The Living Flame of Love by St. John of the Cross - Introduction and Prologue: CarmelCast Episode 50

[Music] thank you praise be Jesus Christ and welcome to a new season of carmelcast carmelcast is a production of The Institute of Carmelite studies Publications or ICS Publications and you can visit our website at www.icspublications.org so my name is Father Pierre Giorgio of Christ the King and I'm joined here today by Brother John Mary of Jesus crucified and this season on carmelcast we're going to be talking about St John of the cross in particular a book written by Saint John the cross called The Living flame of love and right now as a way to do this sort of book study on the living flame of Love we've recently released a new study edition of this work and you can find it at our website again icspublications.org but don't worry if you don't have the book yet because we're not actually going to dive into the into the the first part of the book really until next week we're going to be talking a little bit about the introductory material and the prologue today but you should be fine if at the end of this episode you just go to our website order that book and you'll have it just in time for next week to begin reading with the first stanza of the poem today we're really talking about St John the cross this whole season talking about St John the cross and we're actually going to be reading a book by Saint John the cross and this might give some people some anxiety because they've heard things about Saint John of the Cross and perhaps be a little intimidated by him and so why should we read John lacrosse and and what can you say what can we say to put people's minds at ease about undertaking this book study yeah I think a lot of people when they think of St John of the cross I think about the Dark Knight of the Soul that's like the first image that comes to their mind or his great asceticism and these are things that can really scare people um maybe cause people hesitancy about the idea of reading John of the Cross or perhaps some people have tried to read John of the cross in the past and I've kind of experienced it as this um yeah just a great difficulty in understanding his language and his his imagery and so my word to those people would just be you're in the exact right place because um many carmelites that I know would say that the living flame of Love is the the first book that you should read and in terms in terms of titles too it's it's probably the least intimidating right and and the length too right so some of John's works are rather long this book I think it's about the in in the original the complete works it's less than 80 Pages the study edition's a little bit longer but so it's very manageable for someone to kind of first dive into the the writings of Saint John of the Cross yeah and I think in comparison to something like the ascent of Mount Carmel or The Dark Knight even the title of the living flame has a more of an attraction to us yes what many people who may know more about the writings of St John lacrosse might say then is well why are you why are we doing for your first book study of Saint John the cross why why started the living Flynn because isn't that at the culmination of the spiritual life isn't that where John's speaking of the heights of mystical Union with God and the fruits of that and so what might we say to that person who has that sort of a question about the title yeah it's a good question because that's that really is what the living flame of love is about it's about this Soul that's perfectly United to God in this life and so it might seem kind of counter-intuitive like why would we start there um at the beginning why wouldn't we start at the beginning why would we start at the end and really I think there are several reasons for that I think the most important reason for me is that the the view from the summit can help us make sense of the journey that we have to follow um a great image of this I think is I don't know do you remember when we lived in Oregon we went to Smith uh Smith Smith Rock it's my yeah my favorite places say something about this this state park what is it like well so I I had visited it uh when we were living in Oregon and it's it's just it's on the Arid side of the Cascades so it's it's a high desert sort of environment and you are looking at coming down from we lived on the temperate side of the of the Cascade so we you Crest the The Divide of of the mountain range and you come into a high desert you have these giant volcanoes behind you and uh pretty much it's it sort of flattens out ahead of you but then at Smith Rock there's these formations that were caused by erosion of a river and this River has created these beautiful rock formations that Tower above you and it's a it's a rock climbing sort of Mecca for for many American rock climbers yes and it like the way I describe it it kind of looks like the moon like that's what I would imagine like the moon to look like it's like this just this dry kind of rock formations everywhere and we went there once and a bunch of the brothers went for a hike but I went out for a run on my own and it was you know getting out like towards the middle of the day starting to get pretty hot I had brought a water bottle with me but I'd run out of water and I realized at one point that I was lost and I like for a second it flashed in my mind like I'm gonna die out here in this desert because I have no idea where I am or how to get back to where I need to go and I wasn't even sure if I was on a path anymore because the path it was hard to differentiate the path from the rest of the desert so I looked around I found the highest point and I went up to the highest point and from there I had a good sense of the land I could see the pathways uh I could see which direction I needed to go yeah and so I think that's just a good image for us in the spiritual life of so often when we're in the midst of it um the the the obstacles around us just seem