Where I am, how do we ascend the mountain? How do we enable the kundalini to rise, for some of our people here? It's basically this concept of the person as image and likeness of God. And this conceived dynamically. We're imaged in so far as we yearn for God, desire God. We're discussing just this afternoon this fundamental category of desire. This latest book by Gerald May, the psychiatrist, is fascinating. He feels that just psychiatrically speaking, the basic yearning in all of us is for God. But we get sidetracked in these particular addictions, which are desire cleaving to money or glory or sex or food or drink or whatever it is. And that not being able to satisfy this deepest, limitless yearning. But the yearning is there.

[01:00]

We just can't cut it out. In all of us, there's this eros. There's this craving. And what we now have to do is order that upward. And it's ordered upward and fulfilled when it tends to love of God, karitas, which is this yearning immediately cleaving to God. So the image of God is to desire. I'm sorry, yeah, the imageness of God is the desire. And this is in all of us, even after the falls. This isn't wiped out, because we do remain, in some sense, human being after the fall. That's a big debate among the theologians. In the more pessimistic view of Augustine, we're just wiped out with the fall. We're just abominations to God. But for this more mellow, later tradition, it's influenced by the East. No, we're not entirely wiped out. There's always the desire for God, how poorly understood it is. So someone like Gerald May, who says your basic therapy

[02:01]

with dealing with anyone, to bring that person a full, integrative psychedelics to help them discover this desire for God and work against repression on the one hand and addiction on the other so they can go up to God. And then this is fulfilled in that love of God. So that brings us up, and that unites us with God. We'll see a little more about this later. So this is very close to the reverberance of anthropology, and quite different from someone like Augustine, and also sometimes Aquinas. It's not insofar as we think true ideas about God that we commune with God as truth that we're in our highest dimension. According to this current, it is when we love God, cleave to God immediately, and that then fulfills this deepest desire in us. Questions, comments about that?

[03:03]

Does the Latin correspond with the soul, or the willingness of the person's mind or the people's action, using the word soul here? Well, in fact, his language waffles very much. He tends to say in the Latin, anima, animus, spiritus. So animus, one way to translate it in the Christian's mind, this would be its highest faculty. And then in other texts, when he's talking about this animus, it's that part of us which through faith affirms truth, and knows truths. So someone, and he doesn't say body, he says anima. But he says the anima is the physical part of us. So there's some translation going on here. But to get technical, what he would say is that the analytic mind is the highest faculty of the animus, and the highest faculty of the spirit has the meaning to encounter God in faith and love.

[04:11]

Yes, sir? I was just gonna say that what requires these terms, that each writer has a different definition. But in terms of... Yeah, indeed, this is part of the joy of this whole thing, is that each, and then this is the challenge that each one of us come up with our own anthropology. But you wanna know what you mean by these terms. We had Michael for a split second, but then you died. Okay. Yeah. So the body is basically, its faculties are the senses. And that's good for him. Remember, he's against excessive asceticism for that, because the body isn't the enemy. This is a key thing. We're in some of the more simplistic anthropologies that becomes the enemy. But it's the means, it's the animal that carries us up the mountain. And the mind is higher, and the spirit is higher.

[05:19]

There is a definite hierarchy in his anthropology. When I was teaching this in Berkeley, I was challenged on this by feminists, saying you can't put spirit above mind, above body. It's just all kind of flows in and out, and body can sometimes be higher than mind or spirit or something like that. So, how do you do this one? Well, it's an interesting, I just don't think it's easy to reconcile that with St. Paul or St. John or the Christian tradition. I mean, it seems to me there are some faculties in this that are just higher than others. There's no doubt about it. But the nobility of the body, fine. But to have some deepest insight about selfless love is something more than enjoying a French Sunday or something. It seems. If you refer to the body as the senses, in this upward thrust, is there a point in time

[06:19]

where one has to kind of withdraw from the senses in order to get deeper in touch with the spirit, and then once one has reached that point, going back in and having this great welcome senses? Well, these people would say definitely. My knowledge of saying that there comes a point where things are normal, then as you get into it, they're not normal. Then as you become enlightened, then it's back to normal. Yep, yep, yep. Now, he would certainly say, as this whole school of mysticism, in the moment of contemplation, you move, it's like a mountain, and you ascend the mountain. You don't repress, you don't deny. You just move to higher realms and let the lower be quieted, hushed. Because this higher encounter is so much more sublime. And then the moment comes to descend the mountain again and to enjoy, then, God through creatures. But now, in the moment of deepest prayer, it's as if we're, listen, Paul says, we don't even know if we're in the body or not.

