‘nothing and everything’ (‘nada y todo’). We find this in these poems, with their ascetic giving up of everything that gets in the way of a relationship with the Lover, of putting away everything other than the flame that sears, wounds, soothes, heals and enlightens. Like his great colleague and collaborator Teresa of Avila (also conversos), John lives through a time of immense religious conflict in Europe. The divisions occurring everywhere in the church cause many to explore more deeply the reality of relationship with God, such as we find going on in John’s poetry.   

One enjoyment of John’s poetry is its evident location in Spain. The features of the physical world of his country fuse with biblical language in many effective ways. We hear fountains, see candlelight, walk up and down staircases, breathe in and out in the stillness of the night, taste bread and wine. This is so in the third poem that we read this morning. The version we read is one of my favourites. It requires some context for better appreciation. When the Irish poet Seamus Heaney wrote his cycle of poems ‘Station Island’, he arranged them in order of the shrines that pilgrims reverence in that pilgrimage site in County Donegal called St Patrick’s Purgatory, at Lough Derg. He meets various shades during his own visit, including the novelist James Joyce, but also and significantly St John of the Cross. I say ‘significantly’ because Heaney’s own relationship with Christianity is sometimes ambiguous, laden with a mix of scepticism and respect. He is infinitely aware of his own Irish Catholic upbringing and of Christianity’s deep hold on that country. So, the opening lines recount Heaney’s own mooching about from one station to the next, when by chance he meets someone in an unusual fashion who instructs him to do penance by translating a poem of the Cross. He once said in an interview that the priest he meets is “based on a Carmelite who gave a retreat” during his last year of school, who told Heaney to “read poems as prayers.” To explain what this might mean, Heaney then quotes the Polish American poet Czeslaw Milosz: “He felt gratitude so he couldn’t not believe in God.” We can therefore take it that this translation is written in a spirit of thanksgiving.

[Que bien se yo la fonte]

My own response to this poem is always accompanied by a state of peacefulness , even complete tranquillity. Once more we find ourselves in the night. Again we meet a condition that is one of movement and the present moment, though this time water is the element that helps assist the poet in his understanding of the Creator. Seamus Heaney cleverly contrasts the ‘muddied water’ in the rain barrel, i.e. in the physical world of the here and now, with the ‘pellucid’ water of the fountain that is the source of all being. We may understand the creation in its entirety by listening to the fountain in the night. 

My response to the words is to hear them as a contemplative affirmation. God is always available, even if we doubt it, or cannot seem to connect, or even know exactly what is meant. ‘Although it is the night’ or ‘Because it is the night’: the fountain explains the creation simply through its own being. We are sked to enter into this contemplative vision. At the end of the poem, John identifies as well with the Eucharist, with Christ’s giving and life shared in the bread. Like the other poems, John of the Cross affirms that we live with acceptance of God’s actions. The poems are simple examples of grace at work, where we let go of all our usual supports and explanations, live detached from them, and engage increasingly inside the place of God’s action.  

To conclude our morning of poetry, I wish to read a sonnet about the saint, written by the contemporary English poet Malcolm Guite. Guite himself says that his sonnet is inspired by Seamus Heaney’s version of ‘Que bien se yo la fonte’. And here I quote Malcolm Guite’s own preamble, which I found on his online site. His words speak of some of the things we have been talking about this morning.

“St. John of the Cross … understood and dealt with the darkness that sometimes comes upon us, the saint who gave us the phrase ‘The Dark Night of the Soul’. John encountered darkness not only spiritually and psychologically, but actually: both physical darkness and the darkness of human evil when he was imprisoned in a dark dungeon by fellow Christians and indeed, members of his own order! But he did not give in to darkness, rather he perceived that it might become fruitful, the darkness not of evil but of God, that the way down might become the way up, that hidden even in the deepest darkness was the promise of that light which the darkness can never overcome. So he wrote that beautiful poem ‘Although it is the Night’, which Seamus Heaney translated so movingly, opening with the line: ‘How well I know that fountain, filling, running,/ Although it is the night.’ The other deep element in his writing is the way he understands Christ as our true lover and is able to draw on the deepest language of human loving to give voice to his intimate relationship with Christ. I have drawn on ‘Although it is the Night’, poem and on some of the elements in his story and his spiritual writings in making the following sonnet in his honour. My sonnet also reflects on the fact that his day falls in Advent when we are all waiting in Darkness for the coming of God’s marvellous light.”

