Poets of carmel: Longing for the infinite

Bonsaint, Romeo J

1. Poetic Expression: A Summons to Awakening

The appeal of the poetry of the Carmelite mystics lies in its timeless evocative capacity. If we take the time to attend to its summons, the poetry of these daughters and sons of Carmel can serve to awaken us from the drowsiness of habit and reaction to the fullness of our unique life in Christ that the Gospel promises.

In his memoir entitled Another Beauty, the poet Adam Zagajewski offers a metaphor for such an awakening as he relates the effect that the ringing bells of Krakow has on his consciousness:

One day I heard the bells. They rang every day, but I couldn't always hear them.... This ringing merely makes the air's latent, inner trembling both immanent and audible. It divulges the air's hidden nature. Some passersby clapped their palms to their ears, shielding them; they couldn't bear the ringing. Others grumbled that the bells woke them at dawn, or didn't let them watch TV, or kept them from getting to sleep.... But I didn't cover my ears; the deluge of bells made me happy. The bells gave me a moment of happiness; thanks to them I understood once more that greatness exists in spite of my laziness, in spite of those long spells when I forgot all about it; it slipped my mind for weeks on end as I got lost in other projects, grew preoccupied by other cares and longings. The bells woke me to a higher life .2

The everyday form that our "laziness" takes is forgetfulness, a forgetfulness that life is more than the "bottomline." It is a forgetfulness of our deepest desires and our ultimate longing. It is our loss of connection to the yearnings, joys, and pains of our hearts and souls because of the pervasive noise of the immediate demands to be productive, successful, and connected. If we can let them, the words of the Carmelite poets-in their very potent summons to silence and presence-can afford us a "moment of happiness" in the midst of our stress and strain.

At the core of our being we are participants in a ceaseless conversation, a dialogue of our soul with God. In our everyday lives, which are dominated by the "laziness" of habit and reaction, we are absent from this conversation. We could say that our pretranscendent life (a life lived mostly on the exterior) is a life of self-absorbed anxiety, while our transcendent (interior) life is a loving dialogue:

I stayed: I surrendered / resting my face on my Beloved.

Nothing mattered.

I left my cares / forgotten among the lilies.3

The joy of Divine Communion is realized only when others participate in it with us. As Adam Zagajewski notes,

In a certain sense, the very phrase "the inner life" is imprecise. It is in fact within us, but it's in ceaseless conversation with what lies outside. It's always directed toward the outer world and exists only in dialogue with a small or great transcendence.4

This "conversation with what lies outside" is an expression, however, of the inner dialogue with the "great transcendence." In this way it differs from the pretranscendent dialogue of ordinary life that converses with "the outside" in order to discern, from others, its identity. The great twentieth-century Carmelite St. Therise of Lisieux describes the fruit of this inner conversation that is the source of her life and expression:

Lord, you chose me from my earliest childhood,

And I can call myself the work of your love ....5

Thus, the poetry of Therese, and of all of the Carmelite poets, is an expression of a unique experience of being called by God and an invitation to readers to awaken to and recognize their call.

Poetic Expression

Poetic expression, the fruit of poetic consciousness, is so distinctive from ordinary (prosaic) expression precisely because it emerges out of this unique interior conversation. In his Detailed Rules for Monks, St. Basil declares that he is occasionally "overcome by a kind of dread and numbness at the very possibility of ceasing to love God...because of my lack of recollection and my preoccupation with trivialities." The "trivialities" of which St. Basil speaks, of course, are the ordinary concerns related to our management of everyday life. These concerns become trivial, in his sense, when we react to them out of habit and routine rather than responding to them distinctively out of our unique interior conversation with the Divine.

Our ordinary language, based on a grammar of sentences and paragraphs, is best suited to our capacities for management and control. The thought, embodied in the sentence and the idea, fleshed out in the paragraph, is fully captured and explained for communication to the listener. The reality or the experience, which is the basis of the communication, is thus reduced to the speaker's idea or comprehension of it-that which is capable of being explained. Each word in the sentence serves, and is thus limited by, the thought expressed by the sentence.

Poetry, on the other hand, is distinguished by the fact that its basic unit is not the sentence but the line. In poetry, each word stands out, far more, on its own. The lines of poetry are often fragments, not the conventional single meaning of the sentence. Thus, the word remains not a functionary of a limited and controlled thought but a pointer to the mystery, the inexpressibility of that experience from which it comes.

