Fire Within chapter 03

cake

Fire Within: Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross and the Gospel on Prayer (Fr. Thomas Dubay, S.M.) https://ignatius.com/fire-within-fwp/

(If you are catching up: chapter 1, chapter 2)

[Chapter 3, The Experience of God. I wonder what I wrote this week — probably a lot of nonsense. ... Yes.]

(1/22/25 Wednesday [Mass readings]) The experience of You, Lord... just now I have spent several minutes facedown on the living room floor where I was at first praying Memorares (I got partway through the 4th one) in terrible frustration at a dependent who was “too busy” to eat. He said “not hungry now!” and “too busy concentrating on this level!” of a game. So I flung myself on the floor, first, to pray for his heart (or mind) to be changed. Then (while lying there, sometime into the 2nd or 3rd Memorare, I expect) I remembered that prayer chiefly changes the person who is praying (me). It is not a big deal whether he eats or not, but rather, whether I fall to the temptation to be impatient w/ him. Then You helped me to calm down. Then I was content to be w/ You, having been reminded by the one photo I took of a page in He Leadeth Me, which comes up in my scheduled phone reminders on some cadence, that Your will is not “out there” for me to “discover” and then “do”, but rather, it is Your will that in the present moment, things are as they are: the floor is cold, but I am warm [hot flash at a convenient time], the dependent is not doing “what I want”, but I know he will eat eventually. I only have to accept Your will.

Then, after this (after I had fallen silent) I saw that my intense interest in “what I am working on” for work, and (often) unwillingness to stop for times of prayer [1] that I had set a watch alarm for, is just the same as being too absorbed in a game to eat food that someone else prepared + calls you to come and eat. (Actually sometimes I also forget to literally stop and eat, which I thought of first.)

Then after a while I heard a request for me to reheat the food (he knows how [to microwave it] but I don't mind) and I got up and did that and, and sat down at the same table to write to keep him company.

In this chapter the author talks about “the experience of God”. Like I said in the last post, he [Fr. Dubay] had to establish the veracity, the reliability, the sanity of his witnesses first b/c by the end of the chapter he will be in over his head already... however, when reading Frossard in “Forget Not Love” a reader can smell on his breath that he has had “an experience” when he is writing about someone else's [experience], and here too it is not the case of an author writing about a country he has never been to — all the same, Lord, there is a reader to be taken into account. [2]

Do You remember (of course You do) the time I almost had a baby in a parking lot because I have a tendency to deny symptoms or to expect them to occur in map-like perfection, and in the territory (“the map is not the territory” took me a very long time to understand, if I even do now) they do not occur quite as they are described [e.g. failing to understand “5 minutes apart” as meaning on average 5 minutes apart.] This too happened when I was certainly clinically depressed but looked at a checklist of symptoms as AND rather than OR.

(1/25/2025 Saturday [Mass readings] — The day was Conversion of St. Paul but now it's evening.) In the best[3] tradition, Lord, I am not going to look back at what I was writing (but just look at my bookmark to see where to pick up in the chapter.)

“Delightful times are mingled w/ periods of emptiness” the author writes; as he should, he goes on to describe delightful times — this is not a chapter in which the reader should be frightened away; they have only just started the book. What I don't see written about as often as “dry, boring, arid” prayer [in books in general, not specifically this book or chapter] is “crack an egg on the sidewalk” prayer (this is not a proper description.) If I am bored during vocal prayer, Lord, I just assume it is me, but otherwise I seem to chiefly know extremes. Anyway, the point of this chapter should be (I think) to indicate that You, in this life, already desire to lead people to joy that is too great to describe, and people should be asking: well, how do I sign up for that? Like, it is not a matter of “be very good (all year) (all of your life) and (Santa will bring you presents at Christmas) (you will go to heaven when you die)” but rather it is a matter of walking in greater and greater intimacy with You, Lord, knowing that it is You... someone is very loud near me, and so I don't have any useful thoughts for You — he is listening to clips of Sesame Street “Annie Get Your Gumbo”, and saying “Bob talks like a louder Frank but w/o the southern accent.” — I said (puzzled) “he doesn't sound like Bob” and he said “I meant how I was doing Bob” by which he means he says Bob's lines in Telly's voice, so in other words TELLY talks like Frank but louder and w/o the southern accent. “Isn't Bob kind of shouty in this one?” he says after singing (shouting) “People In Your Neighborhood” (the one with Ben Stiller) like Telly so loud it hurt my ears. ... [Apropos of nothing] Apparently I'm taking a midnight to 2am adoration shift.

