Carmelite spirituality as a path to a deeper experience of liturgy
Paul Menting
Guarding unity
Two people who have formed a friendship must make the effort to maintain that friendship. Just because a relationship is good doesn't mean it will remain good: a fire that has once been ignited does not burn on its own continually. One who loves cannot passively rest on the laurels of a deep experience of love without risking losing everything.
A loving relationship remains alive only when it is renewed and grows through constant further development. However, this growth is not like climbing stairs, step by step higher and higher. It is more like a small pond that eventually becomes an ocean, an ocean with high waves and deep troughs. True love excludes nothing but values and makes room for everything within it. Even painful experiences are not absent from it. Alongside beautiful experiences, they represent (the only) comprehensive reality of the relationship. After a beautiful moment of loving connection, an often difficult period of loss of immediate unity between us follows, and difficulties of any kind may arise. If love is alive, it will use the difficulties, i.e., the troughs between the waves, as preparation, we could say as a lead-up to the following high peak. Then, both the beautiful and the difficult moments of life are encompassed together in the ocean of one endless love.
The same goes for the mystical love between God and man. Mystics tell not only of their experience of unity with God and of peak moments with Him, but also of moments of God's "absence" and the feelings of abandonment associated with it. Generally, for mystics, the experience of unity with God is rare, primarily at the beginning of the spiritual journey. They often have to endure long periods of drought until God draws them back completely to Himself. No one can achieve a meeting with God on their own; they must wait until God grants Himself to them. Nevertheless, a person gradually learns to plunge even in times of stagnation – like between waves of emotions – into the abyss of divine love, which remains just as deep. John of St. Samson (1571–1636) expressed it this way:1
I will not cease to throw myself into you with the force and power of my infinite love, from depth to depth and from abyss to abyss, until I completely return to you and to your love and am swallowed up in it. For when I simply, exclusively, and in complete nakedness cling to you with the simple gaze that I will have from you in you, I will be entirely lost in you. Is it then surprising that I throw myself into love with all (my) might, to love you simply and nakedly – both within me and outside of myself, to have you in the same way, in the infinite insatiability of my loving desire? I will only be satisfied when I have you unmixed and wholly and when you pour into me with such fullness that you overflow to others in such great abundance that they too will be filled and satisfied with the excess of your excess. Sing bravely, brides of the Bridegroom, as to my...
And yet, my sweet life, I have not yet told you how I will repay you for that sweet and loving war that you wage against me in constant love. Behold, I will do this: if you rejoice in the fact that you come to me incessantly in deep love, then I too will go to you incessantly; and in the infinite strength of my love, which corresponds to yours, I will give you everything. And then we will constantly be banging on each other with very frequent and indeed infinitely frequent meetings, spirit to spirit, until one of us succumbs.
With everything he is and has, John of St. Samson wants to return to God's love. His love has already been touched by God's love, transformed into divine love, so he calls it his infinite love. John knows that God's love demands everything from him: his love must be directed plainly and without any hidden motives of subtle self-centeredness simply2 and exclusively to God. And John is capable of this because his own love has gained the same depth as God's love, and thus it no longer depends on the fluctuations of the tide going up and down, but fundamentally rests on (the only) self-forgetting inclination to give oneself. Such love is never exhausted and is immeasurably deep. Such love is divine and excludes every limited human way of love (especially self-centered love). For if a person were to retain even a bit of that "human" love and direct it towards themselves or another object, the depth would be shallow, the abyss would be filled with mud, and the power of the one love would be shattered into many small, weak shards of love.
However, this does not mean that another person or the very own self of the lover must fade away unnoticed in the background. One who loves only God will love another person – a neighbor – much more than one who loves God only among other things. For anyone who loves God Himself resembles an abyss, which, although immeasurably wide and deep, is filled with God's love in such abundance that everyone who comes into contact with it is likewise satisfied and filled from it. Thus, the love of one who loves God itself overflows onto their neighbor and their own self.
To love God Himself means, in nakedness and without pretense, to almost adhere to God and not fill oneself even for a moment with oneself or other things. In this way, a person moves God to come to them continuously and fill them. Meetings can then take place more frequently, even infinitely often. Human love that is completely transformed into divine love has the same power as divine love; passionately and fiercely, both of these loves drive towards each other, just as two strong magnets attract one another. There is then nothing that can stand in the way of the union of both.
Teresa of Avila (1515–1582) describes that a person who loves so much can no longer violate unity with God.3
“... he arranged love in me.” (Song of Songs 2:4 – according to the Vulgate.) Oh, these words that the soul should never forget, for the Lord has given them to her! Oh, sovereign grace; no one could deserve it if the Lord did not grant them the ability to do so. The soul is not yet awakened to love. How happy is the sleep, how happy the intoxication that makes the Bridegroom fulfill what the soul cannot: to arrange it so wondrously that love remains alive while all the powers of the soul are dead or asleep. Without the person being able to comprehend how love works, the Lord arranges it so that (love) works wondrously, that the soul essentially becomes one with the Lord of love, that is, with God. For nothing stands in her way – neither senses nor mental powers – understanding and memory – and – it goes without saying – nor will.
Whoever loves so much is like someone who sleeps or is drunk. Just as in sleep a person is no longer active themselves, but in their dream, passively arises what their waking daily consciousness has not yet processed, so it also happens to the lover: they surrender all their own activity and let God act and lead everything to the best. Just as drunkenness detaches a person from themselves and makes them forget themselves, so love liberates a person from the frantic tendency to arrange everything with a focus on their own self. And God receives the opportunity to arrange everything with a focus on Him. Teresa, in her Meditations on the Song of Songs, refers to the Latin translation of the Bible, which states: “He arranged love in me” (ordinavit in me caritatem) (Song of Songs 2:4). Drunk with love and carefree in love, a person lets go of the rudder and allows God to safeguard the unity in love. Human abilities are excluded, they cannot grasp what occurs within between God and the soul. And as long as a person allows everything to be arranged by God's hand, the unity in love remains untouched. At this stage, everything is in God's loving hands; He knows best how to handle and care for what is so precious to Him in order to continue to grow and develop. For a person, it is better to remain in this passivity of "sleep" and "drunkenness," so as not to disturb what they cannot "produce" themselves. The one who is asleep and drunk with love should surrender themselves to perfect fulfillment.
Translated from German by Sister Petra of the Risen One, OCD.
