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Journey of Love

As we have repeatedly noted, John's journey of faith, with its purification of all false images of God, is not a way of increased conceptual knowledge, through which individuals study the nature of God and progressively clarify the notion of divinity. Many individuals are attracted by this intellectual exercise that satisfies their need to possess God and brings the transcendent into their grasp. Clearly this is not John's focus, since the way of conceptual knowledge ends with images and ideas that need purification. The journey of faith includes a confident loving self- gift that substitutes for the light lost in the darkness of the struggle. "Although the soul in her progress does not have the support of any particular interior light of the intellect, or of any exterior guide..., love alone, which at this period burns by soliciting the heart for the Beloved, is what guides and moves her" (N, 2, 25, 4). Through all purifications that are part of the night, an individual is sustained by a sense of love. "In the midst of these dark and loving afflictions, the soul feels a certain companionship," so that "when this weight of anxious darkness passes, it often feels alone" (N, 2, 11, 7).

So, love is an intimate part of the journey of faith. In addition, John speaks of the journey to God as a way of love:

I went out calling you, but you were gone.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

If by chance you see

him I love most,

tell him I am sick, I suffer, and I die.

Seeking my Love

I will head for the mountains and for watersides.... (C, 1 3)

The Canticle is filled with the imagery of love, and the Living Flame begins and ends with the same focus: "O living flame of love...how tenderly you swell my heart with love!"

The way of love, as found in some mystics, gives rise to criticisms that their approaches are merely expressions or sublimations of their own need for physical or sexual intimacy, but this is not the case with John. His way of love is a rich, mature, total self-gift. The search, encounter, union, and mutual possession are achieved through choice-oriented decisions that imply painful renunciations that shape the personality of the searcher. John advises anyone who longs for union with God to "seek him in faith and love, without desiring to find satisfaction in anything, or delight, or desiring to understand anything other than what you ought to know. Faith and love are like the blind person's guides" (C, 1, 11).

The purification of desire in the way of love is a long process that must be handled carefully, lest our affectivity be divided among many objects. John seeks the integration of the affective life, so that love is united and focused on God alone. 71 Those who have many desires and affections disperse the strength of their wills, and can no longer love God alone. "Because the force of the desire is divided, the appetite becomes weaker than if it were completely fixed on one object" (A, 1, 10, 1). Although John distinguishes the sensitive and spiritual objects of knowledge in the Ascent, the schema he uses in book three for discussing the purification of love and will cuts across such distinctions. He seeks a unity of the affective life, integrally focused on God.

One must purify love by controlling one's desires for satisfaction in attractive but potentially encumbering external goods, whether temporal, natural, or sensible even more so in the case of religious values, including the moral, supernatural, and spiritual. The latter can be particularly deceptive when linked to justifying reasons, criteria, and convictions. Individuals can dedicate themselves to religious causes that are often nothing more than collective appetites, weakening Christian love. Thus, we have witnessed in recent years the increase in divisive and loveless factions in the church, under the disguise of fidelity to tradition or "the spirit of Vatican II," defense of orthodoxy or "aggiornomento," purity of doctrine or healthy pluralism. We have seen the evil of Christians persecuting other Christians in their blasphemous defense of religion as they conceive it. Christian love cannot be divided between many objects, but united on God alone. Our efforts in this direction, recommended in the Ascent, establish the need for an integration of affection in a united dedication to the Lord. "The strength of the soul...is ruled by the will. When the will directs these faculties, passions, and appetites toward God..., the soul preserves its strength for God, and comes to love him with all its might" (A, 3, 16, 2).

John's way of love is set out in greater detail in the Spiritual Canticle and the Living Flame of Love. The former describes the dynamism and stages of love, while the latter addresses the fullness and satisfaction of union. The first thirty-one stanzas of the Canticle were written by John when in prison in Toledo, and thus the poem is in a sense autobiographical, "composed in a love flowing from abundant mystical understanding" (C, Prologue, 2). The journey of love, like that of faith, leads to profound knowledge of God. John calls it "mystical wisdom" and claims that "it is given according to the mode of faith, through which we love God without understanding him" (ibid.).

As John himself explains (C, 22, 3), the Canticle presents the stages of the journey of love:

1. a period of anxious search for the loved one, in which one learns a lot about the Beloved, acquiring partial knowledge that serves to arouse one's impatient desire (C, 1 12);

2. an initial encounter with the Beloved, leading to the love of espousal, but still filled with preoccupations (C, 13 21);

3. the experience of total union in spiritual marriage, with all the love that results (C, 22 35);

4. the yearning for transformation in a glorious final union (C, 36 40).

The journey begins with the awareness that the loved one is hidden deep within oneself, and must be sought with love (C, 1, 6). The initial encounter is a visit from the Lord "with strong love amid the intense loving desires" the seeker has previously shown (C, 13, 2). The spiritual marriage is "a total transformation...in which each surrenders the entire possession of self to the other" (C, 22, 3). Finally, each yearns to become more like the other in mutual transformation (C, 36, 3).

The journey of love is both the deepening of the human experience of love of God and the revelation of God's loving action in the individual. In the journey of faith we saw that knowledge of God is rectified through the two purifications, conceptual and vital. In the journey of love our experience of God's presence is purified in three ways. First, we love God in God's apparent absence. When God seems to withdraw to purify a person's love, the individual learns to appreciate the transcendence of God. As we often think of a distant friend, so an individual thinks of the "distant" Lord and experiences presence in absence. "The soul, enamored of the Word, her Bridegroom, the Son of God, longs for union with him," and "records her longings of love and complains to him of his absence" (C, 1, 2). Such a person, having broken false attachments, still must suffer the apparent absence of the loved one. 72

Second, we love God in union. Here we experience God's love and goodness and under this challenging illumination see God in everything. This is the genuine knowledge by participation. "The soul relates the sovereign favor God granted by recollecting her in the intimacy of his love, which is the union with God, or transformation, through love" (C, 26, 2).

The third way of purifying one's experience of God's presence is through a sense of absence, of a lack within ourselves, in the very experience of union. Present to God, we see our own weakness and imperfections, and anxiety at our insufficiencies leads to a feeling of absence even though God is actually present to us.

The love of God is a transforming experience in a loving union.73 "This spiritual marriage...is a total transformation in the Beloved, in which each surrenders the entire possession of self to the other with a certain consummation of the union of love" (C, 22, 3). This transforming union causes all the faculties of an individual to be moved under the direction of God (F, 2, 34), seeking always to function in union with God (C, 27, 7). It is also an illuminating experience, "for true and perfect love knows not how to keep anything hidden from the beloved" (C, 23, 1).

The journey of love is a courageous undertaking that leads to the possession of God through a loving union that transforms our whole approach to life and grants a participation in the life of God. "In the union and transformation of love each gives possession of self to the other, and each leaves and exchanges self for the other. Thus each one lives in the other and is the other, and both are one in the transformation of love" (C, 12, 7). The journey is rigorously demanding, and the gradual purification of love is a serious endeavor. "This is acquired through complete mortification of all the vices and appetites of one's own nature" (F, 2, 32). It leads to the total possession of God, and everything else in divine union, as the "Prayer of a Soul Taken With Love" explains: "all things are mine; and God himself is mine and for me, because Christ is mine and all for me" (Sayings, 27).

John's way of love, then, complements and completes the way of faith. In reality, these two ways are simply different aspects of the one journey, the one plan God has imprinted in the depths of each person. Both progressively reveal God to us.