The
Spiritual Canticle of St John of the Cross
Carmelite
Conversations
Philip
Harvey
Wednesday
the 7th of December 2022
STANZA
6
Ay!,
quién podrá sanarme?
Acaba
de entragarte ya de vero;
No
quieras enviarme
De
hoy más ya mesajero
Que
no saben decirme lo que quiero.
Ah,
who will be able to heal me?
End
by wholly surrendering yourself!
Do
not send me any more messengers
they
cannot tell me what I wish to hear.
(Venard
xix)
The
opening stanzas of the Canticle enumerate the experiences of someone trying to
make sense of relationship with God, now that they have been ‘wounded’ with
love, calling out after the Beloved, i.e. God. We hear of how the soul, the
lover, encounters obstacles and challenges on the way. Signs of the Beloved are
everywhere, but where has he gone? The beauty he leaves in his wake draws the
soul forward in search. News that others give of him – “a thousand graceful
things” – only cause more longing and hurt due to absence. More questions than
answers keep arising. The lover declares total devotion and the need to be
close to the Beloved at all times. Because God is the source of Love, the lover
yearns to be there more and more. One writer summarises St. John’s thought in
this stanza thus: “The more that the soul knows God, the more it is consumed
with desire to see Him. And when it sees that there is nothing that can cure
its pain except the sight and the presence of its Beloved, it wants no other
remedy. It begs Him to make it fully enjoy His presence … Only the sight of Him
can satisfy the love it has for Him. It then beseeches Him to surrender Himself
to it fully in complete and perfect love: Surrender yourself completely!”
(Tonnelier 32)
My
personal response to this stanza comes from my own lifetime experience of
prayer. This is the way his poem works, as a guide to the life of prayer, but
also as an identifier of where anyone of us may be in the practice of prayer, which
is about relationship with God, at any time in our life. So even though I am no
expert in prayer, I can recognise what John is saying and make sense of it as real
and valid experience. I relate immediately, for example, to the plea for
healing. Although I don’t always think of going into prayer at the time as a
means to healing, my experience tells me that some sort of mending,
restitution, restoration of being happens through the simple process of
praying. To be healed of the longing for connection with God, the Beloved,
means praying more. It is God who heals, if and when we ask, and it can be as
simple as that. The desire to have complete access and surrender is a familiar
state for anyone who has been passionately in love. St. John knows this state,
which he ascribes to our need for increased access and surrender to God, using
the language of the Song of Songs. What we don’t want are any impediments, distractions,
or as he calls them ‘messengers’ that only get in the way of complete access to
our Beloved. Yet when it comes to God, we are still at the stage where we must discern
that all such distractions, no matter how marvellous and placed in our way for our
own improvement, are only signs and wonders of God, rather than true and
complete access. It is not surprising that the lover impatiently wants these
things out of the way at once. But who are these ‘messengers’? In his
commentary, the poet asks to “grant that I no longer know Thee in this
imperfect way by the messengers of knowledge and impressions, which are so
distant from that which my soul desires.” They are necessary but at the same
time “inadequate communications” that only serve to “increase the pain of Thy
absence” and “renew the wound which Thou hast inflicted by the knowledge of
Thee which they convey.” (Lewis 55) My sense is that the frustration expressed
here is with having all sorts of signs everywhere that remind us of God’s Love,
but they are only signs, reminders of what is truly possible, namely direct and
even complete engagement. The experience of desire for more of this kind of
relationship, this kind of love and all that it gives in turn, reciprocally, is
the driving force of the soul in this situation. But I think we can also read
the messengers to include the things of the world, pleasures, past-times, everything
that brings passing satisfaction, but not lasting happiness, let alone eternal
belonging. It is not so much a rejection of worldly things, as we call them, as
the awareness that worldly things don’t last. We learn to identify them in
their proper place. Our own desire meanwhile is for something greater, a desire
that yearns and continues on.
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