insurmountable we're not sure which direction to go we're not even sure if we're on the right path let alone any path at all and yet if we can get the view from the height from the summit then it helps us to see the way to go and I think I think St John the cross even when he's writing the commentary on the living flame and we'll get in the distinction between the commentary and the poem itself but the when he's writing the commentary he even has in mind um the path that we've just tread and and so even from his his authorial perspective he's thinking of he's thinking of the entire uh the entire uh spiritual life from beginning to end and and father Kieran in some of the study guides that we'll be reading throughout this this book study even goes into where in some of the stanzas of the poem um John is is looking back or he's looking forward to the future too so there's these different sort of Dimensions In The Narrative of the text and so you you do you have this whole sense of the spiritual life even though uh he's speaking one of the major themes he's speaking of is the the culmination of the mystical life which is Union with God right yeah and then I connected to that point another reason I think is um it's wrong for us to think that because we're not there at the summit that we that what the the realities that John's talking about don't relate to us in a real way here and now the way that the spiritual life works is that through faith we already possess what is the same reality of Union with God that's possessed at the summit it's just that we don't ex we don't yet experience it in its fullness we don't yet possess it in its fullness but we do in a very real way here and now and so um all the things that John's talking about for this Soul are can be applied to our own spiritual lives if not in a one-to-one way but at least in a close way such that that it can be something to guide us on the path yeah St John the cross had a very temistic framework that he was working with and one of the important aspects of atomism as sort of a way of thinking and epistemology you could call it is this idea of the analogy of being and so all of creation is uh is has a participation in in the highest form of of being which is God and so we can apply this this sort of framework to the spiritual life in the sense of even at the heights of mystical experience even even in the fullness of of Union with God even partial Union with God or or a step along the way towards Union with God has some of the same terrain it has it's analogous to the to the highest yes portion of it I guess you could say and so if we look at the fullness at the highest point uh it's not it's not dissimilar to what a beginner might be experiencing at that level you know in in in proportion to to their Union with God in a sense and so that's an important way to to think about this book as well that there's there's no there's no um there's nothing lacking um there's nothing foreign from beginning to end it's it's all the same it's all the same Journey yes and so this is going to have similar characteristics throughout yes exactly yeah and then one last thing that I would add to that of why why we should read the living flame of Love Is that I think seeing this Soul that's perfectly United to God uh can help to encourage us on our own path at times in the midst of our struggles in the spiritual life our frustrations sometimes we feel like we're running into a wall and not getting anywhere sometimes we need to be reminded of what it is the goal that we're striving for And So reading about this can really help to encourage us along the way yeah good so um is there anything is there anything else you wanted to we should maybe add to this why we should be reading this one last thing and maybe this should have been the first thing we should have mentioned but John of the Cross was writing this work for a lay woman okay yeah um and he was writing this for a lay woman who in from what we know about her we don't know a lot but it seems that she hadn't yet reached this stage of the spiritual life she hadn't yet reached the heights of the spiritual life so John isn't just writing about about a soul for uh who's who's reached Perfection for us for people who are already experiencing it instead he's writing for people like us who aren't there yet for all these purposes to help us to encourage us right and I think that can be very important it's not just written for religious it's not just written for priests it's not just written for Saints it's written for those of us who are striving so this is a good transition to talk about the differences between the poem and the commentary and this is a common sort of characteristic of Saint John the cross's writings usually he has written a poem and he shared this poem with various people and then various people ask him to explain what he's written in his poem and so in this sense John has written the poem The Living flame um as an expression of his own experience so there's a testimonial aspect to it and then uh Dona Ana de penulosa she gets a hold of this poem and she asks John can you explain this to me she's heard from other people that he's he's done these long commentaries for other people and so she wants she's she's a very um uh love St John the cross very a devotee of him um is is a great benefactorist to the to the caramels that he's he uh lives in at various points throughout his his uh life as a friar and so she asks him well maybe he'll write me a commentary about this poem that I really like and so this is a just a distinction between um how this was written the poem was written first and then the commentary was written a couple of years later right yeah and and I think that it can be helpful to remember that the poem is um it's so closely linked to the spiritual experience um it's not it's an expression I think that's what you said it's an expression of a spiritual experience so I think it's not just describing about something but it's