[07:20]

So this is why this anthropology, I think, is helpful. It gives us insight into ourself, into different dimensions, and also it prioritizes a bit. So the whole goal of the contemplative is to regularly ascend the mount and to know that at this level, there might be all kinds of chaos, but at this deepest level, there might be real peace. The whole language today for the pedo-kaliya this evening was to move from the mind into the heart. By the heart, they mean that deepest organ of intuition, of communion with God, and leave all senses behind, instill all that. So it's a slightly different language, but it's the important intellectual language of the heart, to move from the body of the mind into the spirit. And that's why some historical writers will say there comes a point where really ecstasy, when you're taken out of the senses, is not ultimately the high point. Because if you get stronger, then you're no longer affected by what in the lower level would have been ecstasy,

[08:24]

because you're integrated in the pure. Well, that's what is said, but in the highest mystical state, we're no longer ecstatic because we don't have to be taken out of our body. This is what even Teresa of Apollos says, that ecstasy is a sign still of a somewhat lower, but the final stage is the full, and then you have the mountains back, and the hills, the chimney, the crosses, et cetera. But in certainly the stages up to the various highest, we do need to move upward and to work at a certain stilling and quieting and ordering the lower, and that's what the whole of the rhythm of the life is supposed to be about, et cetera. Now, the key thing... We saw you come in and then go out. I had to see what the font. Pardon me? I had to see what the font. Gabriel showed me a few things. Sure, sure. Okay. Now, how do we ascend?

[09:24]

Again, going from desires, unifying them into love. Now, what is love? Then he comes up, I think, with a whole lyrical theology of love. Where is this love from? And he's basically, among other things, he's a rigorous, penetrating theologian and reflecting on self and experience, but he's also a poet. So he has this lovely treatise on the nature and dignity of love. First of all, its birthplace is God. There it is born. There nourished, there developed. There it is a citizen, not a stranger, but a native. I think it's a beautiful thing. When we're in the space of Caritas, we're in that space that's where God is. That's its native country, not this world with its wars, intentions, et cetera. Love is given by God alone, and it endures in him, for it is due to no one else but him, and for his sake. And we'll see more and more

[10:25]

how he means this, quite literally. So when we're in that space of love, we're in that divine dimension. And obviously, he's not talking about Eros here. He's talking about Caritas. And this is the basic movement from Eros to Caritas. We're to seek God. Where are we to seek God? I had this phone call from this person today. Couldn't find God. God had gone. And, well, God is everywhere. But God is particularly in this place, if you like, where love is. That's where you're to seek God. On contemplating God, where do you find God to contemplate him? You must not seek him where those creatures dwell, nor even among mortals. Where then? In love, for that is where God lives. The one you seek is within you, if he is in your love. If he is not there,

[11:26]

he is not within you at all. But you could not look for him if you did not love. And so it follows that you have him, that he dwells with you. So it's a lush theology of love, as we've seen Bernard was, remember his whole thing about the ladder of love. It's the different degrees of love that get us upward. So if God is not in your love, you won't be able to find God. That is, if you haven't moved beyond simply Cupiditas, desire for this and that and that, fame, insecurity, and pleasure, et cetera. If that's where you are, you're gonna have much difficulty finding God. But if you ascended the ladder of love to this highest level, then you encounter God there because that's God's dwelling place. Not only then that love comes out of God, is from God, but God is in love, God dwells there. Now for us, how do we?

