https://cac.org/searching-for-love-2018-11-02/
Searching for love
Friday, November 2, 2018
All Souls’ Day Richard Rohr edit
🌹🏇💔💕💟❣️💓💞💘💖💓💗💕💟👒👑👝
John of the Cross (1542-1591) is one of many Christian mystics who writes about being loved by God in an intimate way. 💟💖💓💕
🌹James Finley reflects on John’s Dark Night of the Soul as a journey deeper into love🌹
John of the Cross says we get all tangled up in suffering, and we get all tangled up in searching for love.
🌹The root of suffering is the deprivation of love.
Now in reality, there’s no such thing as the deprivation of love, because the
infinite love of God
invincibly pervades &
gives itself endlessly
to everyone & to all things everywhere.
💟There is no such thing as a deprivation of love, but there is the deprivation of the capacity to experience the love that is never missing.🌹
🌹Therefore, my spiritual practice is to look within for the places that are blocking my ability to experience the flow of an immense tenderness that is endlessly giving itself to
me in all situations.💞
The Dark Night of the Soul...
as described by John of the Cross is actually a tender, merciful art form of love.🌹
... It very mysteriously dislodges us from whatever is keeping us in the stuck places. 💓
💖Sometimes it is disarmingly joyful & sometimes it is disarmingly painful. If we lean into it & move with its rhythm, love
charts its own course & brings
us to a deep
understanding of God’s love.💜
🌹Thomas Merton once said we spend most of our lives under water.
Every so often our head
clears the surface &
we look around
we look around
& get our
bearings.
Then in a
Then in a
blinking of
the eye we
the eye we
go back under again. 💕
“Oh my God! Look how endlessly trustworthy life is! Look at the God-given, godly nature of simple things!”👀
💔John of the Cross says these touches of love go on & on until pretty soon there begins to grow in us a kind of homesickness for a more daily abiding experience of the depths
of love we have so fleetingly glimpsed.💝
💜there begins to grow in us a discontent for spending so many waking hours trapped on the outer edge of the inner
richness of the life
we are living.
we are living.
💟💕The more deeply we experience God’s love,
the more elusive its consummation seems
There are flares of love, as we momentarily melt into God and God melts
into us.❤️
💗Then, like glowing embers, we live in an underlying habitual state of love’s glow.👒
💝in love’s glow,
we come to the realization/ absence
of the Beloved is the Beloved,
giving him/ herself to me as the experience of the Beloved
💔Building on Finley’s insights, the Dark Night purifies us of our attachment to feelings of union and comfort. 💘
💔Christ lying in the tomb is still Christ—preparing for a resurrection that
cannot even be imagined.💘
💖may we choose to live in union with all who are still in the dark tomb, faithfully waiting for a certain resurrection.💟
Reference:
James Finley, Intimacy: The Divine Ambush, disc 6 (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2013), CD, MP3 download.
James Finley, Intimacy: The Divine Ambush, disc 6 (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2013), CD, MP3 download.
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