actually like experiencing it it's the poem is the experience of this spiritual experience that John John is trying to convey to us and so if we take that even one step further um one thing that's interesting I I thought a lot about the idea of um we call John's prose here A Commentary but a common commentary is not the Spanish word that's used it's in Spanish it's declaration or a declaration and so I looked up like what does that word mean in Spanish and it means to like Express what is hidden in something and so John is not so much writing a commentary on his poem as he's revealing uh what is hidden behind or in the words of the poem about the spiritual experience he's expounding further on the Mysteries that are contained there so I think it's helpful for me to to realize it's not like we're getting further and further away from some experience that he's just describing in the past but John's Hope is that in reading the poem in some sense we're experiencing this Union with God or we're growing in this Union with God through the expression of the poem and also with a commentary they're not they're not so far separated from one another there's an interesting sort of um literary distinction I guess you could make in terms of what is poetic writing and um you know some literary theorists will say that well a poem expresses what in prose is ineffable um and so there's there's a there's a there's a literary sort of character to the writing that allows it to um to take on a meaning that is is not explicated through sentences yes um and so there's there's a deepness there's a richness to it little little uh word selections this over that are very intentional because they make carry specific meanings beyond the dictionary meaning I guess you could say that there might be a contextual sense that's going on in this word um there may be uh something with the meter of the poem or the the Timbre of the poem that allows it to take on the characteristics characteristic of maybe in this case uh love and so um or or something that is that is very um Divine in nature and so this poetry is is a is a means is a mode of being able to express these sort of feelings these senses these these movements of the soul in writing and and I would even say that in the the commentary the prose section that John is very much he's right on the line of almost reaching that same that same sort of poetry there's times in his writing where he just kind of um goes off into this sort of ecstatic sort of writing and one thing that that I mean it's incredible John it said that John wrote this work in 15 days um over a span of 15 days when he was very busy we had many other tasks uh at the time when he was living in the monastery and yet he wrote this in such a short time and so it shows that there's there is something this is not just him sitting down in like an intellectual um sort of yeah cold sort of way and writing about a past experience that he once had in his experience of writing the the commentary he's again putting himself in in into that experience and writing from that place so that we too in reading it experience it in some way right just to speak a little bit more about the context of of when John is writing this he's writing it um when he while he's uh prior in Granada uh and so maybe just speak a little bit about that those sort of circumstances you had mentioned that he was he was writing at a time where he's very busy but also something about about Granada we got to have the opportunity to visit Grana last summer and it's it's a very beautiful city yeah um and so there's there's even aspects of of that that might come into to how John is expressing himself as well yeah and we have to spend there in Granada you know a good amount of time Outdoors just walking around and seeing the scenery and and the beauty of the nature there too and I think that's something in particular that I could reflect on of like how it was that this environment influenced John of the cross because he really is he's a romantic poet and um he he's writing from a place of of experience primarily and so I think that the whole context of his time period his environment um just his Spanish culture like comes forth in this in this work to speak a little bit about his um his busyness then at this time so not only is he prior of of the monastery uh commodoros materials in Granada and he's trying to get that off the ground he's building aqueducts to bring water to the place because there was no water where they were uh that was a little bit before probably when he wrote this but uh simultaneously he's also trying to help the nuns get off the ground so it's like he's he's trying to essentially found two monasteries of this period in his life and he also had a you know a good number of spiritual directees and he would have been involved yeah and many he would have many responsibilities and so it wasn't like this was just a time where he had 15 days straight to just sit and write and no other responsibilities because the account that we have of him mentions that he wrote this in 15 days amidst many other responsibilities that he had and so this says a lot to us I think because we might have the wrong idea that um the spiritual life or a life of prayer is therefore one one that is withdrawn from responsibilities or withdrawn completely withdrawn from the your daily life and and sort of what's going on in the world um and and this is sort of a testimony that no if if we are truly embracing the spiritual life if we are truly uh seeking Union with God then that comes with us he comes with us wherever we go in that sense and and so we're bringing God to the world when we are participating in a life of prayer we have to make time for that obviously but it doesn't mean that once you're there that you're just going to go up to your mountain in solitude for the rest of your life right yeah John was not removed from the world in this especially not during this time and that's something actually we