St. John on and on

Why wood ducks? I love ducks. And I am seeing a lot of them down at the lakeshore, particularly since I started giving them some grain on snowy days. I am grabbing any old photo to stick on the post. Rush, rush, rush.

Today, rather than be painstaking and perfectionist and careful, I am just going to race off and put my first St. John of the Cross quote online. Later perhaps a page for them, if I continue. For now, one quote per blog post. I will quote from the online public domain edition. But find the chapter from my hard copy of a different translation, which I purchased sometime back around the year 2000.

Maybe I can find it in the online edition without checking in my own book. Lazy, lazy. Impatient too. No spiritual aspirations for me.

I did go and get my hardcopy version. And I see already that there are differences wording. However, here from the online version is a quote:

“…this Divine fire of contemplative love,…”

from Chapter 10  of Book Two of the Dark Night of the Soul, by St. John of the Cross, translated and edited by E. Allison Peers from the edition of P. Silverio de Santa Teresa, C.D. (Paragraph 3, under Point 2. The electronic edition was scanned and edited by Harry Plantinga).

This quote is a fragment of a very long sentence. I chose it as my “quote of the day” from my reading last night. It was short, and I hoped memorable enough that if I ran into a bout of insomnia I could repeat it to myself, in my mind, to keep stray thoughts from running wild.

St. John is talking about God’s purifying contemplative love, which can act in us without our asking, as God wills and when God wills. In my case I don’t think it has been God’s will to put it to work in me! However, what an uplifting inner vision to ponder upon while tired but sleepless, abandoned even by one’s cat for the moment (warmer for her in the living room by the stove).