SPIRITUAL FORMATION PROGRAM
FOR CANDIDATES PREPARING FOR
THE DEFINITIVE PROMISE

This three-year spiritual program preparatory to the Carmelite candidate's pronouncement of the Definitive Promise focuses on the four major writings of our Holy Father, St. John of the Cross. He rightfully enjoys throughout Holy Mother, the Church, not only the title of Doctor of Mystical Theology but also the reputation of being a most august and excellent mystagogue among all of the Church's mystics. The key to our Holy Father's Juanistic mysticism is the cross of Christ with its triune cruciformity. The vertical beam embraces the eternal/temporal order of the universe's existence; the horizontal beam spans the historical order of  the world's resistance beginning with the Book of Genesis and the world's future end culminating eschatologically in the Last Judgment. The third order is the cross's cruciformity consistently reconciling these two vertical and horizontal beams together in the Paschal Mystery of Jesus Christ's crucifixion, resurrection, ascension, and Parousia, final return in glory.

Consonant with this three-dimensional cruciformity there are two non-educible and irreducible orders, the objectively transcendent order of the universe of God's existence and creation and the subjectively immanent order of the world of the creature's own resistance and self-cultivation. These two order's are reconciled with each other in the Paschal Mystery of Jesus Christ, God/Superman. Jesus Christ crucified and risen is the Catholic Christian mystic's daily prayerful diet Way, Truth, & Life. Catholic Christian prayer is not so much the creature respectfully addressing his Creator as it is God's Triune Godhead incorporating His creature within the familiarity of His own Triune bosom through Christ's Incarnation & Paschal Mystery.

Catholic Christian prayer is more God graciously supernaturally alive in His creature than it is His creature prayerfully alive in God. The mystic is one who not only theologically believes and objectively understands and ponders this revealed Truth but, moreso, theologically hopes and ascetically experiences subjectively the Way of this Paschal Mystery as the Life of his own life. The Sacramental Church as the Mystical Body of Christ prays, on the one hand, publicly objectively in the liturgy of its sacramental rites and sacred scripture and, on the other hand, privately subjectively in the mystic's mental and contemplative prayerful response to these sacramental encounters with God. These two orders of prayer complement each other.

The human person, male & female, was created preternaturally to know, experience, and rejoice in God's divine Triune friendship. Original sin lost this friendship which resulted in the body's suffering, death & corruption. God Himself in the Person of Jesus Christ freely and graciously entered the history of this death & corruption and suffered its degradation, humiliation, and dehumanizing abandonment in order to restore God's Triune friendship to His own creatures. He accomplished this in His crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension into heaven. His human creature is now invited, in turn, to personally enter into this supernatural restoration--salvation, sanctification, glorification--by freely surrendering his own freedom to Christ's free sacrificial surrender of His own Divine/Superhuman freedom to liberate the creature from the futility, turpitude, and destitution of his own mortal desolation. The mystic is one who knows that this sacrificial surrender to Christ's own Self-surrender is impossible without the supernatural power of the Catholic Church's objective sacramental, liturgical, and his own subjective mental contemplative prayer.

Prayer, then, is not merely a special activity reserved for special occasions nor a special technique to periodically gain some self-serving advantage from God. It is a Gospel lifestyle of dying to one's own self-interest and rising beyond the slavery of this egocentric selfishness. It entails not merely an objective conduct that is voluntarily morally virtuous, orthodox, and upright--honest, chaste, prudent, courageous, noble, trustworthy, worshipful, etc.--but a subjective mental attitude which is Christ's very own Be-attitudinal mindset. It is not a me-myself-I need-more have-attitude; rather, it is a paradoxical have-not need-less attitude in order to be-more like Christ. It is paradoxical because one can only be-more in the vertical order of the grace of God's existence if one has-less resistance to Christ's Selflessness in the horizontal order of one's own egocentric partisan self-serving self-interests. Such detachment from one's own worldly selfishness requires Christ's own Be-attitudinal mindset. Being full of God means placing less stock in one's own self-importance. Hence, our subjective self can only paradoxically find its own self-fulfillment beyond the selfish subjectivity and servitude of its own egocentric selfhood.