[12:29]

What was that one statement that you said? Is through our love for God that we encounter God? That's right, precisely. That's right. But the higher form of love. And here it's a classic distinction between Cupiditas and Caritas. Cupiditas, I desire that for me, for the good it's going to bring me. That's a kind of love. I just love chocolate cake. But Caritas is when I love the other for the other, for the other's good. So if I can ascend that ladder at the higher reaches, I'm then in heaven. It's like Jacob's Ladder, and that's where God is. How do I ascend it? And here he has a rigorous theology, which is what also psychiatrists like Opet and Gerald May say. Love isn't the, we have basically the romantic model of love, the sentimental. It's when I feel myself swept off my feet, when the bells ring and all that.

[13:31]

No, the deepest point of love is in the will. And therefore, in the realm of freedom, of my deepest responsibility and humanness, there is below the desire. But as it ascends the mountain to the highest point, it enters into the will, and that's the fullness of love. By ardent willing, it becomes love. For love is nothing other than the will, ardently fixed on the good. So this is a rigorous theological, what is love? The will fixed on the good. And St. Thomas Aquinas will say, it is willing the good of the other, benevolentiae, for the other, not just for me. And I think this is key, because it's so different from what people mean today when they talk about love, he's in love, or, again, ours is a 15th, 16th century tradition, at very earliest, the romantic love thing, where you just,

[14:34]

it's stronger than you are. And you can't do anything about it, it just sweeps you off your feet. The problem with our model is, what happens when then the wave rolls on, and suddenly you're back into your normal, sane mind, and you're sane decision-making, and she's still here, and then what do you do? Or vice versa. So, all kinds of dangers to the romantic model. It seems sort of dangerous, this various religious organizations that sort of build people up into a frenzy, and only do it after the meet, after the weekend. Well, absolutely. That is, if it has to be some kind of intense feeling of Jesus is everything for me, this is these movements at their worst. And they just focus on getting you to get in such a state, and you make this decision for Jesus, and it sweeps over you, and it's stronger than you,

[15:37]

and it's grace, but sometimes it is. Father, in the love of God, in the will, I can see that aspect, but there's also a higher form where it's just sort of, when you become in love with God, where it comes from the heart, it's not the matter of the will, isn't it? Also, where it's a spiritual aspect, where you can yearn for the love of God, and you wouldn't have to will it, it's just a spontaneous surprise. Well, now you're moving to another set of categories. He's using language of faculties, mind and will. Then you're moving to the more biblical heart. Now, he would agree with you. He would put the will in the heart. He says ardently, and he would also immediately grant that you can only do this through grace. It's the grace of God, and he'll very quickly say the Holy Spirit, that enables your heart to ardently cleave to God,

[16:39]

to use a more biblical language. The will is very biblical language also. But yeah, I don't think he's saying anything different from what you're saying. He's just using different language, focusing on what faculty, precisely. See, heart is a bit of a poetic language in the sense we've got this beating organ in there, but you could have it out and have one of those mechanical hearts for a while, but we're talking about this highest spiritual faculty that enables me to cleave to God or cleave to another person, if it's a spousal love or friendship love or whatever. So there's kind of two states of the will that depend on the author you're going into, one that is kind of part of the intellect, where it's almost, I think, a will power. And as you were saying, there's more of a spontaneous will, which would be put into the category of the anaconda beings just in this period.

[17:42]

I think that's fair. I think some scholars know two great traditions. One is the more intellectualist, you read of St. Thomas Aquinas, and again, the highest faculty is the mind, and I think there's a real sense where he would put the will in the mind. The mind knows the good, and then the will wills it, that's his model. Now, these people would say, no, will is a higher faculty than mind because it can arrive deeper. As he'll say, you can love God before knowing much about God or even after knowing much about God. But I think that's fair. It's different language. I think it comes out of different, even temperaments, to use Union language. Some people are more passionate and ardent, et cetera. Other people are more cerebral. Yeah, the language I'm finding gets confusing at times. This model seems a little bit compartmentalizing