In the spiritual poetry of the Carmelites, the language of the poem is an access into the mysterious connection of the poet with his or her Divine call (the "interior conversation") and an open invitation to the reader's own sharing in this great Divine connection. The poet Edward Hirsch has recently written,

Reading poetry is a way of connecting-through the medium of language-more deeply with yourself even as you connect more deeply with another. The poem delivers on our spiritual lives precisely because it simultaneously gives us the gift of intimacy and inferiority, privacy and participation.7

Poetry is a most appropriate medium for the communication of the inner dialogue precisely because of its "unbounded" nature. It gives open expression to the poet's unique conversation of soul with God (intimacy) while inviting and even leading the reader to enter into her or his own conversation (inferiority). Its openness of expression respects the reader's unique conversation (privacy) while offering the companionship of a fellow solitary (participation).

The Poetry of Carmel

What gives the poetry of Carmel its spiritual potency, the ring of truth to its description of the silence, the connection, and the conversation with the Divine within? As we work toward an answer to this question, let us consider a poem of St. John of the Cross, "Anchorless and Yet Anchored":

Anchorless and yet anchored, / living in darkness without light,

I consume myself completely.

My soul is unattached / to any created thing,

raised above itself / in delightful life,

anchored in God alone.

Now everyone will know / what's most important to me;

that my soul now finds itself / anchorless and yet anchored.

And though I pass through shadows / in this mortal life

my pain is not excessive;

I may feel the lack of light /but I have life from heaven.

For when love grows this blind, / it gives us so much life

that the soul is left with / living in darkness without light.

Love has worked such things in me / since I came to know it,

that all my good and evil / it turns into my delight,

making my soul like itself.

And so, in the delightful flame / that I feel within myself,

swiftly and thoroughly / I consume myself completely.8

The poet here invites us into the most intimate of places in himself, into his very soul. In fact, he tells us that we will "know what's most important" to him. The call to the monastery, as the call to radical discipleship, is a call to absolute poverty and detachment: "Go and sell everything you own and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me" (Mk 10:21). It is, in St. John's words, to live with one's soul "unattached to any created thing," to anchor one's soul "in its God alone." But what is such an unattached but anchored life like? What does it mean to be "anchored in God alone"? It is, says St. John, to find one's soul "anchorless and yet anchored." It is to feel "life from heaven" in one's "lack of light." It is to come to where Love turns "all my good and evil...into my delight." It is to have one's self consumed by Love that one's soul may become like Love itself.

But St. John does more than merely describe "what's most important" to him. His poem creates a word in which we are invited to abide. We, who are not called to the monastery but nonetheless to radical discipleship, are invited to enter the place where our illusions of power and control are darkened. We realize that we, too, have no anchor but God alone. Of course, the very fact that we have been drawn to this poem suggests that we are already available to such a call. Thus, we already have some knowledge of the cost of such discipleship. And it is here that St. John's generosity of speech may most serve us. For, he tells us that what we most fear about this experience of being anchored in God alone is precisely what is most important to him; that is, we are truly anchored only in our anchorlessness. We are not anchored to God despite our feeling of being adrift but precisely in that very experience. With our poetic companion, we can dare not to fear our sense of anchorlessness but rather to trust it fully and thus experience being truly anchored in God.

Poetry of Place

In his essay "Poetry and Place," the poet Wendell Berry takes up the significance of place in poetry, what poetics calls "decorum." Drawing from his personal experience, Berry notes that his poetry is inextricably connected to where he, the poet, lives. Poetry is always "a reference or response to a subject or a context outside itself."

I believe that the source of our poetry is the idea that poetry must be used for something, must serve something, greater and higher than itself. It is a way to learn, know, celebrate, and remember the truth--or, as Yeats said, to "Bring the soul of man to God."10

The poetry of Carmel is indisputably a poetry of the place. First of all, the poetry comes out of the stable, humble, simple, and silent environment of the monastery-a place designed to allow for the deep sinking of roots in the soil of an unadorned humanity. But, it is also a poetry of a personal, metaphysical, place. The action of the poetry occurs in the place of the soul's ongoing, formative conversation with the Lord himself in the heart of the Trinity. The great significance of this poetry lies in the ultimate significance of its place, its context, its setting, and its subject: the place of encounter and communion with the Divine:

The mountains, my love, / the lonely forested valleys,

foreign islands / and busy rivers,

the whisper of amorous airs.

