glorycloud's Diaryland Diary

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the soul desires to be transfigured through love

It is 12:01 PM Sunday afternoon here in West Michigan. It is a cold dark gray windy rainy day. It is predicted to rain all week.

I got up this morning around 6:30 AM. I got up ate breakfast and then messed with our main computer. After messing with our main computer I wrote in my paper diary and read some more of 'The Spiritual Canticle' by St. John of the Cross. Carol got home from work around 9:05 AM. After work she went to a store and picked up Sunday newspapers. She is now sleeping and goes to work tonight around 2 o'clock AM.

I have been this morning mainly writing in my paper diary and reading 'The Spiritual Canticle'. I did take a break this morning a filmed a video for my Youtube channel. Now much else to report.

Last night spent the evening read 'The Spiritual Canticle' and 'The Spiritual Writings of Denis the Carthusian' Translated into English by Ide M. Ni Riain, RSCJ. It is a blessing being able to sit in a quiet house and read Mystical Theology all day. All around me is suffering and death due to the Cornavirus Pandemic. Millions and millions of people all over the world are going through terrible times. Here I sit in this house with a full stomach and reading Mystical Theology in contemplative silence. Weird. But things could change in a minute. Nothing is certain in this life.

Well I will close to drift through the afternoon reading 'The Spiritual Canticle' by St. John of the Cross.

Accordingly, the soul does not fear death when she loves; rather she desires it. Yet sinners are always fearful of death. They foresee that death will take everything away and bring them all evils. As David says, the death of sinners is very evil [Ps. 34:21]. And hence, as the Wise Man says, the remembrance of it is bitter [Ecclus. 41:1]. Since sinners love the life of this world intensely and have little love for that of the other, they have an intense fear of death. But the soul that loves God lives more in the next life than in this, for a soul lives where it loves more than where it gives life, and thus takes little account of this temporal life. She says then: May the vision of your beauty be my death.

"for the sickness of love
is not cured
except by your very presence and image.

11. The reason lovesickness has no other remedy than the presence and the image of the beloved is that, since this sickness differs from others, its medicine also differs. In other sicknesses, following sound philosophy, contraries are cured by contraries, but love is incurable except by things in accord with love.3

The reason for this is that love of God is the soul's health, and the soul does not have full health until love is complete. Sickness is nothing but the lack of health, and when the soul has not even a single degree of love she is dead. But when she possesses some degrees of love of God, no matter how few, she is then alive, yet very weak and infirm because of her little love. In the measure that love increases she will be healthier, and when love is perfect she will have full health.

12. It should be known that love never reaches perfection until the lovers are so alike that one is transfigured in the other. And then the love is in full health. The soul experiences within herself a certain sketch of love, which is the sickness she mentions, and she desires the completion of the sketch of this image, the image of her Bridegroom, the Word, the Son of God, who, as St. Paul says, is the splendor of his glory and the image of his substance [Heb. 1:3]; for this is the image referred to in this verse and into which the soul desires to be transformed through love. As a result she says: For the sickness of love is not cured except by your very presence and image.

13. She does well to call imperfect love "sickness," for just as a sick person is too weak for work, so is the soul that is feeble in love too weak to practice heroic virtue.

14. It is also noteworthy that those who feel in themselves the sickness of love, a lack of love, show they have some love, because they are aware of what they lack through what they have. Those who do not feel this sickness show they either have no love or are perfect in love." St. John of the Cross 'The Spiritual Canticle'

12:24 p.m. - 2020-05-17

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