[18:45]

in the beings. It's spirituality today, and I can see why the women are subjected. Because I think, as I understand the biblical sense of heart, it doesn't bypass any part of it. The heart is the deepest place in the heart. Will, thinking, feeling, and the body, they all intersect. No part of it is left. They intersect at the deepest point. So one can have tremendously deep emotions when they're in the heart, or deepest thought, or deepest conviction. Okay, I think he would agree with that. I think he'd just say, though, there are times when we might not have deepest feelings or deepest, we have just the will. That's the dark night. Or the whole case of loving your enemy. That's the key thing. In no way attracted to the person. There's no, it's just naked will. So that's the thing. He could agree with you,

[19:46]

because you're not repressing or cutting off. You're uplifting, and all these things flow up into it. But he would want, not to get you fired over, and he would want, he uses the language of will just to point out that there are moments when these other elements won't be. I might not have any thought, or maybe the mind might see just Dorland as my every kind of deepest, even highest feeling. Or God might experience this. My God might be forsaken. That may not be the way it is. That's just my perception. Okay, okay. That doesn't mean that's what's going on. Okay. Beyond my ability to monitor it. That's right. I think he would also say, at the deepest level beyond our capacity to monitor, it all comes together. It's just interesting, in my own prayer, I never have a feeling of going up. It's always a feeling of sinking down. Oh well, you can go that way. Yeah, you can just turn it upside down. Absolutely.

[20:48]

Yeah, the cloud is quite explicit about that. He says you can talk about going up, you can talk about going down, you can talk about going to the deepest centers, whatever works, because in fact, it's not a geographic thing. It's a poetic, metaphorical language to talk about going from something a tad more ephemeral to something a tad more substantial, essential, deep. Maybe to the, whether the apocryphatic mission is a journey into darkness, but to read other authors, it's a journey into light. It's not how you talk about the experience. Merlin says that he feels the apocryphatic is closer to what's really happening. That's how you talk about it. Journey into light. Light, not through our normal way. So you can get confused. Oh, absolutely. And I think it's exciting to read all the different ways of articulating. Some of the ways can't even be reconciled, but the mystery is so great that there's not one final way to talk about it.

[21:52]

And one of the reasons for doing a history of Christian spirituality is to discover all these different ways, and then one person will inevitably speak more closely, better to me and another to you. And then I think we find in different phases of our journey. In this phase, I very much need this person. In another phase, another person speaks. So that's the reason to get to know the whole heritage, to claim it so you know. I would just, the whole apophatic, this theology enables you to safeguard it. Because if it's at the peak of the will, you don't have to know anything, you don't have to feel anything. It's just that will ardently fixed on God. I was just gonna say that I think that just by virtue of the fact that so many writers have written in so many different ways, just exemplifies the fact that we all experience the same thing very differently. Absolutely. So who's to say who's right and who's wrong? Just the fact that the four Gospels,

[22:53]

here we have this one central figure for our faith, and the church doesn't present us with one Gospel, but four in a very different, you know, Mark is so different from John. They're not contradictory, but they're so different in their stresses. And Luke and Matthew, and that's exciting, to learn the different theologies and emphases. It's like being in the process, where you're gonna pure the love. And that pure love is free from emotions. And that, it seems like I've heard it expressed like you take a rod and you punch it into water, or even if you punch it into honey, if it's pure, you pull it back out and nothing's clinging to it. And then when you're loving through the emotions, it's like you take this rod and you punch it in and you pull it out, and all of the stuff is losing and dripping off of it, because it hasn't been cleansed properly and you can get the sticking stuff. Well, that's what's- I noticed some not agreement with that.

[23:54]

You're saying pure love can't have emotions with it. Oh, absolutely. No, no. And that's why he's inclusive. That's not that emotions are bad, but will is good or something. It's just that will is higher, or deeper, or more central than emotions. But all emotions are splendid, and when they can be brought up and harmonized, that's the whole goal of this more inclusive anthropology. Yeah, the same thing where everything is good once you reach that point of clarity. But I think he would agree, as would someone like Gerald May, we do have sticky fingers. That is, we tend to clutch onto things. Our love tends to be cupiditas, cupidity. So I want it for me, and that's addictive. And then it's for me, and it's not for you. And then it inevitably becomes for me idle. It's supposed to tranquilize me, fulfill this great hunger. It can't. What I need to do is love all these things, but without clinging to them. The Zen masters say, appreciate the flower there. Don't go over it.