The night that grows calm / with breeze that stirs at dawn,

the soft music, / the ringing solitude,

the meal that renews in love.11

What distinguishes the poems of the Carmelite mystics (and this is no doubt a result of their rootedness in place and in spiritual practice) is the humility and simplicity, the truthfulness of their expression of the encounter with God. Never for a moment do they leave the human place. In his essay, Berry deals with this unique issue of decorum (remaining appropriate for the human being) through comparing aspects of the work of two of the greatest poets of the Western tradition: Dante Alighieri and John Milton.

According to Berry, the great flaw in Milton's Paradise Lost is precisely a violation of decorum. Milton invokes God's "Celestial Light" that he might be able to "...see and tell / Of things invisible to mortal sight." Here, says Berry, Milton's aspiration has become ambition, "a kind of artistic hubris."12 For Berry, Milton's great work is flawed at the point where he attempts to do what it is beyond the capacity of man to do-to "see ...things invisible." Milton falls into the very "sin" of Adam and Eve that his epic poem is describing: to seek to know what it is not the human being's to know, and his poem becomes flawed when he attempts to write of the invisible as if he has seen it:

One of the larger concerns of decorum, reaching to more than literature, is the question of what is proper to do.... How you act should be determined, and the consequences of your acts are determined, by where you are. To know where you are.. is at least as important as to know what you are doing.... Not knowing where you are, you can make mistakes of the utmost seriousness: you can lose your soul or your soil, your life or your way home.13

Milton loses his way just as Adam and Eve did, through disobedience to decorum, to reality.

Berry points out that Dante, by contrast, never speaks of the invisible with an omniscient voice but only with his own humble voice:

Dante, speaking only as himself "with mortal voice," and in a style conscientiously "humble," arduously and by grace ascends to a vision of the Light Supreme, before which his speech fails, of which he can remember only the "sweetness"-but the awesomeness and power of which are borne into the imaginative life of the poem by the failure of speech and memory. 14

Unlike Milton, Dante's poem transcends by its very humility. It is the "failure of speech and memory," the darkness, which invites us to enter through our own formative potential into the "awesomeness and power" of the place the poem communicates.

As for the Carmelite poets, they never lose their sense of place, their decorum. They never dare to speak with God's voice or even in the voice of an imagined or idealized state of personal transcendence. They always speak from a profoundly human place, a ground of deep, dark, and silent humility. Although they are often speaking of an experience of humanization and spiritualization that far transcends us, their description is never beyond our recognition or the formative potential of our memory, imagination, and anticipation. Thus, their words can always connect with and beckon us.

Homelessness

As St. John of the Cross writes of being "anchorless yet anchored," Jessica Powers describes a home that is homeless, this is, says Powers, a homelessness that is far beyond that of the social, the physical, and even the emotional-it is the existential: "It is the homelessness of the soul, in the body sown; / it is the loneliness of mystery." It is the homelessness at the bedrock of the human experience, the pathos that constitutes our very experience of self. It is a grief so deep that no artist can "wrench this grief from stone" or set it free "through the tangled vines of music." And, finally, it is a pain that only intensifies the more one becomes anchored in anchorlessness: "It is the pain of the mystic suddenly thrown / back from the noon of God to the night of his own humanity."

For Powers, this homelessness is the only truly human home. For, to be human is to pray, to be in conversation with God. But human beings can only pray "in finite words to an Infinity / Whom, if they saw, they could not comprehend; Whom they cannot see." In this poem of Jessica Powers, as throughout the mystical poetry of Carmel, we are drawn into the dark night, the sounding solitude, the homeless home of the solitary conversation.

The Carmelite poets thus invite us to share with them a homecoming. The cost of this homecoming is the loss of every security that moors our identity and any light that supports our understanding which is less than the "noon of God" and the "night of... [our] humanity." But the gift is, as St. John of the Cross says, that although "I may feel the lack of light,...I have life from heaven."

II. The Night of Unknowing: Prelude to Creative Expression

A commonplace saying of John of the Cross, though by no means easily understood, is "To come to the knowledge you have not you must go by a way in which you know not."16 The darkening of the intellect is one effect of the Dark Night. We have it on good authority that John not only explained the phenomenon of the Dark Night but also personally endured it. The turbulent experience of the soul in the Dark Night, in fact, preceded the transcendent, mystical knowledge celebrated in the poetry. The new potency for spiritual expression that emerged in the poetry was earned in darkness: "You must go by a way in which you know not." "Not-knowing" leads to spiritual understanding you do not yet have.