John of the Cross

 

Deep in the dark your brothers locked you up

But not so deep as your dear Love could dive,

There at the end of colour, sense and shape,

The dark dead end that tells us we’re alive,

You sang aloud and found your absent lover,

As light’s true end comes with the end of light.

In the rich midnight came the lovely other,

You saw him plain although it was the night.

 

And now you call us all to hear that Fountain

Singing and playing well before the Dawn

The sun is still below this shadowed mountain

We wait in darkness for him to be born.

Before he rises, light-winged with the lark,

We’ll meet with our beloved in the dark.

Sources

Laboratories of the Spirit : R.S. Thomas’ religious poetry. Public conversation between Barry Morgan and Rowan Williams, conducted by the Learned Society of Wales  Cymdeithas Ddysgedig Cymru. On Youtube here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtgpHmEASj0

The Poems of Saint John of the Cross, translated by Willis Barnstone, 1968

The Poems of St. John of the Cross, translated by Roy Campbell. Harvill, 1951

The Poems of St. John of the Cross, new English versions by John Frederick Nims. Grove Press, 1959

The Poems of St. John of the Cross, translated by Ken Krabbenhoft. Harcourt Brace, 1999

St. John of the Cross, a sonnet by Malcolm Guite, in Parable and paradox. Canterbury Press, 2016. Also online here: https://malcolmguite.wordpress.com/2016/12/14/st-john-of-the-cross-a-sonnet/

Station Island, by Seamus Heaney. Faber, 1984

Stepping stones : interviews with Seamus Heaney, by Dennis O’Driscoll. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008

Three Poems by Saint John of the Cross and One Poem about Saint John of the Cross

 Read at Carmelite Conversations, 1^st of December 2021

 [En una noche oscura]

            Once in the dark of night,

my longings caught and raging in love’s ray

            (O windfall of delight!)

            I slipped unseen away

as all my home in a deep slumber lay.

 

            Secure, in more than night,

close hid and up the stair a secret way

            (O windfall of delight!)

            in the night, in feigned array

as all my home in a deep slumber lay.

 

            There in the lucky dark,

stealing in secrecy, by none espied;

            nothing for eyes to mark,

            no other light, no guide

but in my heart: that fire would not subside.

 

            That led me on –

that dazzle truer than high noon is true

            to where there waited one

            I knew – how well I knew! –

in a place where no one was in view.

 

            O dark of night, my guide!

O sweeter than anything sunrise can discover!

            O night, drawing side to side

            the loved and lover,

the loved one wholly ensouling in the lover.

 

            There in my festive breast

walled for his pleasure-garden, his alone,

            the lover remained at rest

            and I gave all I own,

gave all, in air from the cedars softly blown.

 

            All, in wind from the wall

as my hand in his hair moved lovingly at play.

            He let soft fingers fall

            and I swooned dead away

wounded: all senses in oblivion lay.

 

            Quite out of self suspended –

my forehead on the lover’s own reclined.

            And that way the world ended

            with all my cares untwined

among the lilies falling and out of mind.

 

Translated by John Frederick Nims (1959)

 

[Oh llama de amor viva]

 

O living flame of love

that so tenderly wounds

my soul at its deepest centre:

you are no longer fickle,

so finish, if you will –

rend the cloth, end this sweet encounter.

 

O gentle searing brand

and caressing wound,

O soothing touch from his soft hand

that feels like life eternal

and pays off every debt:

you killed me, making life from death.

 

O you lanterns of fire,

your brilliance inflames

the deep caverns of my senses

that were blackened and blind.

With rare elegance

You shed warmth and light on your beloved!

 

How gentle and loving

your reminder to me,

in my heart where you secretly dwell

with your delightful breath

in glory and good will,

how soothingly do you woo me!

 

Translated by Ken Krabbenhoft (1999)

 

[Que bien se yo la fonte]

 

As if the prisms of the kaleidoscope

I plunged once in a butt of muddied water

surfaced like a marvellous lightship

 

and out of its silted crystals a monk’s face

that had spoken years ago from behind a grille

spoke again about the need and chance

 

to salvage everything, to re-envisage

the zenith and glimpsed jewels of any gift

mistakenly abased …

 

What came to nothing could always be replenished.

‘Read poems as prayers,’ he said, ‘and for your penance

translate me something by Juan de la Cruz.’

