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spiritual maturity
I thought I would put those quotes from John of the Cross on here just to have them here for us. Nobody seems to have paid much attention to them on my blog. I think it was too much. Anyway, there are always times when we feel like goofs - like we aren't spiritually mature at all. Sometimes it's because we've done something stupid or maybe it's because we don't feel anything going on inside us - we don't feel like we're connected to God. Real spiritual maturity is mostly having a realization of what really is. I mean to say, to be truly spiritually mature is to have a good grasp on reality - real reality. OK, here we go - Spanish mystics rock!
...many of these, lured by the sweetness and pleasure which they find in such exercises, strive more after spiritual sweetness than after spiritual purity and discretion... the gluttony which they now have makes them continually go to extremes.
These persons, in communicating, strive with every nerve to obtain some kind of sensible sweetness and pleasure, instead of humbly doing reverence and giving praise within themselves to God. ...when they have received no pleasure or sweetness in the senses, they think that they have accomplished nothing at all.
These persons have the same defect as regards the practice of prayer, for they think that all the business of prayer consists in experiencing sensible pleasure and devotion and they strive to obtain this by great effort, wearying and fatiguing their faculties and their heads; and when they have not found this pleasure they become greatly discouraged, thinking that they have accomplished nothing.
...They are, in fact, as we have said, like children, who are not influenced by reason, and who act, not from rational motives, but from inclination. Such persons expend all their effort in seeking spiritual pleasure and consolation; they never tire, therefore, of reading books; and they begin, now one meditation, now another, in their pursuit of this pleasure which they desire to experience in the things of God.
These persons who are thus inclined to such pleasures have another very great imperfection, which is that they are very weak and remiss in journeying upon the hard road of the Cross; for the soul that is given to sweetness naturally has its face set against all self-denial, which is devoid of sweetness.
| posted by + Alan | 9:43 AM |
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