The saint beckons because spiritual knowledge is so valuable that we should approach the night of not-knowing as a potential friend. In concrete terms, this means suspending ordinary knowledge and bracketing our attitudes of knowingness in favor of exploration. This is the stance of interior openness and prayer, of standing before God and the mystery of our existence to hear what is being spoken to us in the silence of wonder. The awareness of not-knowing becomes a point of contact with the mystery, the possibility of entering into new understanding and relationship. John of the Cross describes the spiritual exchange that occurred when he entered, without knowledge, this place of not-knowing:

I entered I knew not where / and remained without knowing, there transcending all knowledge!"

John is beyond the Dark Night in this poem. It is a poem of transcendence: "I was ...raised out of myself / I was stripped of all intelligence and feeling, while my spirit was gifted with unknown understanding.""' This stands in sharp contrast to the violent images of undergoing love that we find, for example, in The Living Flame of Love: "(you) wound my soul at its deepest center"; "0 searing brand ... you killed me, making life from death"; and "...caverns of my senses that were blackened and blind."19 In "transcending all knowledge,"John affirms that he "still knew nothing." Yet having arrived there, he "understood important things."20 In contrast with the poems which speak of great suffering, here we have "peace and piety"things "understood in solitude,""knowledge of the deity's Essence. "21 Paradoxically, not-knowing leads to the highest knowledge of all: to experience of the deity's essence. The transcendence of this state is further revealed in the following stanzas of the poem:

Whoever arrives there / truly dies to himself.

Everything he used to know / seems to him now unworthy,

so much does this knowledge grow

that he ends up knowing nothing.

The higher you rise, / the less you understand,

for the darkening cloud / illuminates the night.

Whoever knows that this is right

no longer knows anything...

This knowing without knowing / is so very powerful

that wise men's arguments / can never defeat it,

since their knowledge cannot grasp

unknown understanding.22

John ends stanza 8 with "Whoever has self-mastery / through knowing without knowing / in the end will always transcend." The night of unknowing is presented as an indispensable means of receiving the more perfect knowledge of God's essence and the spiritual insight that accompanies the experience.

The dark night of physical and spiritual suffering, as well as the darkening of the intellect in the night of unknowing, can be traced in the life journeys of several Carmelite mystics: Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, Therese of Lisieux and Elizabeth of the Trinity, and Edith Stein. In each case, a former way of knowing and understanding had to be sacrificed in order to come to a more complete loving knowledge of the God who communicated his essence to the soul beyond our ordinary faculties.

The poetry and prayers of these mystics testify to the great gift they received in the Spirit. Their willingness to enter the night of not-knowing led to inner enlightenment and to a renewed potency for transcendent expression-the ability to write and speak movingly of their experiences in language that evokes longing in the human spirit for that which transcends it infinitely. So open and encompassing is their discourse of heart-to-heart encounter that we easily find a place to enter and share in the longing expressed and the love received in their poetic hymns.

III. Sighs in Exile: The Transformative Power of Loneliness

As we pointed out earlier, any great poem must have decorum, that is, the poetic expression must come out of and be linked to a proper sense of place. As Wendell Berry puts it, "What we do and say is properly determined by where we live." And this sense of decorum is not only true for the poet. For any of us, to be really and truly human requires that we know where we live, where we stand at the present moment. When the disciples-to-be first encounter Jesus (as related in the Gospel of John), they first inquire of him, "Rabbi, where do you live?" (Jn 1:38) In the art of poetry, as in the art of living, all begins with recognition and awareness of "where one is" at the present moment.

Wherever we may physically stand at any given moment, however, we are always, to some degree, living in exile. The description of Adam and Eve as offered in chapter 3 of the Book of Genesis rings true: "I heard the sound of you in the garden; I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid" (Gn 3:10). As with our first forebears, when we come to self-consciousness we do so, to some degree, with a sense of our own being that is anxious, shameful, and lonely. Jessica Powers writes, "There is a homelessness, never to be clearly defined."

When we dare to awaken to where we are living at any given moment, we realize that our consciousness is often conflicted and split. As creatures who live with awareness of both our transcendence and mortality, we are, in a certain sense, neither "here nor there." In a poem entitled "Sighs in Exile," St. Teresa of Avila expresses our state in a powerful metaphor:

The fish caught / On the painful hook,

In death's embrace / Its torment ending.23

As the fish caught on the hook wriggles and strains to be free of its fate, the only release from this painful dilemma is its resolution in death. The teaching of the Carmelite mystics, however, is that the death by which the torment ends is not merely physical death; it is even more our death to that conflict and tension which our disobedience to reality creates. The death that embraces us is the death of the autonomous, autocratic self. This death is a doorway to the "atoneness" with God and all creation that we enjoyed "before the fall."