 

Returned from Spain to our chapped wilderness,

his consonants aspirate, his forehead shining,

he had made me feel there was nothing to confess.

 

Now his sandalled passage stirred me on to this:

How well I know that fountain, filling, running,

            although it is the night.

 

That eternal fountain, hidden away,

I know its haven and its secrecy

            although it is the night.

 

But not its source because it does not have one,

which is all sources’ source and origin

            Although it is the night.

 

No other thing can be so beautiful.

Here the earth and heaven drink their fill

            although it is the night.

 

So pellucid it never can be muddied,

and I know that all light radiates from it

            although it is the night.

 

I know no sounding-line can find its bottom,

nobody ford or plumb its deepest fathom

            although it is the night.

 

And its current so in flood it overspills

to water hell and heaven and all peoples

            although it is the night.

 

And the current that is generated there,

as far as it wills to, it can flow that far

            although it is the night.

 

And from these two a third current proceeds

which neither of these two, I know, precedes

            Although it is the night.

 

This eternal fountain hides and splashes

within this living bread that is life to us

although it is the night.

 

Hear it calling out to every creature.

And they drink these waters, although it is dark here

            Because it is the night.

 

I am repining for this living fountain.

Within this bread of life I see it plain

            although it is the night.

 

Translated by the Irish Nobel Prize poet Seamus Heaney (1984)

 

John of the Cross

A sonnet by Malcolm Guite

 

Deep in the dark your brothers locked you up

But not so deep as your dear Love could dive,

There at the end of colour, sense and shape,

The dark dead end that tells us we’re alive,

You sang aloud and found your absent lover,

As light’s true end comes with the end of light.

In the rich midnight came the lovely other,

You saw him plain although it was the night.

 

And now you call us all to hear that Fountain

Singing and playing well before the Dawn

The sun is still below this shadowed mountain

We wait in darkness for him to be born.

Before he rises, light-winged with the lark,

We’ll meet with our beloved in the dark.

 

 

 

 

 

‘Looking East in Winter’ by Rowan Williams BOOK REVIEW

 

‘Looking East in Winter : Contemporary Thought and Eastern Christian Tradition’ by Rowan Williams (Bloomsbury Continuum) 

This review by Philip Harvey first appeared in the November 2021 issue of The Melbourne Anglican 

Rowan Williams has been engaged with Orthodoxy from his youth. He exemplifies the Anglican Church’s historical interest and deep conversation with the Eastern church traditions. His new book collects writings from the past ten years, but may be seen as a drawing together of learning over a lifetime, ranging from the early Greek Fathers right through to Mother Maria Skobtsova, John Zizioulas and present-day theology. He informs, questions, reflects and illumines at every turn. 

Each chapter attends to a main aspect of Orthodox theology and spirituality, but Williams links each one through time, subject, and personalities. Thus, an up-to-date chapter on the great spiritual anthology the Philokalia leads into the next chapter, on desire and its relationship to logos, the embodied Word. Which, in turn, leads to a chapter firmly explaining deification, i.e. “participation in the life of God as the goal of God’s saving and restoring work in human beings.” As he puts it, this starts with the “fundamental norm in Christian identity” of addressing God as Jesus did, as ‘Abba, Father’, and orients us “towards a state of freedom from compulsion by instinct,” a state imitative of divine life that involves a share in divine wisdom. What I detail here is just one of many enlivening sequences throughout the work.  

The abiding interest of the book is Christian anthropology, something we find recurring throughout his work: the question of what makes us human. Furthermore, what makes us more human, rather than less human. Complex theology is highlighted throughout by Williams’ characteristically felicitous turns of phrase, compression of materials, and enthusiasm to introduce readers to new and challenging ideas. While never shying away from the technical language and specialisation of Orthodox theology, his elucidation of its historical changes and central concerns offers us a valuable gift of learning.     

The book’s title comes from an image used by the fifth-century writer Diadochos of Photike. “Looking east in winter,” writes Rowan Williams, “we feel the warmth of the sun on our faces, while still sensing an icy chill at our backs. Our divided and distorted awareness of the world is not healed instantly. But we are not looking at the phenomenon from a distance: we do truly sense the sun on our faces; and we have good reason to think that the climate and landscape of our humanity can indeed be warmed and transfigured … This is the promise that the Church must embody if it is to be credible in what is at the moment a notably wintry world.”

