Stanza 4
—
ESPOSA:
¡Oh bosques y espesuras,
plantadas por la mano del Amado!
¡Oh prado de verduras,
de flores esmaltado!
Decid si por vosotros ha pasado.
—
SPOUSE:
O groves and thickets
Planted by the hand of the Beloved;
O verdant meadow
Enameled with flowers,
Tell me, has He passed by you?
Excerpt of Saint John +’s teaching on stanza 4:
The soul has made known the manner of preparing oneself to begin this journey: to pursue delights and satisfactions no longer, and to overcome temptations and difficulties through fortitude. This is the practice of self-knowledge, the first requirement of advancing to the knowledge of God. Now, in this stanza, she [the soul] begins to walk along the way of the knowledge and consideration of creatures that leads to the knowledge of her Beloved, the Creator.
On this spiritual road the consideration of creatures is first in order after exercise of self-knowledge. The soul thereby advances in the knowledge of God by considering his greatness and excellence manifested in creatures, as is brought out in that passage of St. Paul: The invisible things of God are known by the soul through creatures, both visible and invisible [Rom. 1:20].
Personal reflection on stanza 4:
Again in stanza 4 as in stanza 3, SJ+ is explosive in his invocation of symbols which have rich intended spiritual meanings associated with each. Admittedly, the intended spiritual meanings for the symbols invoked in this stanza were not intuitive to me. In fact, they were confusing to me and required me to meditate carefully on them before I could start to make sense out of them. Here is an inventory of SJ+’s intended spiritual meanings for the symbols that he invokes in this stanza. Again, I am extracting these decoded meanings from SJ+’s own commentary about his poem–I am not adding my own personal interpretation to these symbols:
- woods = earth, water, air, and fire, i.e., all of the “elements” in a unity, populated with creatures
- thickets = reference to vast number and difference among creations
- green meadow = the heavens, including the diversity of beautiful stars and other heavenly planets
- coated, bright with flowers = the “flowers” are the angels and saintly souls that adorn and beautify heaven, as John says in his commentary: “like a costly enamel on a vase of fine gold”
The symbol that really threw me is the green meadow symbolizing the heavens. For me, I began to render this metaphor more sensible as I meditated on it in the context of the Lord’s prayer, i.e., “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” There is a pattern that comes us repeated in mystical Christianity wherein the earth below is a shadow and figure of the heaven above. Or in other words, that there is a bifurcation in God’s creation between a lower order creation which we inhabited and a higher order creation which the angels and post-mortal saints inhabit. (Oh, how I want to live in this higher order of creation with them.) This theology of a bifurcated creation also shows up in SJ+’s “Romanzas” (his poems about the love within the Trinity). So here in this poem, it seems sensible to me to understand SJ+ as using something we readily see here on earth–a green meadow, coated bright with flowers–to give us a concrete and sensory image for the nature of that higher order in creation.
+ forward to Canticle Journey, Day 5
– back to Canticle Journey, Day 3
~ return to Spiritual Canticle main page