The Spiritual Canticle of St John of the Cross STANZA 28

 

The Spiritual Canticle of St John of the Cross

Carmelite Conversations

Philip Harvey

Wednesday the 7^th of December 2022

STANZA 28

 Mi alma se ha empleado

y todo mi caudal en su servicio;

ya no guardo ganado,

ni ya tengo otro oficio,

que ya solo en amar es mi ejercicio.

 

Now I occupy my soul

and all that I possess in serving him;

I no longer tend the flock,

nor have I any other work

now that I practise love, and that alone.

(Venard xxii)

 The second half of this long poem moves away from the various struggles and trials of the soul finding its way with God, and moves into more and more complete relationship with God, who is the God of Love. Each verse, whether spoken by lover or beloved, more steadily affirms the centrality of relationship with the Beloved, i.e. the source of our thoughts, words, and actions in love. In his commentary, John of the Cross says of the lover, the soul, “she is therefore not seeking her own proper satisfaction, nor the gratification of her own inclinations, neither does she occupy herself in anything whatever which is alien to God; yea, even her communion with God Himself is nothing else but acts of love, inasmuch as she has changed her former mode of conversing with Him into loving. “ (Lewis 218) We are told this devotion involves the soul in “all its faculties, understanding, will, and memory to his service.” In this same process, we notice the letting go of anything that impedes and distracts from this completeness. In this stanza, those distractions are called ‘the flock”, in Spanish ‘ganado’ which doesn’t just mean flock but also a swarm or mass of people in turmoil. John identifies these as the appetites and “other work”, or “unprofitable occupations”. John explains that amongst these are the following: “To these habits belong that of speaking, thinking, and the doing of things that are useless; and likewise, the not making use of these things according to the requirements of the soul’s perfection; other desires also the soul may have, wherewith it ministers to the desires of others, to which may be referred display, compliments, flattery, human respect, aiming at being well thought of, and the giving pleasure to people, and other useless actions, by which it laboured to content them, wasting its efforts herein, and finally all its strength. All this is over, says the soul here, for all its words, thoughts, and works are directed to God, and, conversant with Him, freed from their previous imperfections.” (Lewis 220-221) Lewis in his 1909 translation translates “que ya solo en amar es mi ejercicio” simply as “My sole occupation is love.”   

 I find this verse useful in stating the condition that any of us can find ourselves in who “practise love, and that alone.” For this is really, in all its simplicity, the single main import of the poem, as it is of Jesus’s words to love one another as I have loved you. Surrounding this poem is not just John’s spiritual commentary but also generations of later commentaries, many of which are captive to a language of beatific visions, rapturous unions, and other stunning human experiences that sometimes succeed in making his message sound impossibly otherworldly and not for the likes of mere mortals like ourselves. Western art has not helped us here with images of saints staring soulfully upward in some kind of personal mind blow. The word ‘perfection’ could do with a better alternative, given that today we are warned against perfectionism, so have doubts about becoming perfect anyway, even though the false image of perfectionism in our modern terminology is precisely what John is warning us against. Stanza 28 disabuses us of these misconceptions, fortunately. It comes at that time in anyone’s life where we discover, rather than just being told, love is the first cause of being, not something else; that time where we discover, that this is what is meant by serving him. John Venard writes that “a state of continual, uninterrupted prayer” means “it is not intermittent, as before; now it is habitual, uninterrupted … an habitual and loving attentiveness to the will of God.” (Venard 198-199) I find this very helpful because he is saying that prayer is the most integral part of our being. Far from being separated out from the rest of our experience, prayer and relationship with the God of Love can and will inform everything we do. And in a world today that is overwhelmed with distractions and things that are, in truth, useless, being able to learn through prayer to pay attention to what matters is a gift that John in his Canticle is offering freely. We still live in the world, with ourselves and others, yet everything changes and gets better through this practice of love.