The Carmelite Library re-opens on Tuesday the 9th of November at 10 am

The Carmelite Library re-opens on Tuesday the 9^th of November at 10 am. Now is your opportunity to return books held through lockdown and to borrow more. Request-and-collect services are also available for those who prefer that option. We are encouraging renewal of membership at this stage, now that the prospect of continuous opening is in sight into the new year 2022. Welcome back! The staff looks forward to seeing you in the Library.

 

‘A Bridge Between : Spanish Benedictine Missionary Women in Australia’ by Katharine Massam

A book review by Philip Harvey first published in The Melbourne Anglican, September 2021 

The religious orders are intrinsic to the history of Australian settlement. Yet accounts of the different orders vary wildly in coverage. The Josephites, for example, and their founder Mary MacKillop (St Mary of the Cross) enjoy a wealth of study, while the Carmelites have no official in-depth published history. The genre ranges from HQ histories with little to say beyond names, places, and dates, through to copious reference works like the Jesuits’ biographical dictionary.

 Prominent in this literature is New Norcia, the Spanish Benedictine monastic town that has flourished in Western Australia since 1847, the year Melbourne became a city. But this new book is no conventional history of that place. Katharine Massam has worked in depth with the sources, many previously unknown, much translated from Spanish, to piece together the women’s side of the story. Gender, race, language, hierarchy, nationality, law and canon law, rules of orders and cultural styles – all of these social factors are at play as each new wave of sisters arrives from Spain, and elsewhere, to work in a mission field focussed on the Indigenous population. 

Her history spans the 20^th century, from the arrival of the first nuns in 1904 to the commemorative return visit of the last sisters in 2001. Teresians, Josephites and then Benedictine nuns operate the New Norcia school, then the orphanage, working alongside but separate from the main foundation of Benedictine men. Personalities, ambitions and conflicts are handled with a cool detachment and insight. Massam makes the story highly readable, indeed dramatic, through her sympathetic reading of all kinds of people, whether abbots, bishops, and other superiors; monks, nuns and other church folk; Indigenous men, women and children, living in a world that has changed radically from anything they had ever known. The tensions are identified between rapid social change and lives regulated by prayer, instruction and compassion. The many photographs in colour and black-and-white give a challenging and inspiring parallel narrative to her words.       

The style, scholarship and substance of ‘A Bridge Between’ show it is time for historians to look anew at the world of the religious orders, in the light of the social upheavals in the world going on around them, and their own charisms borne out of time and experience. 

Massam’s history appears at the other end of the life cycle of most of the orders in Australia. The days are over of regular yearly vocations to join orders with, in many cases, a sense we are looking at closing chapters. Hers is a new kind of exploratory writing about the orders, but also Christianity in general in Australia. It is an exemplar. She deals directly with main issues of racial assimilation, separation of Aboriginal children, and cultural dominance. The text keeps a firm account of transgressions and misunderstandings while moving into the necessary space of naming and reconciliation. Her sensitivity to all sides, her ability to ask questions that affect lives, her determination with the documents, show how to treat such complexities while speaking to their truths. Similarly, she casts her wizened eye on the internal management processes of the Catholic Church, showing how the beneficence of key figures, grit and some grace, and even a spot of luck can make the difference to productive outcomes. Nor does she shy away from describing the sometimes precarious nature of the sisters’ existence when these variables are not all in place.

 

A talk on Ruth Burrow’s book on Saint Teresa’s Interior Castle

 This is the text of a Carmelite Conversation, given on Wednesday 4 November 2020 by Bernadette Micallef 

Ruth Burrows is the pen name of Sr Rachel OCD, a nun of the Carmelite monastery in Quidenham, England, and the author of more than a dozen books on prayer and the mystical life. Describing the ruling insight that runs throughout all her writings, she says: “God offers himself in total love to each one of us. Our part is to open our hearts to receive the gift.” [CathNews 27 July 2020]

To begin today’s session, we pray that God uses it to open our hearts more fully to receive the gift of God’s love. This process is essentially what Teresa’s Interior Castle describes – the process of growth – of opening up to receive God more and more fully. It describes the spiritual journey which we are all on, with and toward God.

Today, we’ll be using Ruth Burrows’ book to explore this process. The presentation will be in two parts, with conversation after each part.

