Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

When I was in high school, I discovered a copy of Thomas Merton’s Ascent of Mount Carmel in the school library and devoured it. I’d only recently been introduced to the reality that Christianity had an immensely rich and amazing mystical tradition (I would later learn that a distinction between doing theology and doing mysticism was a pretty recent distinction in Christianity), and reading Merton’s discussion of the mysticism of Saint John of the Cross answered in me a hunger for a deeper engagement with my faith that I couldn’t rightly articulate until encountering the book. It was amazing and life changing in a whole host of ways!

Somewhere in the book (I think pretty early in), Merton had reproduced Saint John’s sketch of a mystical ascent of Mount Carmel. At the base of the sketch was a poem crystallizing John’s thought, beginning, “To reach satisfaction in all / desire satisfaction in nothing. / To come to the knowledge of all / desire the knowledge of nothing. / To come to possess all / desire the possession of nothing. / To arrive at being all / desire to be nothing.” I was so incredibly confused! Confused and, to be honest, delighted for being so perplexed! I took it as an invitation to go deeper.

It would take me a long time to learn that John wasn’t talking about ending desire, but about learning to desire the greatest Good, learning from God to desire God and settling for nothing less than God: desiring not the things of this earth, not even the joys of heaven, but only God. The key to the poem was there in the sketch, and I didn’t realize it: John had enumerated a series of earthly and heavenly goods (knowledge, consolation, joy, possessions), the denials of which served as so many stepping stones to the summit of the mount. Near this mystical staircase, John had written, “Now that I no longer desire them, I have them all without desire.”

One of the things in the sketch that consistently challenged me was the inscription at the very top, the summit of the Mount, “Here there is no longer any way because for the just one there is no law, they are a law unto themself.” Now, my high school self thought, “Oh cool! Acquire just-ness and you can do whatever you want!” Which is precisely and definitively not what John is saying!

What he’s saying is much more like what Paul is saying in the epistle reading today when he writes in Romans 2:14, “When Gentiles, who do not possess the law, do instinctively what the law requires, these, though not having the law, are a law to themselves.” He’s speaking of the law of righteousness as a way-of-being that’s intrinsic to the human person, intrinsic to being human. The just external law is a reminder of this fundamentally human way-of-being (written on the heart) and an encouragement to return to it. To be truly just, then, is to be fully human—to be fully human is to be just, to live the way of justice and of love that the external law can only mirror. It is to be, in John of the Cross’ understanding, a living flame of love. It is to live a life completely transparent to the Risen Life of Jesus Christ in whom (by virtue of the fullness of his divinity) the fullness of our humanity is fully recovered, recoverable, and manifested; a life in which Christ is not only truly visible, but truly visible as truly alive. What other way could there be for a person completely and mystically united to the One who is the Way?

Dear Friend! As we continue our Lenten journey together, as we walk the Way of the Cross together, may we grow ever mindful that we are journeying into the fullness of our humanity revealed completely in Jesus Christ. And let us desire Jesus so completely that we can desire nothing else apart from Jesus, that in the Light of the Resurrection we may, without possessive desire and completely by grace, discover ourselves inheritors of the fullness of the Kingdom of God, and clothed, at the last, with the All of Christ’s own divinity .

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+