can get to a little bit in the prologue too because he mentions some of what is happening with him interiorly as he's writing this work I was wondering though if you could say something about John and how he's known in his like his poetry is is known John John the poet yeah so um it's a really interesting like so sort of tidbit about him he was declared the patron of Spanish poets by the what's essentially the the Spanish Academy I don't know if that's actually what it's called but it's the basically the the linguistic the literary sort of Academy of Spain he was considered to be uh among the greatest Spanish poets who ever lived uh he's considered to be um probably the representative of of What's called the sigla De Oro the uh the Spanish Golden Age so the 16th century where Cervantes is writing and of course Saint Teresa as well and so all of these this is when Velasquez is painting this is when um this is when El Greco is painting So a great literary and artistic period in in Spanish history and and John Saint John the cross is seen as a representative of that age so among all those those brilliant artists and and and and literary uh writers uh he's he's considered to be a representative of that entire golden age of Spain it's interesting we you when we when we sell our books at ICS Publications the collective works of John lacrosse are actually often purchased by universities for secular universities for your Spanish language classes and so when you take a class in the literature of Spain in the 16th century these professors want you to read Saint John of the Cross so he's someone whose poetry is not just read by carmelites or by people seeking a spiritual life or reading Catholic Books but even he's considered to be a great poet on in the secular world as well and in terms of from that perspective I guess you could say yeah and and you were speaking earlier about kind of the tone and the meter and all of that of John's poetry and I was speaking how this is really an expression of an experience that John is having um the living flame of Love specifically and I think that it can be hard for us to see that sometimes in our translations so write John's writing in Spanish and we have most of us just read English and so that's what we're reading and so I was thinking it would be helpful we're going to have one of our Spanish Friars recite uh the living flame of love for us in Spanish that way all of you can hear the poem in in the way that it's it's meant to be portrayed and you can hear some more of the lyrical elements that are are lost in translation of English encuento Oklahoma so in hearing the Spanish we can hear some of the even the rhyme scheme that comes through this and this is an ABC ABC each stanza runs six lines and so you have an ABC ABC form so for instance Viva rhymes with eskiva herees rhymes with rhymes with encuentro so you could you can you can pick up that rhyme scheme in the Spanish which that's almost impossible to replicate in English unless you're very talented yeah exactly and and and yeah so a lot of this a lot of the feel of the poem is lost in our English translation but one thing I would say is that the English translation in the Study Edition the um the Study Edition by father Kieran Kavanaugh is I think a very good translation um again when you translate poetry you're going to be losing some things I think father Kieran this translation though it does a great job of keeping the the meaning a more literal meaning right but in doing so it sacrifices some more of the feel and so actually one thing when I was studying a lot the difference between the English and Spanish I realized that at times we reading the English translation might have a better understanding of what John of the Cross meant than a Spanish speaker today would have reading the Spanish and the reason why is because over those 500 years a lot of the Spanish words have changed meaning and so an ink Spanish speaker today would read them as though they mean the same things today when really we have a translator who's gone through looked at what did those words mean in the context of John of the Cross and translated them as such in the English right so it's actually it can give us a benefit so whereas meaning is lost in Spanish from the 16th century the 21st century well a 21st century translator is translating both across languages and across centuries yes and you know there's different strategies too to uh as a way to to um to translate poetry and so you'll even see in in Father kieran's translation things like an enjamment where the the next line actually he moves it to the line proceeding in order to maintain some of the meter in it so it's it's one of those things you can't have everything in a translation but you can do a lot and and and gain a lot from it and so and it's it's it's the best we have in a sense as well yeah outside of being a 16th century Spaniard exactly yes good so um why don't we Jump Right In into the prologue then so the prologue uh is sort of the the first thing that that Saint John of the Cross is writing as an introduction before he even gets to the stanzas uh so remember he's already written the poem these four stanzas and uh and now he is introducing the commentary with a prologue yeah one thing that sticks out to me is often when I'm reading a work I just kind of skip over the prologue or just you know read it very quickly and this this prologue is so short I mean it's we have four paragraph numbers here and I think it's so rich though and there's so much to be gleaned um about John lacrosse but also for our own spiritual lives um from this prologue and so even from like the very beginning we John writes I have felt somewhat reluctant so he's he's saying he felt reluctant to even write this work to begin with why because this is speaking about something that's so intimate to the depth of his soul that the idea of sharing it is very difficult for him so it's not he's not saying he's writing about the heights