In the introduction to her book Ruth says: “If I succeed in my aim, this book will have a twofold character; it will indeed be a commentary on St Teresa’s Interior Castle, and someone should be able to read that work slowly, turn to this one and find every important point elucidated; at the same time, if it is a true re-presentation of that classic, then it should stand in its own right as a useful guide to a life of union with God.”

The aim of this conversation today is to share Ruth Burrows’ insight into Teresa’s work, as a useful guide to our own life of union with God; to entice you to read those insight firsthand and then read or re-read Teresa’s Interior Castle.

Why this order?

If you go to Teresa’s writings first, it can be confusing, with talk of favours and visions and raptures and other such experiences. Ruth has sorted out some confusions that Teresa herself could not sort out. Ruth writes about her own journey in coming to a place of critical evaluation of Teresa’s writings – whilst maintaining her great respect for Teresa, Ruth recognizes her limitations, and writes, “perhaps now and then she was mistaken; or even that she did not express herself clearly and was not always consistent! Dare one question that perhaps the intellectual, theological, literary tools available were often inadequate and clumsy for what she was trying to communicate.” There’s quite a lot in the book about Ruth’s personal journey in this regard, and critical evaluation is an underlying theme.

 

Overview of the Interior Castle

For those perhaps not familiar with the concept of the Interior Castle, I’ll begin with an overview. Please excuse the male pronoun for God in both Teresa’s and Ruth’s writing, and the non-inclusive language. I’d rather stick to their text than attempt to alter it to suit our sensitivities.

Teresa writes in the Prologue, “Not many things that I have been ordered to do under obedience have been as difficult for me as is this present task of writing about prayer. ... May He, in whose mercy I trust and who has helped me in other more difficult things so as to favor me, do this work for me.” She begins by introducing the image of the castle with these words, “Today, while beseeching Our Lord to speak for me, ... there came to my mind what I shall now speak about, that which will provide us with a basis to being with. ... It is that we consider our soul to be like a castle made entirely out of a diamond or of very clear crystal, in which there are many rooms, just as in heaven there are many dwelling places.” She goes on, “I don’t find anything comparable to the magnificent beauty of a soul and its marvellous capacity. Indeed, our intellects, however keen, can hardly comprehend it, just as they cannot comprehend God; but He himself says that He created us in His own image and likeness. (Genesis 1:26-27)”

What do these short extracts tell us?

Firstly, Teresa is writing about Prayer – and remember her definition of prayer is “an intimate conversation between friends.” So she is writing ABOUT PRAYER and seeking an analogy for THE SOUL. By ‘the soul’ she simply means that dimension or essence really of each of us, that has the capacity to be in relationship with God. That’s what the soul is and she is concerned with the soul’s growth to full CAPACITY which enables union with God.

In summary, in the Interior Castle, Teresa is talking about the growth to full capacity of the soul – growth toward becoming fully human. She describes this growth within us, as a movement through seven dwelling places or mansions, where the seventh, the most hidden and interior, is the place of full and permanent union with God.

I’m reminded of that quote from Rahner, “Jesus was so fully human he was divine.”

We’ll explore this further but I’d like to consider this image of the castle, a little more, first.

 

The Castle Image

The Spanish word morada, which Teresa used, means a place where one lives: a dwelling, abode, home. It is an allusion to John 14. “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.”

The Greek word in John 14, Ruth writes, which is “usually translated as mansion or dwelling place, can equally mean a staging-inn, a place where travellers may stop for a while as they journey. Such stopping places would be along frequented routes. Jesus could well be saying that, ‘with my Father, there are many such staging-inns, I am going away to make it possible for you to use them all, to pass from one to another until you reach the “dwelling place” where I am, the Father’s heart.’ (7-8)

However, Teresa writes, “You mustn’t think of these dwelling places in such a way that each one would follow in file after the other; but turn your eyes toward the center, which is the room or royal chamber where the King stays, and think of how a pal-met-to has many leaves surrounding and covering the tasty part that can be eaten. So here, surrounding this center room are many other rooms; ...” (IC I:2:8)

Perhaps an artichoke is similar in structure to the palmetto that Teresa mentions. It might be a helpful image. I think her point is that the rooms are more complex than a linear progression. But although God dwells at the centre, Ruth reminds us that “ It can never be said too often that God is always present, always bestowing himself in the measure that he can be received.” (11) So it’s not that the outer rooms are beyond God’s reach. God is always present, always bestowing love. What is distinctive about each of the dwelling places is our growing capacity to receive that love.

