How to best cultivate Erotic Desire in One's Love for God
a consensus & a sanjuanist case study
How Art can serve an Erotic Love - a consensus
Oliver Sacks’ book and movie, ―Awakenings―, describes how brain damaged individuals can be roused out of stupor by music and art when nothing else can reach them.
Tony deMello spent his life teaching the importance of awareness versus analysis, of insight versus information, perhaps patterned after the founder of his order, St. Ignatius, who emphasized the need to ―taste― the truth versus merely ―knowing― the truth.
From Amos Wilder: ―Imagination is a necessary component of all profound knowing and celebration … It is at the level of imagination that any full engagement with life takes place. ―
From Morton Kelsey: ―God knew that human beings learn more by story and music, by art, symbols, and images than by logical reasoning, theorems, and equations, so God‘s deepest revelations have always been expressed in images and stories. ―
When Jamie Smith published ―Desiring the Kingdom―, a publisher‘s review described it as a focus on the themes of liturgy and desire: ―Malls, stadiums, and universities are actually liturgical structures that influence and shape our thoughts and affections. ―
Humans –as Augustine noted–are ―desiring agents, ― full of longings and passions; in brief, we are what we love. ―
The lesson we take away, here, is that, not only is our relationship with God shaped and influenced through story-telling, the manner in which we live, move and have our being in the world is also.
Charles A. Coulombe writes of one of Catholicism‘s greatest storytellers, J.R.R. Tolkien:
―It‘s been said that the dominant note of the traditional Catholic liturgy was intense longing. This is also true of her art, her literature, her whole life. It is a longing for things that cannot be in this world: unearthly truth, unearthly purity, unearthly justice, unearthly beauty.
By all these earmarks, Lord of the Rings is indeed a Catholic work, as its author believed: But it is more. It is this age‘s great Catholic epic, fit to stand beside the Grail legends, Le Morte d‘Arthur and The Canterbury Tales. It is at once a great comfort to the individual Catholic, and a tribute to the enduring power and greatness of the Catholic tradition, that JRRT created this work. In an age which has seen an almost total rejection of the faith on the part of the Civilization she created . . . Lord of the Rings assures us, both by its existence and its message, that the darkness cannot triumph forever. ―
Liturgy as Spirituality serves an Erotic Love - a case study
The ― Collected Works of St. John of the Cross ― translated by Kavanaugh & Rodriguez (ICS) has a Scriptural Index which reveals that Juan cited almost every book of the Old & New Testaments in his writings and the citations number somewhere between 800-1,000 bible references (we didn‘t count precisely, but that is a fair estimate)!
It is easy to understand how new students of contemplative spirituality focus on, what is to them, the novelty of Juan‘s via negativa. One could err, however, by failing to take into account Juan‘s fidelity to Scripture, Sacraments, Liturgy and almost-Ignatian emphasis on ―God in All Things― and almost-Franciscan emphasis on creation. (How‘s that for a litany of kataphatic modalities?)
Denis Read OCD, an ICS member, calls Juan the ―liturgical mystic― and sanjuanist spirituality ―liturgical spirituality―.
In addition to Juan‘s love and fdelity to Scripture, to the Eucharist (one of greatest personal trials in prison in Toledo was not being able to celebrate Eucharist) and to the other sacraments (strong emphasis on reconciliation), Juan quoted the Church‘s liturgical books liberally, including hymns, antiphons of the ―Liturgy of the Hours – Divine Office, Roman Ritual, etc!
Richard Hardy, PhD in ―Embodied Love in John of the Cross― states: “The question we must answer is whether John is espousing the goal of an ethereal, “purely spiritual” love, or rather an embodied love replete with sensuality and delight.”
Juan‘s emphasis on nature, the imagery of his poetry, his relational imagery reveal a man overflowing with sensuality and delight! He is selling us on nothing less than Divine Eros and as Hardy says: “in the light of this erotic love challenges today’s Christian to embrace a lifestyle that risks all for the sake of all.”
The apophatic-kataphatic remains in a highly creative tension with Juan and gets resolved, not by emphasis on one mode versus the other, but rather by a rhythmicity, by Juan‘s recognition of God‘s every ―spiration― and by Juan‘s ―re-spiring― in accordance with same.
Juan does NOT move us away from sensory delight but to purifed sensory delight. Juan does not negate the kataphatic devotion but moves us to transformed devotion.
Sanjuanist liturgical mysticism is ―mysticism par excellence. ―
In ―Open Mind, Open Heart―, Thomas Keating writes about apophatic/kataphatic contemplation that there has sometimes been a misleading distinction suggesting opposition between the two, when, in fact, a proper preparation of the faculties (kataphatic practice) leads to apophatic contemplation, which in turn is sustained through appropriate kataphatic practices.
To risk all for the sake of all … now that’s something worth considering!
Therefore, to best cultivate an Erotic Desire in One's Love for God, however diverse our spiritualities may otherwise be, all spiritualities need to be nurtured liturgically in a way that invites & encourages one to risk all for the sake of all. After all, creation as Incarnation is a love story!