To come to the life of love and consonance for which God has made us, we must, according to St. John, willingly enter the vortex of life's conflict. In our spiritual practice, we are to reverse the process of the fall. Where we would spontaneously move to have things our way, we are to embrace reality as it is. And we are to do this at such a depth that in time our very life of desire is transformed to that point where we desire nothing other than what is given. And then, say the Carmelite mystics, we shall know that everything is given to us, that all is grace. But the only way to the end of the "torment" is through it-it is to pass through the place of exile where we live.

Loneliness

The most familiar manifestation of this exile, of "homelessness," for most of us is the experience of loneliness. But to be able to enter our loneliness, we, paradoxically, need to feel less alone. The poetry of those who have fully entered the exile of their own lives can mediate to us a presence and companionship as we make the conversion to a more interior way of living.

Soul, since you are My room, / My house and dwelling,

If at any time, / Through your distracted ways

I find the door tightly closed,

Outside yourself seek Me not, / To find Me it will be

Enough only to call Me, / Then quickly will I come,

And in yourself seek Me.15

St. Teresa of Avila recognizes well that the fearful, lonely, and ashamed self frantically seeks companionship outside of itself, while God patiently awaits within for our recognition and address. Because our own loneliness frightens us, we disperse our attention without rather than focusing it within. This is why we require an abiding sense of companionship if we are to face and enter our own solitude.

The companion not only accompanies us into the place of our loneliness but also draws us ever deeper into it:. "All love, all companionship opens a space greater than it fills.16 The exile that characterizes where we live is beyond the capacity of anyone we can know, or anything we can see, to overcome. It is this reality that makes the companionship of the Carmelite mystics so invaluable to us. For they have so deeply entered "the place" of their own humanity that their words can illuminate an otherwise dark path. "What great art gives us most of all," writes O'Donoghue, "is companionship in our loneliness."21 The mystic alone is capable of accompanying us to the deepest levels of that loneliness, to a place where the most profound experience of loneliness and exile becomes a place of communion.

In her poem "In the Hands of God," St. Teresa of Avila speaks of the great power and freedom each of us has at every moment of lifeno matter how broken or alienated we may feel-to place our lives in God's hands:

In Your hand / I place my heart,

Body, life and soul, / Deep feelings and affections mine,

Spouse - Redeemer sweet, / Myself offered now to you,

What do You want of me?

Give me death, give me life, / Health or sickness,

Honor or shame, / War or swelling peace,

Weakness or full strength, / Yes, to these I say,

What do you want of me?

Give me, if you will, prayer; / Or let me know dryness,

An abundance of devotion, / Or if not, then barrenness.

In you alone, Sovereign Majesty, I I find my peace,

What do You want of me?

If you want me to rest, / I desire it for love;

If to labor, / I will die working:

Sweet Love say / Where, how and when.

What do you want of me?m

This poem draws us into that place where we are never alone, where nothing in our life or experience is outside of the great conversation. Here the question is not "Why is this happening?" or "How can this be?" or even "What must I do?" It is rather "What do you want of me?" At the core of our being, in our very loneliness and solitude, there lies a transcendent potency, a deep freedom, to willingly abandon ourselves to the loving, creative, and enduring Mystery: "In Your hand / I place my heart." From this place, the freely chosen actions of one's life emerge out of the great conversation with reality as it is manifested both within us and outside of us. Our lifechoices are a response to the Lord's answer to our ongoing question: "What do you want of me?" O'Donoghue offers the following insight:

I am here at the root of my freedom where my will generates its own energy or else feeds on other energies. I become self-creative as I stand in my own truth, willing my own being as it is, accepting fully the dimension of loneliness (as also the dimension of nothingness). Within me a great source of power awaits my discovery, but I must face the truth of myself to make this discovery. It awaits me beyond the final loneliness as also beyond the final misery. The way to this source of power is hard and even bitter, yet this is involved in the very nature of the enterprise, being as it were the very material from which the power is generated. This energy is the great dynamic of poetry and the other artS.29

The power of the poetic expression we have been discussing issues from an energy that the Carmelite mystics have entered because of a profound sense of decorum, that is, by rooting their work, prayer, and poetry in a concrete place: the monastery in which they spend their days in spiritual practice and the reality of their own lives which they accept and offer in truth and humility. Their poems invite us to discover and share this energy source by offering us a milieu whose words can hold us as we more deeply enter into our own lives and can awaken us as the Lord summons us to our unique conversation with the Divine Presence within.

