July 11, 2014

Letters to the Editor

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Learn from St. John of the Cross and search for the perfect realm of holiness and peace

As we walk the narrow path of self-knowledge, it is inevitable that we will come up against our own limitations—these barriers inside us that will attempt to stifle us in our lifelong apprenticeship of self-mastery.

As you overcome each one of these barriers—by your nature cooperating with God’s grace—you end up learning something valuable about yourself. And sometimes, the things you learn about yourself can, to the individual, seem to communicate a certain spiritual sense along with them.

Every time you come up against a true barrier to your progress, you become a child again.

It is a most interesting experience to be reduced, once again, to the level of knowing nothing about what you’re doing. We reduce ourselves at a certain point in our lives to kind of only pursuing things that we already know how to do. You know, because you don’t want to have that uncomfortable experience of not knowing what you’re doing and being an amateur again. And I think that’s rather unfortunate.

St John of the Cross said: “I came into the unknown and stayed there unknowing rising beyond all science. I did not know the door but when I found the way, unknowing where I was, I learned enormous things, but what I felt I cannot say, for I remained unknowing, rising beyond all science. It was the perfect realm of holiness and peace. In deepest solitude, I found the narrow way: a secret giving such release that I was stunned and stammering, rising beyond all science.”

- Kirth N. Roach | Order of Carmelite Discalced Secular Indianapolis

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