of the spiritual life and that's why because it's hard to explain he's right no it's something that's so close to me that revealing it seems to take away from the Beauty and intimacy of it and so there's this great uh humility with which John's even approaching this topic in in his reluctance to share and yet because he's being asked so here it says he's he's responding to this very Noble and devout lady he's responding to Dona Anna who's asked him to comment on this out of his love for her and out of his pastoral care for her he is willing to share something that's even so intimate to his heart yeah and so this would have been difficult for him just in the sense of of sharing his testimony sharing the inmost steps to his of his soul knowing that the person who is going to be reading this is a lay woman yes which may have may have raised some alarms in his own heart with respect to uh whether that was proper for a religious prior to do yes yeah that's an interesting point as well it is it's I think it can be again it's helpful for us though to realize that um our we're not so different from Dona Ana as well and so John is speaking to us as well in this text not just to her in a historical sense but to our own experience and then he starts to speak of of how he had to wait for a particular moment in his in his own life to be able to to write this he speaks about he says I have deferred this commentary until now a period in which the Lord seems to have uncovered some knowledge and bestowed some fervor so so even it speaking of of sort of the uh the manifold aspects of the spirit virtual life and the UPS they come with ups and downs that come with um the US dealing with our sensible nature are our fallen nature and distractions as they come and go so even even for Saint John of the cross the mystical doctor he can't even really get his headspace into this into writing a commentary about this poem um until until he's able to become somewhat more recollected so it speaks a little bit about um kind of the the variation in the spiritual life even even when someone has uh achieved what is we would expect to be Union with God as it is accessible in this world yes yeah and actually one of the two letters that we have two letters that John wrote to Dona Ana and one of them he expresses this dryness that he's experiencing inwardly in his soul um it's actually it's a beautiful letter he's talking about the dryness of the desert exteriorly and also his interior experience experience and this is a letter he wrote um towards the very end of his life and so we see that the I think yeah we have this misconception that those who have reached the heights of the spiritual life they're in into your spirit experience their experience of prayer is somehow so different from our own but we see once again that like John's experience even at the heights of the spiritual life he still experiences times of dryness uh times of difficulty and so he's waiting to write this until he's at a place of interior peace and a place again it shows to me how closely connected this commentary is to the experience himself itself it's he's not writing it from a place far removed looking back on a past experience but it's something that is currently happening within his soul that he's commenting on he speaks in the prologue too about what there's going to be some of his AIDS along the way of trying to express himself and he mentions um of course the teaching of the church and uh the other arm of the church the sacred scripture so these two these two arms of Revelation that come to us both the teaching of the church and uh and the support of sacred scripture so throughout you're going to find him constantly citing secret scripture so it speaks to how much John knew of the Bible and how much he studied the Bible as well yes yeah I think throughout the living flame there's it's over I think it's over 200 explicit references to scripture um within the flame itself actually if you read there's a beautiful commentary in the Study Edition by father Kieran a beautiful introduction where he talks about John and and scripture and I forget the exact phrasing uses but it's he says that scripture arrogates the ground of John's spiritual life yeah it's scripture is like so much a part of who he is that he just like sees the world through this lens of scripture and that's why on every single page of the living flame you're going to find scriptural references it's the the kind of the foundation through which John understands everything in his life another interesting thing to me is the the reading right at the beginning of paragraph two here John writes there's no reason to Marvel at God's granting such Sublime and strange gifts to souls he decides to favor if we consider that he is God and that he bestows them as God with infinite love and goodness it does not seem unreasonable and it's interesting to me that the idea that these gifts even when we read about them here when we talk about them here in this work they almost seem like something too good for us it's too good for me and so we we Marvel at and we we almost we question like could this really be and what John is saying is that we don't need to question that because of who God is if you consider that he's God and that he bestows them as God with infinite love and goodness if we trust who God is then we can accept like no this is this is something that I'm called to is isn't just something that John lacrosse experienced 500 years ago but this is what God is calling me to live today right yeah and so it it's it's another Twist on uh what maybe some people misunderstand about humility and and thinking that that as a virtue is is something that says that I'm not good enough to receive Grace I'm not good enough to receive mystical Graces either um and so that's not that's not what's at play here because it has nothing to do with you because it's Grace it's a free gift it's full it's full gift it's it's the it's the Supernatural and so it's