IV. Singing the Song of Infinite Embrace

But we have this treasure in earthen vessels. (2 Cor 4:7)

We are reminded in this familiar passage from Corinthians that our spiritual treasure is contained in earthen vessels to show that the transcendent power belongs to God and not to us. The transcendent power that we see manifested in the poetry of various Carmelite mystics witnesses to the treasure that shines through our human weakness. As St. Paul affirms,

We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed but not driven to despair; persecuted but not forsaken, struck down, but not destroyed, always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. For while we live we are always being given up to death for Jesus' sake, so that the life of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us but life in you. (2 Cor 4:8-12)

The treasure of life in God propels the mystic to undergo any trial, if only it will lead to more intimate relationship with the Beloved. The longing is stronger than any difficulty the soul may encounter. It is an eternal longing, a desire planted deep within the soul for "something which is permanent, free, above sorrow, and of eternal value."30 The restlessness and the desire for union implied by this irreducible longing is at the heart of the yearning we find in the mystics.

In a recent publication, Why Religion Matters, Huston Smith observes that

Minds require eco-niches as much as organisms do, and the mind's eco-niche is its worldview, its sense of the whole of things. Short of madness, there is some fit between the two, and we constantly try to improve that fit. Signs of a poor fit are the sense of meaninglessness, alienation, and anxiety that the 20 century knew so well. The proof of a good fit is that life and the world make sense. When the fit feels perfect, the energies of the cosmos pour into the believer and empower her to a startling degree. She knows that she belongs. The ultimate supports her, and the knowledge that it does produces a wholeness that is solid for fitting as a piece of a jigsaw puzzle into the wholeness of the All .31

The call of the mystic, present in some measure in each of us, is a call to realize the treasure buried deep within us. The greater the longing, the stronger the drive for "a perfect fit." The Carmelite mystics, however, are not driven so much as they are impelled to undergo the passion of Christ: "Always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies." Experientially, this means confronting all of the meaninglessness, alienation, and anxiety that is in the soul, at conscious and unconscious levels. Everything in the soul that is a "poor fit" for eternal life must be purged and purified, gradually converted and transformed into the promised treasure.

Smith tells us that as the fit improves, "the energies of the cosmos pour into the believer...; she knows that she belongs." As the Carmelite mystics grow in their knowledge of and intimacy with God, their poetry sings of the belonging, the support, and the fulfillment they find in the arms of Infinite Love. In a marvelous little poem by St. Teresa of Avila, for example, we have a personal declaration that "her mind is stilled" and that "she draws abiding joy and strength from the One within":

Her heart is full of joy with love,

For in the Lord her mind is stilled.

She has renounced every selfish attachment

And draws abiding joy and strength

From the One within.

She lives not for herself, but lives

To serve the Lord of Love in all,

And swims across the sea of life

Breasting its rough waves joyfully.31

These lines are a moving testimony to "free formation flow,"31 to the divine energy that carries one when one has broken through to the deeper spiritual life which is our greatest treasure. Flowing with the deeper life of the Spirit, Teresa faces obstacles courageously, "breasting the rough waves joyfully." It is not reality that has changed but her experience of reality.

In a subtle poem of St. John of the Cross, "Anchorless Yet Anchored" (quoted earlier), John uses the image of an anchor to express the support, freedom, and new life he has attained in God. "Darkness without light" is "life from heaven"; "being consumed" is a delight, for it is "transformation of the soul into God." Th*rose of Lisieux wrote a gloss on this poem, dedicating it to her confrere and taking up his themes of divine support and transformation. Her support, she writes, "is to see and feel my soul / supported without any support!" Reverberating John's theme of anchorlessness, Th6r*se offirms that she is supported by the Invisible God alone. Like John, she "suffers without light" but "at last..I possess / the Heavenly life of Love":

Love, I have experienced it, / Knows how to use (what power!)

The good and the bad it finds in me.

It transforms my soul into itself

The Fire burning in my soul / Penetrates my heart forever.

Thus in its delightful flame

I am being wholly consumed by Love!"