[Technically Sunday, 12:0something am] Is it any use writing of “the experience of God”? Since reading it will not make a person more holy and since only a pale shadow of “it's like this” can be understood for any human experience that a person has not undergone? Well, Lord, I guess I would say “yes” because maybe[4] a person would give You a fair shake — let You show them that You are serious about wanting them — if they have heard that there are many good things in the life of prayer that they have not experienced and could experience. They might say “well, I will give it a shot,” or they might say “how do I set foot on this ladder?” — This ladder! [5] — You said, Lord, to Nathaniel (an honest man: “can anything good come from Nazareth?”) that he would see greater things than these, when he acknowledged You as God after You said You had seen him sitting under the fig tree. Philip said to him “come and see” and because he knew and generally trusted Philip he came and saw, and what he saw was You, Lord, in the flesh and seeing and hearing he began to believe and at this, the beginning of his road, You said what he would see. I am sure he did not wholly understand it.

But desiring to lead us onward to perfect or complete joy You sometimes give a taste of something like “try this” samples in a grocery store, or You intrigue us with whispers from someone who has tasted... St. Augustine said [6] he breathed in, and panted for You. We should in no way consider this to be a poetic exaggeration... How many settings (at least four [Hurd, Haugen, two others]) we sang of Psalm 42, my Lord, when I was in the choir in college... if we had found more we would have sung more because we liked it, in a head-knowledge way, like reading “Sing hey! for a bath at close of day” [7] in Fellowship of the Ring when one is not cold or tired or muddy or wanting to bathe. This is different than at the end of a long cold day with snow shoveling in it several times, being actually in very warm water, not shower, ... I won't say none of us knew [in college, experientially, Psalm 42] (how would I know?) but I [in college, etc] did not know what it might actually be like to drink when thirsty and to yearn for cool water having once known it. This is because the yearning itself is from You and given by You: like being hungry because of currently smelling something (we are aware, in that case, of the smell, but we do not and cannot sense the source of yearning. [I was therefore dissatisfied with the analogy.])

(It's 1:03 am now) — This yearning, which is Your gift, is a thing You can crank up “to eleven” [8] or to a moderate level, [here I confusingly reversed the order] from “somewhat hungry or thirsty” to “I would crawl over broken glass to be with You” and when a person understands that the yearning is for the sight of You (who are close to us but in darkness like Psyche and Cupid in Till We Have Faces — but also not like that for reasons I won't get into just now [Typical! No idea what I was thinking of]) and that as we have been taught we cannot see You and live (which we knew even from Moses asking to see You, O most delightful one). [9] Then what is there to do but to say to You: I am ready when You are. But in other moments the soul knows that — as in the Dream of Gerontius [10] — there is a lot more work for You to do and if it popped off just now it would just have to cast itself into purgatory anyhow. What will the soul then [i.e “in other moments”] do? Ask earnestly to be purified in this life at whatever pace is pleasing to You (how could a creature propose a more efficient timeline than You, who know all, from whom nothing is hidden, and who desire this union more than we do: more even than St. John of the Cross writing ardent/lovesick poetry about longing?)

The soul therefore would say: burn out of me, Lord, as soon as You like, whatever in me is displeasing to You; “Only, give me the grace to endure it, because without Your help I cannot.” —> since a soul in this state would also be aware of its own abject poverty; we have nothing of our own (except our sins, which are a “nothing” anyway); everything is received from You.