This prayerful ascetic volunteer sacrificial dying to one's own subjective selfish self-interest is the key to St. John's mysticism and the horrendous darkness which characterizes the mystic's prayerful experience of living in darkness and even feeling and bearing the conviction of being abandoned by God. Of course, this dark experience of the mystic's prayerful experience of being ignored by God eventually yields and gives way to Christ's very own experience of His bodily resurrection and ascension. This prolonged prayerful period of dark forbidding purgation, hence, eventually gives way to a prayerful period of illumination (viz., the resurrection) and finally to a period of ecstatic bliss emulating Christ's ascension into the paradise of heaven: the bosom of God's Triune Godhead and the Sacramental Church's New Jerusalem.

This prayerful process of dying and rising does not occur automatically, of course. It is a process that is totally contingent on God's very own Divine Will & pleasure as well as the mystic's prayerful persevering resolution to become charitably attached to God and completely detached from his own selfish self-interests. Thus, the mystic prayerfully experiences in his own lifestyle Christ's very own Gospel lifestyle of dying and rising. These three distinctive phases of mystical prayerful experience--the purgative, illuminative, and unitive--are carefully, intimately, and poignantly described in the four major writings of our Carmelite Holy Father. They deserve our utmost prayerful attention and emulation. Certainly, only a fool would tackle an ascent up Mount Everest without availing himself of the help and experience of an experienced guide. The same holds true for the Carmelite mystic who is summoned by Christ to climb to the solitary summit of Mount Carmel, God's very own heavenly abode.

The four major writings of St. John of the Cross are the Ascent, the Dark Night, the Spiritual Canticle, and the Living Flame. In a broad sense they correspond to the three major phases of the mystical life paralleling Christ's Paschal Mystery. The Ascent deals with the mystic's active efforts to prayerfully detach his selfhood from all that hinders its total selfless attachment to God. The Dark Night deals with the  humiliating prayerful experiences of God's deliberate withdrawal and withholding from the mystic's religious experiences the security of His own sublime joy and divine serenity. The Spiritual Canticle deals with the religious enlightenment, wisdom, peace, joy, etc., that the mystic prayerfully experiences in the aftermath of the prolonged turbulence and trials of the Dark Night. The Living Flame describes the perfect ecstatic union of the mystic with the Blessed Trinity through being nuptially bonded to the Father's Holy Will through the subtle sublime influence of Christ's indwelling Holy Spirit.

The Catholic Christian mystic's religious experience of the Blessed Trinity is expressed throughout in our Sanjuanistic writings in trilogies that parallel the cross's cruciform triunity with its vertical-horizontal crossbeam configuration. This parallel also evokes the trilogy of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Of course, the prayerful life of the mystic is sublimated to the Divine Life itself of God's Triune Godhead. Hence, it is vertically supernatural, horizontally superhuman, and cruciformly superhumane.

It is supernatural inasmuch as the mystic partakes of the supernatural grace of the Father's infinite providential magnanimity and is fortified in his intellect with the theological virtue of faith to totally trust the Father'sinfallible trustworthiness. It is superhuman inasmuch as the mystic prayerfully confides his body's own hopeless mortality to the Son's bodily invincibility made manifest in His resurrection and ascension into heaven. This prayerful conviction vested in Christ's very own invincible confidence is, in turn, fortitifed by the theological virtue of hope which sustains the mystic's memory throughout its own span of historical vicissitudes from birth to death. Finally, it is superhumane inasmuch as the mystic partakes of the supernatural gratuitous selfless Giftedness proper to the Father and Son themselves: their Holy Spirit. The mystic's own will is superhumanely sublimated with the theological virtue of charity to enable it to love God with a love that is befitting God's own infinite Loveliness.

Given these trilogies, St. John pays close attention to the centrality of the faculties of the intellect, memory, and will and to the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity. While it is very much the case that these three faculties are endowed with properties and activities peculiar to the human person's own nature, self-humanized personality, and humanitarian altruism, these very same properties and activities are in the mystical life of the Catholic Christian supernaturally, superhumanly, and superhumanely sublimated to the Trinity's very own divine Paternal providential gracious initiative, Filial sacrificial Selfless consummation, and Holy Spirit's gratuitous integrating reconciliation.

Further, we will pay close attention to the cross's threefold order of vertically virtuously (i.e., morally) being more, horizontally attitudinally (i.e., ascetically) having less, and cruciformly integrating together both being and having in order to be-have more-and-less well in the manner of Christ Himself. The vertical beam is that of the being of reality itself which existentially is the fundamental order of creation. The horizontal beam is the overriding concern of having one's own personal security which with the onset of original sin has become resistantly the supplemental historical order of mankind's self-cultivated civilization, reformation, and redemption. The cruciform intersection of these two beams is that of be-having well congruent with having-less and being-more emulating Christ's very own Gospel life-style. The disciple is not above the Master.  