Elizabeth of the Trinity

Similar themes emerge in the prayers of Elizabeth of the Trinity, a Carmelite who lived roughly contemporaneously with Therese, in the Dijon Carmel in France. Hans Urs von Balthasar considers these two French Carmelites in his Two Sisters in the Spirit.35 (See Susan Muto's Catholic Spirituality from A to Z for biographical information about Elizabeth.36) Elizabeth has been bowled over by the limitlessness of God. Von Balthasar tells us that infinity is no simple word for her; it is, rather, a spiritual disposition, a physical experience, and an inescapable need.37 Limitlessness speaks immediately to her of God, and, in surrendering to it, she knows, "God is here!" Elizabeth urges us to go beyond life's limits:

There comes a moment when, raised beyond her limits, the creature must stagger into the bottomless ground of infinity without perishing.38

The "path to the abyss" must be traveled in this life. This is faith: to enter the infinite world in the midst of the finite. The creature "must learn to love and explore as his home what appears to be the most alien of places."39 When Elizabeth testifies, "Here we find the strength to die to ourselves...and to be changed into love," we hear reverberations of her fellow Carmelites, whom she read and knew well.40

The power of longing attested to in the Carmelite mystics is clearly present in Elizabeth's teaching as well. Ineluctably, longing roots the soul in God and moves it toward union with the Beloved:

The soul who penetrates the depth of God and lives there... becomes with each movement, with each of her yearnings, with each of her actions... more firmly and more deeply rooted in the one she loves.41

Elizabeth's vision of deepening union in the "double abyss" of God's boundlessness and the soul's nothingness resonates, in fact, with the entire tradition of apophatic spirituality, stretching all the way back to Gregory of Nyssa. In Gregory, for example, we read about the limitlessness of the soul's union with God:

Never will the soul reach its final perfection,

For it will never encounter a limit....

It will always be transformed into a better thing.42

Elizabeth echoes this spacious progress of the soul's union:

I sense myself called by him to live in endless fields

where union with him takes place.43

In longing and faith, she sets out on her path to the abyss. The important point, however, is that the Infinite meets her! The abyss of infinite longing is met by the abyss of God's boundless love. The infinity of longing is also prefigured in Gregory of Nyssa:

Since the First Good is infinite in its nature,

Communion with it on the part of the one

Whose thirst is quenched by it will have to be

Infinite as well, capable of being enlarged forever.?

We note finally that the experience recounted by these mystics is

preeminently one of intimacy and embrace. In her famous Trinity

Prayer, Elizabeth writes,

The Trinity drew me into an embrace.

I found in its abyss my landing.

No one can carry me back to shore,

For I range freely in boundlessness,

No bars block my recreation,

My endless life lives in the Holy Three .41

When the Carmelite mystics turn to expression, now as poets of divine formation, their language sings. They sing a song of Infinite Embrace. And in doing so they manifest, albeit in earthen vessels, the secret treasure and wisdom of the Scriptures:

We too believe, and so we speak, knowing that he who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus and bring us with you into his presence .... We do not lose heart. Though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed every day. (2 Cor 4:13-14, 16)

Edith Stein

Even as our outer nature wastes away, our potency for transcendent expression graciously may be renewed. Edith Stein, Carmelite mystic, scholar, and poet, profoundly embodied this transcendent potency, even to her untimely demise in a death camp at Auschwitz. One of her poems resonates with all those we have discussed thus far. In it she conveys her journey in the Spirit and gives expression to the "polyphonic melody of becoming"46 in which she participates with her fellow and sister Carmelite poets:

Who are you, kindly light, who fill me now,

And brighten all the darkness of my heart?

You guide me forward, like a mother's hand,

And if you let me go,

I could not take a single step alone.

You are the space,

Embracing all my being, hidden in it.

Loosened from you, I fall in the abyss

Of nothingness, from which you draw my life.

Nearer to me than I myself am,

And more within me than my inmost self,

You are outside my grasp, beyond my reach,

And what name can contain you?

You, Holy Spirit, you, eternal Love!41

NOTES

1. St. Teresa of Avila, "I Gave All My Heart,"in Eknath Easwaran, God Makes the Rivers to Flow (Tomales, Ca: Nilgiri Press, 1991), p. 39.

2. Adam Zagajewski, Another Beauty, trans. Clare Cavanagh (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), pp. 117-118.

3. St. John of the Cross, "On a Dark Night," in The Poems ofSt. John ofthe Cross, trans. Ken Krabbenhoft (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1999), p. 21.

4. Zagajewski, p. 125.

5. St. Th6rbse ofLisieux, "For Sister Marie ofthe

Trinity," in The Poetry of Saint Thdrise of Lisieux, trans. Donald Kinney, OCD (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1996), p. 210.