[24:54]

Pick it up and put it in your bottle. It's okay. [...] But then they do their flower arrangement. Whatever you do, love, but not clinging to. Nor is it the detachment, the kind of violent cutting off, but it's simply the non-attachment. So, yeah, love at its highest level is very sublime, and we're about to see how sublime. That is, in its highest moment, it is simply the Holy Spirit for him. Amor noster spiritus sanctus est. Our love is the Holy Spirit. It begins in our way, enabled by the Spirit, but at its highest moment, it is simply the Holy Spirit. That's who the Holy Spirit is. Caritas. And so everything he's said up to now, where is the place, where does the country of love, where does it come from? It comes from God. Now he's going to slowly work this out in a more and more rigorous way.

[25:55]

By love, he doesn't, again, mean something sentimental or, boy, I really like her, or I love Gothic or something. He means God of God, of the Holy Spirit, in the strict sense. And we can't fully know God, we can't understand much of anything about God, but somehow we encounter God in and through everything, through this experience of the Spirit in and through everything. As I long and desire, I often ask myself, how is it possible to love something one cannot see? But he who yearns for you has no doubt that you can be loved. We can't see this God, but we love this God. I can see you in everything, in heaven, on earth, in all your creatures, that you can be loved without being seen, because everything speaks to me of your love, oh God. The more I see this, the more I long for you. So this is a spirituality of longing, of yearning, of love.

[26:57]

And this love, finally, he's a charismatic in that sense, is the very Holy Spirit. And if we love perfectly enough, we're loving God alone. If we love our neighbor passionately enough, but without sticky fingers, but in a divine way, then we're fulfilling not just the second commandment, but the first. And so, lest our charity be imperfect, we are taught to love our neighbor in accordance with the perfect law of love, just as God loves only himself in us and through us, and we say that we love only God, so too let us begin to love our neighbors as ourselves. Then in him, just as in ourselves, we will love God alone. So finally, it all comes together, all these creatures, all these emotions and sentiments, et cetera, because God is the creator of all good things that are. So in God, if we truly love another, if we truly love Scooter, or Buddy, or the neighbor, or Chant, or something,

[28:00]

it finally comes to be pure love of God alone, because this is its source and its fulfillment. So it's a sublime theology of love, yes. The love is in the will, as you say it in the highest form, it's from the Holy Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit. What's the actual mechanism? That he provides the faith, and then you, because you can't affect your will, because that's, you have free will. It must just inspire the faith, so that you'll have the degree of faith where you'll exert the will above God, because you have the faith that you believe that he is your God. He doesn't directly get into this. This will be one of the deepest, most agonizing problems of speculative theology. How to safeguard, on the one hand, the total freedom of the human person, and on the other, the omnipotence of God. In some sense, it all has to come from God. It's all grace. But it also all has to come from us, if it's our action, or else we're just puppets,

[29:03]

or we're half puppets, or we're being forced, or something. So this is, he doesn't directly get into that, except to presuppose that God can work in and through directly the will without violating the will, because God made it. I think, for me, the deepest insight is it's not a competition. It's not, well, God does 60%, so the will does 40. That's an anthropomorphism. No, the will does it all, and God does it all. It's not, because they're in totally different orders. It's not like two people in the boat, and so one does half the rowing, and the other does half the rowing. That's anthropomorphic. That's reducing God to our level. But it's God does all the thing, and we do all the thing. One little glimpse of it, though it's not, is kind of the instrument. It's the pen that writes. There's no ink or words without the pen, but it is I who write. The pen isn't violated by me. It's fulfilled by me. So it all comes from God, and it all comes from us,