These three separate orders of the cross's cruciformity are crucial in coming to grips with our Carmelite mystagogue's writings. Each order entails a transcendence peculiar to that order itself. In the objective vertical order of existence, the mystic must transcend the material body's finite sensory animal palpability and affectivity in order to intellectually attend to and voluntarily worship God's infinite intangible immutable Divine Nature. This order is one of orthodox intelligible positive (i.e., cataphatic) knowledge and worship of God. In the subjective horizontal order of resistance, the mystic must transcend the body's egocentric self-serving sensational tactuality and sensuality (i.e., somaticity), on the one hand, and its  nontactual impassivity (i.e., psychicity), on the other, in order to overcome its own resistance to the objective reality which transcends the subjectivity of its own selfish self-serving psychosomatic partisan self-interest. This horizontal order is one of unintelligible paradox steeped in a conscious self-centered experience of things. It is paradoxically one of self-conscious (i.e., apophatic) ignorance of God's actual existence and
divine nature. This conscious experience is religious inasmuch as it engages
the will's determinate persevering willful self-commitment to God.

These two orders coalesce in the cross's cruciformity on which Christ, God/Superman, is crucified and undergoes His volunteer passion and death. In this crucifixion these two non-educible and irreducible orders are reconciled with each other through the power of Christ and the Father's Holy Spirit residing within the intimacy of the mystic's own selfhood. Mankind's liberation from the historical prison of the self-alienating hell of his own selfish selfhood and his corresponding peaceful reconciliation with God's very own transcendent eternal sublime Nature are purchased by the Blood of Christ.

This cruciform coalescence is focused in the mystic's conscience which is a fusion between the intellect's objective intelligible cognizance of Truth's moral practicality and the mind's subjective willful self-conscious awareness of its own volitive surrender to the integrity of this same Truth. In this conscionable coalescence the mystic simultaneously understands and experiences the supernaturally revealed Word of God interiorly (i.e., intellectually by faith), intimately (i.e., mindfully by hope), and integrally (i.e., conscientiously by charity) in the Person of Jesus Christ, God/Superman. This cruciform coalescence entails undergoing and sharing in the sanctifying crucible of Christ's very own suffering and glory. This is nothing less than objectively dutifully living Christ's very own Love of the Father's Wisdom and subjectively experiencing His own gratuitous power influenced by the Holy Spirit's Wisdom of Love.

The extraordinary genius of our Sanjaunistic mystagogical writings is their cruciform integrality and theological triune integrity. They are first presented in poetic verses steeped in the religious resonance of the mystic's own subjective personalized religious experience of God's Trinitarian supernatural self-revelation. They are subsequently presented in a prose proper to the Catholic Christian's objective intellectual theological insight into this same self-revelation of God's Triune Godhead vis-a-vis the creature's creation, historical journey, and final eternal destiny. They are inspired, studded, and buttressed with citations from Sacred Scripture.

A word of explanation seems in place regarding St. John's heavy emphasis on the element of ascetic darkness and nullity throughout his writings. How can this be reconciled with the Gospel's revelation that Christ is the Light of the world? The key to this stems from the unremitting struggle that confronts the Catholic Christian sacramentally baptized into the death and divine Life of Christ's Paschal Mystery. This struggle continuously countermands the instincts of mankind's very own nature precisely because it engages the mystic vertically in a supernaturally sublimated prayerful activity initiated and sustained by God-the-Father Himself.

It further is entirely counter-cultural horizontally because it cuts against the grain of the self's worldly willful selfish self-centeredness inasmuch as it entails the mystic's prayerful surrender to and embrace of God-the-Son's consummate volunteer sacrificial self-oblation to the Father's Holy Will. Further, it cruciformly in the coalescence of these two orders demands a prayerful superhumane superheroic religious self-giving to God empowered with God-the-Spirit's very own unbounded largesse and unfettered
freedom of benign Giftedness.