Anyway,

I sure don't know about this cherubim (really seraphim: one of the burning ones who touched a coal to Isaiah's lips) sticking an arrow or spear or whatever into St Teresa's heart. But (I am at the adoration chapel at the Oratory) it is no stranger than St. Philip Neri's adventure in the catacombs. Her heart had a mark on it (in autopsy) and his ribcage was found to be... well, You know and anyone else can go read about it. It is only 1:25...

As the author says (or doesn't say yet), sometimes You give these things [i.e. I have reverted to the discussion of yearning, not extraordinary events], and sometimes You are just as though companionably silent, and sometimes You are as though facing away (I will find the meme and put it in) [11] and sometimes You are the fire that does not consume the bush but the bush scarcely knows this reassuring fact but only “that I am burning!!” — Whatever happens, a person ought to “eat what is set in front of you”. Especially if it is cake!! — “get up and eat, else the journey will be too long for you” [12] — in the early (or even middle) stages a person can even be afraid to eat the cake: for fear of “loss of control” chiefly [perhaps I will discuss this another time]. [13] But one is already not in control (the illusion dies hard.) The more we burn in Your love the less we fear. I would wonder what it is like to die, but no need to wonder, since someday I shall know. What You want, Lord, and when You want it: this is what I ought to say, all the time, and not only at times of prayer. However, You will take care of that also.

Next chapter: https://withoutcost.substack.com/p/fire-within-chapter-04

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[1] I was about to add, in square brackets, “and for meals” but I see that I wrote about that in the next sentence. In any case I wanted to keep the focus on prayer as sustenance provided by someone who patiently waits.

[2] What was I getting at here? Sorry, I have no idea. I know I mentioned Frossard because he was mentioned in the chapter and so I was reminded. I have four post-it flags and a bookmark in Forget Not Love: the first flag at the bottom of p. 24 "The Apparition" at the section beginning “The mystical experience carries with it surprise, joy, and contradiction” and this is certainly the section that, having read it (to the end of the chapter) I looked up Andre Frossard in a web search to find out what happened to this guy? because it was clearly, although written as though in the abstract, autobiographical. The second flag is at p. 37 "Two Letters" at these words “For Maximilian, to be a saint was the least one owed to God in return for his graces...” The third flag is at p. 51 "La Casa Kolbe", in case I had the urge to explain to one of my kids how it is that there are relics of St. Maximilian Kolbe. The fourth flag is at p. 101 "Mary Without Sin" at “It must be explained that for a mystic pride begins when he loses a clear consciousness of his own nothingness...”. The bookmark — no, I find there are two bookmarks — one at p. 136 "The Return" (perhaps marking the paragraph which begins with his brother and detours into serenity), the other at p. 152 "The Cause of Saints".

[3] It would be better to write an organized whole but sometimes this is just not on the table.

[4] Here I am on shaky ground, hypothesizing where I have no personal experience (it seems to me that I did not enlist but rather that I was drafted and so I have actually no idea why people enlist or what means of persuasion are effective.)

[5] Here I am thinking of John 1:44-51.

[6] https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/latinconf/10.html CAPUT 27. “... fragrasti, et duxi spiritum, et anhelo tibi, gustavi et esurio et sitio, tetigisti me, et exarsi in pacem tuam.” Translation https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/669135-late-have-i-loved-you-o-beauty-ever-ancient-ever .

[7] https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Bath-songs

[8] cf. This Is Spinal Tap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_to_eleven

[9] Exodus 33:20 (now I am thinking of Exodus 33:11 (the Lord spoke to Moses face to face as one speaks to a friend) and Matthew 17:3 (like old times but literally))

[10] https://newmanreader.org/works/verses/gerontius.html

[11] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/no-talk-me-im-angy the white/orange kitten, specifically.

[12] 1 Kings 19:7 they had to tell him twice.

[13] do I have to explain cake as a figure of speech? I do not know whether I have to explain it.