[30:07]

but in a subordinate way. Beautiful. Pardon me? Shh. So, but this is one of the deepest. I heard one professor say, don't think too much about it. You'll just get in trouble. But in fact, I think we can think about it, too. This will become a huge battle of the Jesuits with the Jansenists, because for the Jansenists, we can't do anything. God either puts us in grace, or God puts us in sin. God predestines to the one, and then the Calvinists get into this terrible box, and the Lutherans, and the Jesuits say, no way. It's gotta come from our freedom and our responsibility. But how then do you not diminish God's infinitude, and everything is grace? Well, I think the Jesuits would manage, but we've gotta wait about five centuries before we could do that. Jesuits are brilliant for that. But he just presupposes that somehow it all goes together, so it's all Holy Spirit, but it's also all we.

[31:10]

Then he does a Trinitarian theology. We've had an anthropology, and now we're getting into who is the Holy Spirit in the Trinity? Well, the Holy Spirit, if you, is precisely the bond of love between father and son. This is classic Trinitarian theology of actually Augustine. This ultimate mysterious source, who is fullness, expresses himself, and that's his mind, his self-knowledge, his word. And then the mind meditates the source, and the source meditates the lightness, and there's this mad, passionate love, the one and the other, and that is so full that that also is substantial person, and that is the Holy Spirit. We were reading a little while back, we were getting interested in something about William was saying that he could see God in everything. He's dynamized in everything. Yeah. I see God as a life force,

[32:15]

in people, in plants, in animals. When you take it to everything, that has to mean what is commonly termed inanimate. Oh, absolutely. How is God in that which is inanimate? Well. I know I just went back to the origin thing, but I'm curious for your thoughts. Now, what the theologians would say, at least two ways, at least as creator of all things, as ground, so if a thing has any existence whatsoever, it's only because God is immediately intervening and sustaining it there in existence. So this table is immediate sign of God's creative and sustaining presence. And simply, as God, God can't be separated out from anything. I'm here, so I'm not in my cell. The characteristic of created being is locality, ubiquitous. I'm one place, and therefore not another. But it's precisely God's being everywhere. The prime thing that separates us

[33:17]

from everything else in the planet is that we have to respond to love, God embellishes on creation, to keep creation in peace. Right, responding consciously. Everything responds to this love. But we respond to it consciously. That's right. And we can sum up the whole of creation's voice in this, in our praise. That's what, praise. But it doesn't respond to love consciously. Well, somewhat consciously. I think that's a great mystery. But certainly more than this table. The rational man, the rest of the animal life is. Well, I don't know. It comes a long way in our understanding of the ignorance of animals and so on and so forth. Oh, even of flowers, it's a great mystery. They respond to everything. I mean, even the fact that I was talking to someone who said modern-day Buddhists would no longer say sentient beings were with insects and up, but that they believe it's in plants.

[34:18]

In fact, I remember talking to Tibetans, a couple of Tibetan Buddhist monks here, back in about 83, if they were Christian here or not. They made that cut with sentient beings. So that's the old tradition. Before they knew that plants respond to stimuli, so. Well, if you want to read someone like Teilhard is interesting, Teilhard de Chardin. He has an evolutionary. And he says there's no way that you can have something in a higher form, that it's not somehow in a lower form, in some most rudimentary way, but it's all connected in one evolutionary thrust from this most primitive first molecule, whatever it is, up to the highest, most complex forms of organic reality. Reality. So he would say, yeah, if there's consciousness in us, there's certainly consciousness in body in a much more primitive way. We don't want to anthropomorphize there. But if there's consciousness in body, there's some kind of mysterious first roots of that

[35:18]

in pre-animal life and plant life. And if it's there, there's some kind of, because it's all one. The creationist in its most primitive way is a series of several closed boxes. God is a very beginning being, cats and dogs and dogs, and they're all kind of each. But the evolutionary is much more dynamic and it's slightly exciting. It's an upward thrust up to higher and higher, more intense forms. And in this way, I'm summing up also to the DNA. It's all the past history of the cosmos. And then the other side of that, if you go down to alpha, and you go down to the first mysterious explosion, this is primitive, and it's all there in potency. So you no longer have dogs that have nothing left to do with roses, which have nothing to do with carbon, which has, it's all part of one mysterious evolutionary force. And it's all this upward yearning, as Teilhard would say,

