50

all of the left leg’s steps

(Thursday 8/21/2025 - readings - after daily Mass)

[Apropos of nothing. Why was I writing on this subject? Who knows.]

I think it’s important to understand that the passive and active purifications (what You do, and what we do) are not a strictly sequenced thing; authors write about active and then passive because that makes a book easier to write and clearer to read. But they are the two legs of a person walking up the stairs — we don’t take all of the left leg’s steps forward and then all of the right leg’s steps — that would be impossible... instead taking a step w/ the left leg makes it possible to take the next step w/ the right leg. The active and passive purifications are like the two strings of a “climbing bear” toy (we had a climbing gingerbread man) [I was fairly certain while writing that sentence that I have written about this before]; pull the left string and right string alternating, but maintain tension; if both strings are slack it will slide down to the bottom.

These purifications [i.e. the entire climb of the toy] are referred to by St. John of the Cross as the night of sense and the night of the spirit, and each of these two he divides into active and passive [i.e. the left and right strings] in order to describe to us what we ought to do, for our part, and what we ought to be willing to undergo, for God’s part; e.g. I ought (as a child) to be willing to pick up my toys and I ought to be willing to undergo hearing my mother vacuum the floor.

This is not a great analogy, Lord, but it is what I have at the moment. It is as though You go through the house room by room encouraging us to clean (the child cannot even pick up her toys alone) and then cleaning what we cannot — but although it is much better now, even the rooms that have been tidied up like this, when the sun shines through the window, are clearly still FAR from a magazine photo or a house staged for sale... living there we know (on sunny days) there is more work to do but “not yet”... and at the same time — Lord, in my actual house — the attic is objectively filthy (I keep nothing in it) and beyond my capacity or desire to do anything about; I block off the door to it. This is in the literal sense and I don’t know if it belongs also in the metaphor. You would want to “Mister Clean” it up, mend all the gaps where birds + squirrels can enter, and make it somehow into a habitable space as some houses have ... you don’t ever discard but rather transform... nothing in Your final design will have a “do not enter” sign.

I, however, Lord, am an abysmal [which, although ordinarily a decent speller, I attempted to spell “abyssymal”] housekeeper (here I am being literal) and I beg that You will make me put first things first, second things second, neither of them “never” (or “hardly ever” [music note doodle]) and eliminate ruthlessly from my life whatever separates me from You; amen.

[It is now the evening of Friday 8/22 (readings) and I have not yet typed this up. Perhaps Google Lens can transcribe my handwriting, I thought. However, having made the experiment, I find that it cannot.]

[We always talk about walking up stairs in the spiritual life - here, however, are stairs that you go down in order to continue climbing a hill. It is either a pedestrian underpass or a troll’s lair depending on whether you have a fantastical imagination. It was not nearly as bad as it looked from the top of the stairs where a person cannot see “the light at the end of the (very short, very straight) tunnel”.]