not it has no bearing on your nature it you have to cooperate with it in the sense of detaching yourself from inordinate affections and sin but there is um there's nothing that about you that is unable to receive this because it's all about what God is and that he's giving it to us right so to be truly humble would be to realize that I can't accept this but God can right and and and and and and he's he's calling me to that and and one comment I mean on the incredible Heights that John's talking about here it's really if if we even understood the realities that John's talking about here who just like below our minds completely and if you look in the third paragraph of this prologue John talks about perfection one can reach in this life transformation in God and that's a very interesting phrase because um in the Spanish it's it has a slightly different meaning maybe you could say a word on on uh preposition so like the phrase Spanish is transformazion in dios it's the same right transformation in God but that word in in English i n and Spanish en has a slightly different meaning maybe you can say something about like preposition you know more you know a lot about translation let's learn about prepositions in general right so prepositions are notoriously idiomatic from language to language and so what is what is the preposition in one language um I'll give you an example there's a preposition in German by and we might expect that it matches our preposition by but it doesn't they're completely different and it has to do with how words are formed and syntax over time the development of language remember that English is developing in a completely different world to Spanish and so the use of prepositions are developing differently and so what may be a preposition in one language looks like the same preposition another language but they have completely different meanings and so there's an example yes and in Spanish might look a lot like in in English but they have developed differently over time right so um in en spanish can have a broader meaning than our understanding of in English it can mean in or it could also mean into it can involve movement towards something and so just think about that in English transformation into God and that carries a very strong connotation and a connotation that kind of makes us like be like whoa what are you what are you saying here but if we read the rest of John's works that's not um contrary to what he says in other places he says we become God by participation it's very strong language yes we we always remain who we are we're not just like lost into this sea of God and and lose our individuality um we remain uh you remain father Pierre Giorgio um even when you're United to God but you through your participation through your acts through your your actions through your interior actions in particular your your will becomes the will of God your intellect becomes the intellect of God it's like such an incredible thing that we're called to the heights of this it shouldn't surprise us if we've read the gospel right exactly so yes this is something that is very present within within our Lord's teaching yes and as particular it comes comes out alive in in in John's gospel and there's a lot of linguistic sort of things going on there St John the Evangel this is you know that gospel so it really shouldn't I mean it does it like kind of shocks you to hear someone say these things but it it really it shouldn't surprise us based on what our Lord taught yeah so I just encourage people when they're reading when they see that phrase transformation in God like really think about what that means each time you read it like transformation into God what is it that I'm called to these it's these ain't just the incredible um the miraculous the the pure gift that we're called to in this relationship maybe one thing we could could end with is I think for me like kind of a central the central image really of the whole living flame of Love is this idea of fire and like a particularly a log um or wood that's been penetrated by fire John introduces that image here just in the beginning of the prologue even but it's one that'll come back to at different points throughout the commentary the central theme and it kind of even looking back it's the beginning of the spiritual life right we just have like the dead cold wet log that the fire of God's love begins to purify and dry and cleanse and all you know it's releasing all this nasty smoke and all of that and eventually it's transformed into fire such that there becomes uh from from our our view there's no difference between the fire and the log itself right because the the log is just totally consumed in the fire of God's love and that's the same thing that would happen to our soul this is the transformation into God that he's talking about that aspect particularly of like the log is no longer a log and if you you know know anything any chemistry that's that's something that probably is is uh you know and now it's in that discipline the fact that this this is no longer wood this is this is being consumed this is being transformed and it is it is becoming another substance yes and that's what yeah that's what we're called to in God that that kind of transformation good well with that like we said at the beginning of the episode if you have uh if you've enjoyed this episode make sure you pick up your copy of the living flame of Love Study Edition available to our website www.icspublications.org and you should be able to get that in time for next week where we'll dive start diving into the the commentary from the first stanza and so we look forward to sharing with you throughout the season throughout this Easter season uh the fruits of our reading and study of Saint John the cross and the living flame of love so thank you and God bless you [Music]

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Length: 38min 38sec (2318 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 26 2023