Monday, June 9, 2014

A SPIRITUAL CANTICLE





St. John of The Cross  
Plot of his Spiritual Canticle


In the Spiritual Canticle St. John of the Cross tries to explain the mystical process that follows the soul until it reaches its union with God. In order to get this, the poet uses an allegory: the search of the husband (Christ) by the wife (the human soul). The wife feels itself wounded by love, and this makes it to start the search of the Beloved (el Amado); the soul asks everywhere for him in despair until they finally get together in the solitude of the garden (Paradise).

 



The Soul Personality Self’s Journey to find God:
A Spiritual Canticle for 2014
 
 by Brenda Harriet Nelson

 The Soul Personality Self is like a husband who has lost interest in his true Wife (his Soul) and so has lost his ability to find God—who is himself and who resides in his true Home, at the center of his being. This husband may take on the form of either gender.

He feels forgotten by Her. Yet it is he, himself, who has forgotten Her

He no longer values his own first wife—His Soul (who may appear as either gender)—nor does he even see/feel Her any more.  He has forgotten his mother as well—God/The Great Mother who lives within him, in the Home at the center of his being.

He seeks instead to find satisfaction by searching outward among his many other wives, friends’ wives, concubines , prostitutes and flirtations (symbols for all of his human activities).

He finally gives up in despair as none of these bring him lasting happiness (Alignment with God). Some did momentarily, but only because he had inadvertently stumbled onto the path of  happiness-inducing alignment when he did a certain thing. So he went on doing the thing, but the happiness it originally brought crumbled to dust as the path of alignment wended elsewhere. 

At the point of complete and utter despair, because he is in a state of profound surrender, She makes herself known to him. She helps him find his way Home to who he really is—God—the perfectly imperfect being he  is right now.

“You are already there and you will never arrive” he says of  The Journey  as he finally looks around and sees the magical beauty of the Paradise at his center and "out there" (which is still within)—a paradise that has always been where-ever he was, but which he was blind to, because he looked  only outward rather than inward and outward simultaneously. Or rather, because he looked outward through only his soul personality eyes and not the eyes of his Soul or The Great Mother.