 

The Soul – a for-Godness – being human

Despite Teresa dualistic language about body and soul, Ruth tells us, “What we have to do is see what Teresa is really saying about the soul. She is saying that it is for God; it is a capacity for God; he is its centre and all its beauty is because of him. This soul, this castle of immeasurable beauty and capacity is ourselves.” (6)

“Man, to use the classical expression, is a capacity for God. Unlike every other form of life that we know of, he does not come into the world ready made. ... he comes into existence insofar as he consents to be what he is, a ‘for-Godness’.” (7)

 “[God] calls into existence what is not and calls into fuller existence what is. ... Only [humans have] the power to respond to God, consciously to answer the call. The ability to hear the call and to answer it, is what makes [us human].” (9)

Ruth re-iterates this point over and over. It is the ruling insight that runs through all her writings. “God offers himself in total love to each one of us. Our part is to open our hearts to receive the gift.”

Again, “This divine call is what constitutes man.” (10) and “This is what makes us human beings.” (11)

Despite the beauty and complexity of other parts of creation, humans are the only part of God’s creation that have the capacity to participate with God in the making of ourselves.

 

Diagram

I’ve tried to represent in a diagram what Ruth and Teresa are saying about this capacity and our participation in becoming human.

Although I have shown a movement outward from the self, and the Castle has a movement inward to God it is essentially the same movement – a growth away for the self toward God.

This is the spiritual journey – a growth in the capacity to receive God – this is becoming like Jesus – so fully human he was divine. This is what being human means.

 

Part Two

We’re now going to look at what is distinctive about each of the seven mansions and get to the key contribution Ruth Burrows’ makes in understanding Teresa’s writings – especially in the later mansions.

Teresa starts with the outer courtyard – before even entering the castle and tells us, “Those in the courtyard are so accustomed to being involved in external matters that they cannot enter within themselves. She writes, Insofar as I can understand, the door of entry to this castle is prayer and reflection.” (IC:I:1:7) Prayer and reflection is how we turn to an inner life. However, we enter the first rooms letting in some reptiles, bringing with us all the external matters that fill our lives and hearts, worldliness, and self-interest.

In these first rooms – the rooms of self-knowledge, “We have to be honest with ourselves and often accept to bite the dust, but the best way to acquire self-knowledge is not by endless poking into ourselves, trying to turn over this stone then that to see what reptiles lurk beneath, but by looking constantly at Jesus Christ our Lord.” (19) Teresa says, “we shall never completely know ourselves if we don’t strive to know God.” (IC:I:2:9) For Teresa, knowing ourselves, or self-knowledge, is synonymous with humility. And humility is truth. The truth of who we are in relation to God. She writes, “For humility, like the bee making honey in the beehive, is always at work. Without it, everything goes wrong. But let’s remember that the bee doesn’t fail to leave the beehive and fly about gathering nectar from the flowers.” She urges the soul to fly to ponder God. “Here it will discover its lowliness [its truth] better than by thinking of itself, and be free from the vermin that enter the first rooms, those of self-knowledge.” (IC:I:2:8)

In the second rooms, Ruth writes, “Though still very weak, the resolution [to give themselves to God] is there and it is earnestness which distinguishes this mansion from the previous one. ... Imperceptibly, they have become more faithful as the years have passed, more charitable, more truthful, more reliable. What they would call ‘saying their prayers’ has become a much deeper reality, ...” (20)

“We must resolve to seek God and not ourselves. It is this that makes perseverance really hard ...  unless we make up our minds from the start to embrace the cross we shall never get anywhere. “(25) Teresa tells us, “These rooms require much more effort than do the first, ...” (IC:2:1:2)

The third rooms can be a false goal. Ruth writes, “It is because this state seems so good and exemplary, that it is a stumbling block to true holiness. Too often this third mansion in real life is taken to be the summit of the spiritual life: it tends to satisfy us and those around us yet it is far from what Christianity is all about. ...” Ruth explains the internal dynamics at work at in these rooms. “We reduce God to our own likeness,  ... we feel he hates our ugliness. Therefore we can’t afford to be ugly, we have to hide it from ourselves and so we bury it all deep down; we bury the gnawing doubts and fears, and manage to achieve a state of relative self-satisfaction. Our seemingly excellent behaviour gives support to this self-satisfaction. It is of enormous consequence to us that we behave well, that our thoughts, desires, actions are those of a ‘spiritual person’. Tremendous inner energies are at work to produce this ‘perfection’ which has in fact nothing to do with real growth.