This negativity may be best explained in the light of the Supreme reality which is God's very own Triune Godhead. God is not only the preeminent Being among all beings, God is Beingness itself outside of which there is only non-being (i.e., not God). God's divine existence exhausts the totality of existence itself. No creature is Beingness; hence, no creature is identical with God's own divine existence. Accordingly, there are different intelligible renditions of "non.being." One is entirely negative. This is the non-being as a mere point of reference from which every creature is created by God. We frequently employ this sense of non-being when we declare to speak "nothing but the Truth."

Another sense is entirely positive. This is the creature itself created by God. The creature is a relative being inasmuch as no creature is God's very own absolute Beingness. Each creature is a relative being because its very own existence exists only in reference to God. Its being is simultaneously dependent on God for its own existence and since this existence is not that of God's own Beingness, it is a non-being. Hence, St. John of the Cross insists that no creature is to be whole-heartedly worshiped in the same manner that one worships God.

Finally, there is the privative sense of non-being. This is a lack and a need for an existing being in a selfhood that remains lacking until it finds its very own self-fulfillment in an existing reality beyond the subjectivity and emptiness of its own lacking. Accordingly every human self must die to its own selfhood in order to participate through Christ in God's Triune divine Life beyond the deficiency of its own needfulness. Such a lacking needful subjectivity is exclusively peculiar to mankind's own personhood. The brute animal has no egocentric self-consciousness and neither do the angels. This self-centered ego-subjectivity is the mark of the dignity and sovereignty of the human person's own personhood capable of cultivating and civilizing its own personality. This selfhood and all its civilized worldly possessive attachments are impediments to the mystic's total dutiful, self-controlled, volunteer worshipful attachment to God's very own adorable divinity. Total detachment from the non-being of one's own partisan selfish selfhood is the inescapable ascetic condition for becoming unconditionally attached to God's very own Beingness.

For St. John, the mystic must actively forego maximizing created goods for their own sake. This is the case even if such goods are morally upright and supernaturally God's very own blessings. God's very own divinity alone is worthy of an unconditional love of worship and adoration. God alone is Supreme Goodness. God's own glory is the only purposeful intention worthy of the mystic's optimal purposeful free choices and actions. Further, the mystic must actively mortify his very own egocentric personalized self-serving motivations. His motivations must be principally and exclusively selflessly at the service of God and not his own partisan self-interest.
St. John's ascetic religious negativity is predicated on the lavishness of God's infinite love for mankind. The Catholic Christian mystic is called to respond to God's infinite love, measure for measure, treasure for treasure. This, of course, is humanly impossible.

The creature is finite; God is infinite. Hence, the mystic's task is to actively strip himself of every willful impediment to God's gracious gratuitous invitation to become enveloped  into the familiarity of the consummate supernatural love and loveliness proper to God's very own Triune Godhead. The brunt of this stripping for the mystic occurs in the horizontal order of the subjectiviey of his own religious personalized consciousness and ascetic life of mindful self-denial and Christian attitude of having less in order to be more Christ-like. Try as he may, the mystic can never strip himself utterly of his own selfish selfhood. To further facilitate this stripping, God denies to the mystic's religious experience every vestige of self-gratification and self-justification detracting from his total service and surrender to God's Holy Will. It is precisely this lack of religious self-gratification and justification that constitutes the "soul's dark night of the senses and spirit."

Caught in the painful throes of this divine denial, the ensuing emptiness of the mystic's religious emotional feelings and perturbation of his religious mental bearings is devastating to his own morale. He experiences no special incentive to continue serving and praying to God. The upshot of living through this excruciating religious ordeal of God's abandonment is that the mystic by persevering prayerfully in the service of God discovers himself to be truly a servant of God and no longer of his own partisan pious self-serving self-interests. At this point in the mystic's maturity God can flood the mystic with ecstatic religious somatic emotional delights and mental oceans of serenity precisely because these no longer are impediments to the mystic's selfless willful adoration and embrace of God over and beyond these delights themselves.

Two further notes seem important enough to emphasize here. St. John refers all activities to the mystic's soul. Without in the least compromising the integrity of his mystagogical writings the use of the word, person, will be preferred in my commentaries to St. John's use of soul. The soul is the substantive spiritual animating dynamism of the human body. In addition it is endowed with spiritual activities above and beyond the body's organicity (viz., intellectual pondering and the will's volitions). The person, on the other hand, while naturally endowed with a soul and entirely capable of acting objectively and transcendentally within the power of this soul's dynamism, is not limited to its animating activity.

