Spiritual Canticle of the Soul and the Bridegroom
An intense love of God seems to have inspired the creation of this canticle, a God whose love and wisdom is so infinite that it spans from end to end. The soul, grown closer to the beloved in love of whom and guided and energized by whom reflects the same amazing abundance and spirit of magnificence; the same fullness and spirit of love defies almost all articulation. It is so by dint of the fact that this approach to the divine is characterized and affected by its nearness to the ineffable, the incomprehensible, and the unspeakable. However, it would spell one's going completely awry, if one were to expect to undertand, in any sense or manner, to come to terms with or move in a grasping gesture toward this deeply apophatic and transcendent realm and seek to appropriate or lay hold of it with the profoundly limited (for the purpose) human faculties and categories like reason and language. I fact, the very sinful constitution of the human person decapacitates him or her for this this perfect light or this union with God. It can be accomplished or effectedonly throuh divine grace rendering all human volition and effort as insufficint in the final accomplishment of the goal. In the final analysis, it is not merely the language of love but also thaat of mystical intelligence. The poetic words and stanzas of St John of Cross are also the spontaneous expression of the mystical intellince which is over and beyond human intelligence. This human frailty of heart, mind, spirit and intellect (Romans?) issuc h that cannot communicate to God even in prayer without the intervention of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, eszxentially, these poetic stanzas giving expression to his ineffable and incomrehensible experience of the divine light and union with it are ineffable.
He is an Indwelling God who knows the Spirit of man and creates and communicates his prayers for him. The prayers that theSpirit, dwelling within and outseide the human spirit, utters are for the supplicant unutterable; byond the ken of his discursive intellect. (The Spirith helpeth our infirmity ... the Spirit itself requested for us with groanings unspeakable. It is an event that happens in secret yet openly. It is not forthe rest of the created world to limpse and reveal though created words this ulterior and transcendent reality thatdwells in and outside all. His grace brings relected souls into the divine liht and it is not forus to ask why oe whom or white. The inarticulable experience of apophasis defies all inprisonment into language and words must fall silent in the face of it.
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