What has happened is that the roots of our basic selfishness have been left untouched. This selfishness takes ever more subtle forms which ... do not cause the humiliation and shame of grosser manifestations. This is the danger Teresa is alive to.” (28-29)

Fear of the Lord is a topic Teresa addresses in these mansions, and Ruth writes, “Fear of the Lord means we have a keen realisation that only his judgements matter.” (29) Teresa is writing to her nuns who have “left the world” but only externally – they can still be attached to wealth and honour, other people’s esteem of them – subtle forms of attachment to self. Teresa writes in the Way of Perfection, “Humility and detachment from self are two sister who cannot be separated.” (WP X)

Like the rich man in the gospel, attached to his riches, it IS possible to turn back at this stage.

 

The fourth rooms – beginning of direct encounter with God

This encounter is referred to in various ways but they all means the same thing – supernatural prayer, infused contemplation, mystical contemplation. Here, Teresa  says, we ‘begin to touch the supernatural’. (IC 4:1:1) It is here too that we come to Ruth’s new insights into Teresa’s writing. In chapter four Ruth writes again about her personal struggle to make sense of the mystical tradition in the way it was classically presented, and to relate it to real life. She writes, “My conviction is that anything that can be described, given an account of, simply cannot be the mystical encounter itself. ... the mystical encounter is precisely a direct encounter with God himself. ... earlier forms of prayer are ‘indirect’: God speaking, communicating, etc. through ‘natural’ channels, in the ‘ordinary’ way.” (37-38)

Ordinary ways are through the senses, by means of good conversations, sermons, books, good thoughts and feelings, sickness, trials and other events of life. (21) These are all indirect contact.

However, infused or mystical contemplation is God in direct contact; “... When we insist that this encounter with God himself, must, of its nature, bypass, or transcend our material faculties we are saying that it must be ‘secret’ – John of the Cross insists on this – ‘from the intellect that receives it.’ (37-38) He says this encounter must be secret from the intellect that receives it – secret, hidden, received, not earned. “If we strip to the bone what both Teresa and John have to say of the gift, [of infused contemplation] we find; it is pure gift, something we can never achieve for ourselves ...! ... It is something entirely new. It is not a deepening of what has gone before, an increasing expertise, not a continuation, but a break... It is, as already said, a direct encounter with God. It purifies and transforms.” (42)

Ruth asks, “Do we not see that this is just what the new Testament is telling us of the Father’s promise: the ‘kingdom of God’ in the synoptics, ‘eternal life’ in John, living with the life of Christ is Paul.” (43)

“Is not the whole theme of the gospel of John that of something, wholly new breaking into the world of men, something divine, something from, heaven, a direct encounter with God such as has not been before, and which man, of himself, can never attain or dream of? (44)

What point is Ruth making here? I think she is saying, do we not see that this direct encounter with God is what ALL Christians are called to? And yet, in the tradition of the Church, ‘mystics,’ are set apart as extraordinary, uncommon, different from the rest of us.

 

Four different experiences of union with God

The Interior Castle is Teresa’s  spiritual masterpiece – four of the seven mansions report intimate experiences of God’s presence. She presents the goal of the spiritual life as union with God in the seventh mansion. To be so transformed into his own image and likeness so as to allow such a union.

What about Therese of Lisieux? Did she reach union with God, in her lifetime? She never reported visions or ecstasies.

Or Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, (Edith Stein)? She wrote almost nothing about her personal experience of prayer. Although others testify that she spent long hours completely absorbed in prayer.

Or Saint Teresa of Calcutta? Many people were shocked to discover in her diaries that she lived in darkness for much of her life.

They are all canonized saints, which in my understanding means the Church has declared that we know that they have reached union with God after their death, BECAUSE of the life they lived which revealed that they had reached union with God in this life. Teresa was the only one to speak of such mystical experiences. So, what does this tell us about union with God?