[36:20]

that becomes conscious in us, and probably with higher forms in the universe, it's statistically probable, and you can get into angels, all that. And finally, finding its fulfillment in Omega Point. The other thing I think of here too, in past times, perhaps we're not accepting of UFOs. I mean, angels don't go around in UFOs. But we now have, are open at least, hopefully to the possibility of intelligent life, what we would consider important life. Beyond this point, and I don't think in the Middle Ages they accepted it. Well, now there's volumes, and you know, file cabinets and hall rooms in Washington, full of that throws in a whole nother crutch to some of the traditional categorizing of what's conscious, what's not conscious. No. And you can argue that in the Middle Ages, they did believe in intelligent life

[37:24]

that transcends the humans. They just use the language of angels. The angel is a pure spirit, pure intellect. And you have a pretty subtle theology. We tend to poo-poo it in the scholastics. But what they're getting at is the human isn't the highest form of God's creation. There are higher forms with more of intense consciousness, more intense freedom, responsibility, intellect, et cetera. That's what they mean by angel. And so there's some fascinating work, you know, and you get it to Christian science fiction writers, that's, but as someone, a theologian like Cardinal Daniel, who says, there's an age that should find very easy the whole language about angels. It's our age, because the substance of angels is simply a form of life that transcends the human as we know it. No. Would you love the way that you're writing is that you're now a musical person? Well, I like, because this theme of love

[38:27]

is so immediately interesting to me, I like that, the nature and dignity of love. But they're all very exciting. And the other one is how to live it in prayer. The Uncontemplating God is a lovely little book. These two. Then, specifically to get into the anthropology, this is a good one. So I think they complement each other. But the Golden Epistle gets into the body, mind, spirit things. He's a rich theologian with all these parts. So again, the culminating moment, we can tie him up and conclude him here, is that it all fits together because it is the spirit who is love, who enables our loving, and thus uplifts us into the Trinitarian life. As the spirit is this bond of passionate love between father and son. So mystical prayer is being caught up in the inner Trinitarian life. You remember how excited Father George Maloney

[39:28]

got about this. In this way, your Holy Spirit produces the charity of God in us. Through that charity, he can make himself one with us, for he is the love and unity and will of the father and the son. He is the son willing the good of the father and the father loving the good of the son in his fullness. It again is so full, you can only describe it as person, as co-equal to father and son. And so you love yourself in yourself, oh God. And when from the father and the son proceeds the Holy Spirit, who is the love of the father for the son and of the son for the father, this love is so intense that it is unity. And so complete is this unity that it is consubstantiality. So curious now in this lofty Trinitarian theology, and you love yourself in us when you send the spirit of your son into our hearts. In the sweetness of love and in the ardent goodwill

[40:29]

which you inspire in us, he cries, Abba, Father. In this way, you make us love you, or rather in this way, you love yourself in us. John of the Cross will just echo this. In the highest mystical prayer, it's true even to say it's not we praying, it's God loving God in and through us. We're simply this little tiny channel for this electric charge, if you will. So this is ultimately what it's all about. Whatever gifts are worth having, whatever endowments are perfect of their kind, these come to us from you, the father of all that gives light, because they are from you. You love yourself in us just as you love us in yourself when we love you by means of this great gift of yours and when our love joins us to you. So we enter right into the inner life of God through love, which again fulfills all our being and uplifts us into God.

[41:30]

Amen. So next time, which will be a while from now, because next Thursday, Isaiah will be having this workshop on Robinson Jeffers, and that's more on the human plane, but it is good stuff. This is local. And then the week after, Thomas begins a series of three weeks, two sessions each week on key themes in the General's Letter, which quite are more traditional and perennial than the General's Letter, but that the General articulates. So that'll be good. But every now and then, there'll be a little slot to come in. And then we'll be going back to the great Hugh and Richard of St. Victor, another great mystical school that's just after these people. Amen.

[42:23]

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