6. St. Basil, Detailed Rules for Monks, in The Liturgy of the Hours (New York. Catholic Book Publishing Co., 1975), Vol. 3, p. 121.

7. Edward Hirsch, How To Read A Poem (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1999), pp. 4-5. 8. St. John of the Cross, "Anchorless and Yet

Anchored,' in Krabbenhoft, pp. 51-53.

9. Wendell Berry, "Poetry and Place," in Standing By Words (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1983), p. 93.

10. Berry, p. 98.

11. St. John of the Cross, "The Spiritual Canticle," in Krabbenhoft, p. 7.

12. Berry, pp. 102-103. 13. Ibid., p. 103.

14. Ibid., p. 106.

15. Jessica Powers, "There Is a Homelessness, in TheHouseAtRest(Pewaukee,Wis: Carmelite Monastery, 1984), p. 10.

16. St. John of the Cross, The Ascent of Mount Carmel, in The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh, OCD, and Otilio Rodriguez, OCD (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1991), 1:13:11, p. 150.

17. St. John of the Cross, "I Entered I Knew Not Where,' in Krabbenhoft, p. 25.

18. [bid.

19. St. John of the Cross, "O Living Flame of Love," in Krabbenhoft, p. 23.

20. St. John of the Cross, "I Entered I Knew Not Where," in Krabbenhoft, p. 25.

21. Ibid., pp. 25-29. 22. Ibid., p. 27.

23. St. Teresa of Avila, "Sighs in Exile," in The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila, vol. 3, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh, OCD, and Otilio Rodriguez, OCD (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1985), p. 383.

24. St. John of the Cross, The Ascent of Mount Carmel, in Kavanaugh, 1:12:6, p. 149.

25. St. Teresa of Avila, "Seeking God," in Kavanaugh, p. 385.

26. Noel Dermot O'Donoghue,Heaven in Ordinarie (Springfield, III: Templegate, 1979), p. 68. 27. O'Donoghue, p.65.

28. St. Teresa of Avila, "In the Hands of God," in Kavanaugh, pp. 377-378. 29. O'Donoghue, p. 66.

30. D. T. Suzuki, 'The Awakening of a New Consciousness in Zen,' in Twenty Questions: An Introduction to Philosophy, ed. G. Lee Bowie, et. al. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Inc.), p. 46.

31. Huston Smith, Why Religion Matters: The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age ofDisbelief(New York: Harper Collins, 2001), p. 26.

32. St. Teresa ofAvila, a free renderingby Eknath Easwaran, in God Makes the Rivers to Floor, p. 66.

33. Adrian Van Kaam, "Free Formation Flow." This concept refers to the consonance which takes place in the soul when obstacles to transcendent formation have been overcome. See discussions of the transcendent dimension, the disposition of awe, and pretranscendent formation in, respectively, Volumes 1, 2, and 6 of the series Formative Spirituality (Crossroad Publishers).

34. St. ThirL-se of Lisieux, p. 148.

35. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Two Sisters in the Spirit (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992). 36. Susan A- Muto, Catholic Spirituality from A to

Z (Ann Arbor, Mich: Servant Publications and The Epiphany Association, 2000), pp. 745. 37. Von Balthasar, p. 421.

38. Ibid. 39. Ibid.

40. Ibid., p. 423.

41. Ibid., pp. 428-429.

42. Gregory of Nyssa, Contra Eunomium, quoted in Hans Urs von Balthasar, Presence and Thought: Essays on the Religious Philosophy of Gregory of Nyssa (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995), p. 38.

43. Von Balthasar, Two Sisters in the Spirit, p. 422.

44. Von Balthasar, Presence and Thought, p. 38. 45. Von Balthasar, Two Sisters in the Spirit, p. 478.

46. Von Balthasar, Presence and Thought, p. 41. 47. Waltraub Herbstrith, Edith Stein: A Biography (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), p. 161.

Br. Romeo J. Bonsaint, SC, and Br. John D. Hamilton, CFX, are co-directors of Resources in Spiritual Formation in Danvers, Mass., which offers courses, seminars, and retreats in formative spirituality. Br. John has masters degrees in English from Wesleyan University and Formative Spirituality from Duquesne University. Br. Romeo holds a master's degree and a doctorate in Formative Spirituality from Duquesne University. They can be reached at 21 Spring Street, Danvers, MA 01923, or by e-mail at resourcest@aol.com.

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