Ruth Burrows introduces the concept of ‘light on’ to explain what was different about Teresa. She has previous written about this is Guidelines for Mystical Prayer. She writes here, “The ‘light on’ experience is not the mystical grace itself, it reveals it. What it does is precisely to illuminate the mystical happening which, of itself, is secret. ... In Teresa’s case, its function seems to have been to reveal her own soul to herself, enabling her to see God’s action in her. What we have to grasp is that this gift, puts a person in a class apart – their experience is fundamentally different from ours. It is a very rare gift and all of us do well to take  from granted we are ‘light off’ no matter how great our psychic perception and consequent ‘spiritual favours’.”  (48 & 49) Ruth emphasises that “Unless we accept the reality of this mysterious phenomenon operating in Teresa, we cannot understand her writing.” (49) “The confusion of the human psyche with the theological, biblical concept of soul or spirit is common, and is the source of our misunderstandings [of spiritual experiences – of what is a divine act and what is a human act.]” (46) “It is possible to have most lofty ‘spiritual experiences’, and yet be a mere embryo when it comes to capacity for God.” (47) “[Spiritual experiences] never proves the divine touch; it is when we think they do that all sorts of illusions and dangers follow.” (52)

 

Signs of growth on the spiritual journey

So how can we, light-off people, understand these experiences, if they are present, in ourselves or others, and perceive our own growth on the spiritual journey?

Teresa says, right back in the third mansion, “If these favors are from God they come brimming over with love and fortitude by which you can journey with less labor and grow in the practice of works and virtues.” (IC 3:2:11)

In the fourth mansion she writes, “In sum, there is an improvement in all the virtues. [The soul] will continue to grow if it doesn’t turn back now to offending God ... It must persevere ...  for in this perseverance lies all our good.” (IC 4:3:9)

In the fifth, Teresa introduced the image of the silkworm, the death of the self in the cocoon of God’s love. It is no longer possible to turn back – an irrevocable choice of self-surrender is made. Ruth says, “What Teresa calls the ‘prayer of union’ is the moment of definitive decision.” (81) Within such lofty experiences, Teresa tells us what is important, “... works are what the Lord wants! ... if we fail to love our neighbor we are lost.” (IC 5:3:11 & 12)

In the sixth, a transitory union is experienced which can be compared to bringing together two candle flames. Momentarily the two are one, wax, wick, flame. But they can be separated. (113)

To receive such experiences, Teresa says, “I tell you there is need for more courage than you think.” It leaves in the soul  “little esteem of earthly things save those that can be used for the service of so great a God.”(IC 6:5:10) Elsewhere she writes about courage. To have courage for whatever comes in life – everything lies in that.” To have courage for whatever comes in the spiritual life – whatever experiences or lack of experiences, whatever insights we may have into our own growth or whatever lack of insights. Ruth insists, “If we have faith, surely we know that God gives himself without measure and we can't attempt to gauge the depth of the giving by our totally inadequate plumb lines of sense (what we feel).” (41)

 

The seventh mansions represent union with God – a mutual and permanent abiding

Ruth writes in summary, “By choosing to open ourselves to God, to obey the summons to life more abundant, uncoiling from our self-centred embryonic state, we become what we are, what we are meant to be, ‘He destined us in love to be his sons through Jesus Christ (Eph 1:5)... to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God’ (Eph 3:19). God infallibly gives himself to the wanting openness and in this gift we become ourselves. ...  Only when we are God-filled are we truly human.” (112)

“It is no longer a question of a passing contact with the king dwelling in the centre; this is a mutual and permanent abiding, Lover in the beloved. There can be such an abiding only when the full potentiality of the creature has been realised, by God communicating himself to it and the creature responding in love and surrender. Thus the inmost room is nothing but the full growth of the creature. This mansion is no staging inn but the end of the long journey; it is home. ‘I will come again and take you to myself so that where I am you may be with me.’ (John 14:3)” (112-113)

“This is the mystery: man is that being who only becomes himself when he has surrendered totally to God; only when he is lost to himself is he fully there.” (115) Re-visiting the earlier diagram, we can see that mystical union with God is what ALL Christians are called to. It’s what it means to be fully human.

To review the journey, proposed by Teresa and explored by Ruth, let’s return to the diagram.

The spiritual life is a process of becoming human, consenting to be what we are, a ‘for-Godness. Moving from having almost no capacity to receive God to a full capacity – fully human. Ruth says, the seventh mansion is Jesus, he living is us and we in him, the perfection of marriage. (110)

We began this session with a prayer that God uses it to open our hearts more fully to receive the gift of God’s love, to participate in the making of ourselves. Perhaps we could take a moment to notice what has happened within us during this presentation.