Within the personalism of Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, also Pope John Paul II, who is intimately familiar with St. John of the Cross's writings, the human person in virtue of its own personhood willfully cultivates within its own egocentric subjectivity a self-humanizing and self-civilizing personality mindful of its own sociability. This subjective egocentric personality has a willful mind and will of its own quite distinct from the human soul's intellect and will. Furthermore, this self-conscious egocentric psychosomatic mind and heart exhibit all of the traits peculiar to St. John of the Cross's memory and even to his descriptions of the Will. In other words the very pith and core of the personality of the human person's personhood is the psychosomatic mind and heart of the person's selfhood.

We must appreciate to the full the tripartite dimension of the human person if we are to capture the plenitude of the mystical resonance inherent in the writings of St. John's elucidation of the mysteries of Christ and His revelation.  The human person in the vertical order achieves the excellence in his personhood personally through the vigor of the upright moral rectitude of his will dutifully obedient to honoring the truth of what he intelligently knows to be objectively the practical moral good of his own innate freedom of choice. Supernaturally this practical good is known by faith to be God's very own transcendent supreme Goodness and Holy Will revealed through the Tradition of the Church's liturgy, Sacred Scripture, and the Church Magisterium. This rotund dutiful moral conduct supernaturally buttressed by the Father's grace characterizes the fiber of his moral character.

In the horizontal order the person achieves the plenitude of his own personalized personality through the process of ascetically cultivating a self-detachment from the possessions which he acquires and to which he is prone to cling as a guarantee of his very own autonomous security. This is entirely counter-cultural in terms of the secular world's self-centered selfish esteem for its own partisan social welfare. A total self-detachment is impossible to mankind's fallen nature. God Himself in the Person of Jesus Christ's own Selfless crucified oblation superhumanistically detaches mankind completely from every self-alienating partisan selfish self-interest impeding the human person's personality from being utterly attached to God's own Godhead as its utmost everlasting security. When this self-detachment is sufficiently progressed its very charm makes itself manifest in the charism of the person's personality that lives in the holy hope of Christ's resurrectional victory over secular history's ultimate doom and timely termination.

The reconciliation of these two vertical-horizontal orders is achieved in the cross's cruciformity when the human person's personhood and personality achieve processively the stature of becoming a personage. Of course, this combines the element of moral duty and an unstinting service which in purely humane terms is frequently identified with the role of statesmen who are in a position to bring great benefit to entire countries over which they excercise their influential rule in a most benign  and unselfish way. In the superhumane divine economy of mankind's salvation, this is identified with the goodnes of the saints (both acclaimed and unacclaimed) who as disciples of Christ dutifully (i.e., willingly) intend the Father's Holy Will in all their deeds and sacrificially volunteer (i.e., willfully) in union with the Son to be-attitudinally alive to the Father's very own infinite paternal providential solicitude through the superhumane charitable power of Father & Son's Holy Spirit indwelling influentially within the inner inmost intimacy of their own egocentric selfhood. The mark of this personage is God's very own transcendent catholic ebullient holiness. 

We are fortunate to have all of the writings of our Carmelite Holy Father available in one volume, THE COLLECTED WORKS OF ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS. It is an ICS publication of the Institute of Carmelite Studies located in Washington, D.C. These four major writings are examined within a two-year period broken down into two five-month segments for each year. In the first year the Ascent and Dark Night are examined consecutively following the outline supplied on pp. 62-64 of the 1979 edition. In the second year, the Spiritual Canticle is reviewed in the first five-month segment and the Living Flame in the second five-month segment. The general plan of the Spiritual Canticle is found on pp. 405-407. The Living Flame's outline is found on pp. 578-579 in the stanzas of the Poem which epitomizes its mystical savor and thrust.

Our Blessed Mother, Mary, holds a preeminent place in the prayerful life of the Carmelite Mystic. Not only is she the Mother of Christ, God/Superman, but also Mother of His Sacramental Church and every member of this Church. She is the Mother of Christ's very own Supernatural Life sacramentally alive in this Mystical Body, the Church. It behooves the Carmelite to explicitly prayerfully have recourse to Mary in order to become more perfectly conformed to the Supernatural Life of her Divine Son, Jesus Christ. Hence, some portion of this three-year preparatory program of spiritual formation will be devoted to her and her preeminent maternal role of conceiving, bearing, nursing, nurturing, and fostering in her Carmelite children the very prayerful Life of her Divine Son.