Sublime

failure is part of the search for God.

1 Peter 1:8: Whom having not seen, ye love; in whom, though now ye see him not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory.

John of the Cross came to define deep prayer along similar lines. “Preserve a loving attentiveness to God with no desire to feel or understand any particular thing concerning God.”

John disagrees with the Aristotelians in refusing substantiality to particular things. He calls Plato the summit of philosophers. But the first three of his kinds of being are derived indirectly from Aristotle’s moving-not-moved, moving-and-moved, moved-but-not-moving. The fourth kind of being in John’s system, that which neither creates nor is cre

2. To find glory in tribulation is not hard for one who truly loves, for to glory in this manner is to glory in the cross of our Lord. The glory exchanged among men is brief. The glory of this world is always accompanied by sadness. The glory of a good person is in his own conscience and not in the praise of others.

6. In silence and quiet, the devout makes progress and learns the secrets of the Scriptures (see Sir 39:3).

The only characteristic of the experience of the dark night that is certain is its obscurity. One simply does not comprehend clearly what is happening.

John of the Cross came to define deep prayer along similar lines. “Preserve a loving attentiveness to God with no desire to feel or understand any particular thing concerning God.”2 By means of this loving attentiveness one begins to move into God.

For guidance, I turned to a poem called “Dark Night of the Soul” by a sixteenth-century mystic, St. John of the Cross.