Canticle Journey, Day 3

Stanza 3

—

ESPOSA:

Buscando mis amores,
iré por esos montes y riberas;
ni cogeré las flores,
ni temeré las fieras,
y pasaré los fuertes y fronteras.

—

SPOUSE:

In search of my Love
I will go over mountains and rivers;
I will gather no flowers,
I will fear no wild beasts,
And pass by the mighty and the frontiers.

Excerpt of Saint John +’s teaching on stanza 3:

The soul is aware that neither her sighs and prayers nor the help of good intermediaries, about which she spoke in the first and second stanzas, are sufficient for her to find her Beloved. Since the desire in which she seeks him is authentic and her love intense, she does not want to leave any possible means untried. The soul that truly loves God is not slothful in doing all she can to find the Son of God, her Beloved. Even after she has done everything, she is dissatisfied and thinks she has done nothing. 

And accordingly in this third stanza she says that she herself through works desires to look for him, and she describes the method to be employed in order to find him: she must practice the virtues and engage in the spiritual exercises of both the active and the contemplative life. As a result she must tolerate no delights or comforts, and the powers and snares of her three enemies (the world, the devil, and the flesh) must neither detain nor impede her.

Personal reflection on stanza 3:

Even though each stanza is quite short on its own, SJ+ packs a lot of symbolism into his text. This stanza in particular explodes with richly analytical meaning, so rich in its analytical and systematic qualities that it reinforces my own speculation that SJ+’s writings may be used as something of a Rosetta Stone to translate between spiritual, psychological, and physiological ways of knowing and understanding human nature.

Here is a brief synopsis of SJ+’s symbolism in this stanza:

• mountains = virtues (because they are spiritually “high” places)
• rivers = mortifications (because they are spiritually “low” places)
• flowers = gratifications, satisfactions, and delights
  • three kinds of flowers specified in SJ+’s commentary:
    • temporal
    • sensory
    • spiritual
• wild beasts, strong men, and frontiers = the three enemies of the soul
  • wild beasts = world
  • strong men = devil
  • frontiers = flesh

SJ+ is giving us in this stanza an artistic portrait of the active spiritual life: ascent to higher virtue, descent to lower mortification, detachment from reward and consolation, with fearlessness against the enemies of the soul. Baller. SJ+ writes poetically, yes, but also he writes in systematic detail whose depth and spiritual logic are not immediately apparent to me without the help of his commentary. It’s not off the mark to think about this duality of artistry and analytics as appealing to both hemispheres of the cortex, i.e., the right hemisphere of the brain’s cortex which is typically specialized to process affective prosody of language and the left hemisphere of the brain’s cortex which is typically specialized to process language semantically and analytically…my main point here being that SJ+ is using multiple forms of his own intelligence in order to help infuse multiple forms greater spiritual intelligence into our own minds as we absorb and internalize his poetic offering.

Lastly for now, I’ll note that I think it’s likely to be spiritually productive for us to commit at least portions of SJ+’s poetry to memory so that our minds can both consciously and unconsciously recite the verses and meditate on their meaning. Especially given how actively our brain spontaneously recalls and processes those things which are stored in our memory, I visualize this collective process of conscious and unconscious recitation and meditation on the verses stored in our memory as something like our brain/mind churning the “whole milk” of SJ+’s poetry into spiritual “cream”.

+ forward to Canticle Journey, Day 4
– back to Canticle Journey, Day 2
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