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The Degrees of Prayer 2: Don’t Turn Back
The Degrees of Prayer 2: Don’t Turn Back

We must be patient with heaven, and stubborn with hell.

The Degrees Of Prayer: Following The Story
The Degrees Of Prayer: Following The Story

Developing your prayer life can feel like a project to be planned and completed. Consider a different sense of what is happening when we get serious about prayer. When you begin to make prayer a serious focus of your life, you begin to follow a story.

Kindled in love
Kindled in love

The theology of St John of the Cross is focused on the necessity of self-discipline, but it begins and ends in love. This is not the dull path of obligation. It is an adventure, into a wild freedom.

Calming the appetites
Calming the appetites

Rather than the psychological models of the self propounded by Freud and Jung, we should learn from St. John of the Cross how to understand ourselves. Only then can we begin to be at peace with our clamoring appetites.

“You do very well, O soul, to seek Him ever as one hidden, for you exalt God immensely and approach very near Him when you consider Him higher and deeper than anything you can reach.”

St. John of the Cross, The Spiritual Canticle, Stanza 1.12

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Featured, The Book Cellar Glenn Dickinson Featured, The Book Cellar Glenn Dickinson

Spiritual Canticle

St. John of the Cross began composing his poem, "The Spiritual Canticle," when he was imprisoned by his brother friars in Toledo, Spain. The Carmelite order at that time was at war with itself. During the previous centuries, the disciplines required of the nuns and friars had slowly been relaxed, although they still were austere by modern standards.

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