Stanza 11
—
ESPOSA:
Descubre tu presencia,
y máteme tu vista y hermosura;
mira que la dolencia
de amor, que no se cura
sino con la presencia y la figura.
—
BRIDE:
Reveal Your presence,
And let the vision and Your beauty kill me,
Behold the malady
Of love is incurable
Except in Your presence and before Your face.
Excerpt of Saint John +’s teaching on stanza 11:
It should be known that the loving Bridegroom of souls cannot long watch them suffering alone as this soul is suffering because, as he says through Zechariah, their afflictions touch him in the apple of his eye [Zech. 2:8], especially when these afflictions are the outcome of love for him, as are those of this soul…
In explanation of this verse it should be known that God’s presence can be of three kinds:
The first is his presence by essence. In this way he is present not only in the holiest of souls but also in sinners and all other creatures. With this presence he gives them life and being…
The second is his presence by grace, in which he abides in the soul, pleased and satisfied with it. Not all have this presence of God; those who fall into mortal sin lose it. The soul cannot know naturally if it has this presence.
The third is his presence by spiritual affection, for God usually grants his spiritual presence to devout souls in many ways by which he refreshes, delights, and gladdens them…(T)he above verse “reveal your presence” could be understood of any of these three ways in which God is present…
The soul is right in daring to say, “may the vision of your beauty be my death,” since she knows that at the instant she sees this beauty she will be carried away by it, and absorbed in the very beauty, and transformed in this beauty, and made beautiful like this beauty itself, and enriched and provided for like this very beauty…
Accordingly, the soul does not fear death when she loves; rather she desires it. Yet sinners are always fearful of death.
Personal reflection on stanza 11:
Scripture says that no human has seen God and lived. I imaginatively and intellectively consider this declaration as in fact a descriptive statement rather than only an impressionistic or mere poetic exclamation. Both my imagination and my reason represent as potentially real a scenario wherein the revealed vision of God’s face is so magnificently wonderful, that it would cause our whole will to entirely orient toward God’s self with such a force that our very mind, consciousness, spirit, and soul would be stripped as it were from the body they inhabit in this world in whatever ways that this is possible; and that all our self that could do so would fly to God like iron flying toward a very strong magnetic. So great would be the attractive force of the eternal elements in our nature to the infinite source of every holiness that they would fly from this lower sphere of creation into a higher one. In this way, I don’t think we could see the revealed face of God and bear to live apart from him.
Could the revelation of his divine face be anything other than supernaturally potentiated through a synthesis of our physical and spiritual faculties enabled in grace to their highest degree? I think of the apostles on Mount Tabor who fell to the ground and trembled, even when they only saw a fraction of his glory revealed in energies of uncreated light radiating from the human face of Jesus.
May we one day attain the purity and detachment of Saint John of the + so that we can say in all simplicity and ease of humility, “Let the vision and Your beauty kill me.”
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