Tag Archives: St. John of the Cross

Pentecost and the Three Conversions

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The first Christian Pentecost was a feast of fulfillment.  It was, in a very real sense, a graduation ceremony in which twelve simple men from various walks of life became prophets, preachers, priest, prodigies, and polygots.  A feast of fulfillment because they became what they were destined to be.  Removed some 2000 years from Pentecost, it is, for us, a feast of possibility.  The Holy Spirit is ever ready to pour out His power on each and every believer.  The problem though is that the average believer is not ready to receive His power.  Part of the reason for this is that we view Pentecost as an isolated event; a miracle for sure but not magical.  The Apostles were ready to receive the fullness of the Holy Spirit and in so doing, left for us a model of preparation that we need to follow.

Protestants would have us to believe that union with the Holy Spirit comes about through faith, that is, by a single moment of conversion.  Sacred Scripture and the Mystical Doctors of the Church teach otherwise.  They teach, each in his or her own way, that three conversions are necessary for union with the Holy Spirit.  One of them, St. Catherine of Siena, shows how the Spiritual life of the Apostles reveals the content of these three conversions which culminate in the fullness of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost.

As in all activity, our spiritual lives are marked by three levels of maturity—beginners, proficients, and perfected.  These three stages are clearly delineated in the Scriptural account of the lives of the Apostles and therefore serve as a model for each of us.  St. Catherine in her Dialogue traces each of the three conversions of St. Peter and enables us to see some of the qualities of each in order to facilitate our own growth towards union with God.

St. Peter and the Three Conversions

The first conversion happens when St. Peter acknowledges he is “a sinful man” and Our Lord promises to make him a “fisher of men”.  From that point forward, St. Peter set out on what St. John of the Cross calls the Purgative Way.  This is the most active of the stages in that we must, under the instigation of actual grace, remove all the obstacles to true growth.  For St. Peter, this purgative stage lasts almost the entirety of the pre-Passion and Resurrection accounts in the gospels.  It also helps to explain why St. Peter shows such incredible flashes of sanctity while also being called “Satan”.  St. Peter will remain in this stage until he is no longer scandalized by suffering and is willing to mortify himself completely.  Even during the Trial of Jesus, he keeps the suffering Christ at a distance and therefore fails to admit to even knowing Him.  He loves Jesus, but not more than he loves himself. 

It is just after the three-fold denial that St. Peter experiences his second conversion.  When Our Lord gazes upon Him just after his third denial, He receives the grace of deep sorrow for his sin.  St. Peter’s second conversion occurs when he has him “come to Jesus” with Our Lord on the shore of the Sea of Galilea with his three-fold affirmation of his love for Jesus.  In loving Our Lord “more than these” St. Peter is no longer deterred nor scandalized by the fact that he will have to suffer.  Each of his affirmations, according to Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange, marks each of the three distinct motives for the second conversion.  We find the juxtaposition of the two Greek words for love—love of friendship (philia) and love of God (agape)—in the dialogue to mark the rooting out of all traces of self-love by a desire for Divine friendship and filial love of God.  Secondly, Peter is aware of the great price of Christ’s Blood.  Third is the love of souls that need to be saved in his desire to “feed my sheep.” 

Furthermore, he must first go through the Night of the Spirit where he no longer is aware of Christ’s continual presence.  He only “feels” His presence on a few occasions and loses it completely when Our Lord ascends into Heaven.  Just as in the transition from the first conversion to the second there must be a purgation of the sense, a purgation of the spirit must be undergone in order to pave the way for the third conversion.  It would seem that the Apostles were on the fast track in that they only had to endure the Night of the Spirit for 50 days, until we put ourselves in their sandals and realize how painful it must have been for them.  They had spent three and a half years, day in and day out, with the constant awareness of God’s physical presence.

All of this leads up to the third conversion on the day of Pentecost.  Our Lord had meticulously been leading St. Peter to this moment when he would be united to God in the fullest sense possible on Earth.  He still was not perfected, but he was closely yoked to God in the Unitive Stage.  What we need to focus on is that Pentecost was not just an isolated event in their spiritual journey but the culmination of it.  He, along with the other Apostles, received the Holy Spirit because they were ready for it. 

All of this talk of the need for a “New Pentecost” is really a call for more saints who have the courage to set out through the Dark Nights and to be so purified as to become completely united to the Holy Spirit.  Without the proper preparation work this “New Pentecost” will never happen.  With the path of the threefold conversion the Apostles have left us along with the instructions of the great Mystical Doctors of the Church, we “shall renew the face of the earth”  and share in the fruits of the same Pentecost that marked the birth of the Church.

On the Necessity of Mental Prayer

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In the thirteenth chapter of St. Matthew’s Gospel, Our Lord gives us the Parable of the Sower.  He speaks of a farmer who indiscriminately spreads seeds over a variety of soil types.  Despite the farmer’s prodigality, the seed only produces a yield in the rich soil.  The implication is obvious: to produce the great yield of holiness, we must become rich soil.  What is not immediately obvious, however, is how one becomes the rich soil. 

One might be tempted to think that the solution is to be a “good” person.  When you are nice to other people and try not to sin, you become rich soil.  The problem with this viewpoint however is that soil cannot make itself rich.  It must be made rich by having things added to it.  Clearly then, the answer is to receive the Sacraments.  The Sacraments are like a strong fertilizer producing rich, dark soil.  But this interpretation is problematic as well.  While the Sacraments are, at least objectively speaking, like spiritual fertilizer, their effect depends upon the subjective disposition of the soil in which they land.  Even the Sacraments will have no effect upon a hardened heart.  Instead, the Fathers of the Church all thought the key to becoming rich soil was to become men and women of prayer.

But prayer is anything but a simple solution, especially living in the grasp of a ubiquitous technocracy.  Within its grasp, we have grown accustomed to thinking that all of reality can be controlled and manipulated by technique, our spiritual lives not excepted.   The technocratic mindset has led modern men and women to search for human techniques, usually repurposed from Eastern Religions, to solve the problem of prayer.  Rather than solving the problem, these techniques often lead us away from God because they are not in accord with human nature itself.

The Myth of Technique

Let’s suppose that we want to pray, but St. Paul is right when he says that “we do not know how to pray as we ought” (Romans 8:26).  It is normal to then think we must investigate various techniques to find out which one works best for us.  The problem with this mindset is that it is a subtle form of Gnosticism.  The knowledge of how to pray becomes some secret knowledge that we must discover.  The conclusion, one that a lot of people draw, is that a life of true prayer is not open to everyone and is reserved for a select few who somehow figure it out. 

We must hear St. Paul out.  While it is true that “we do not know how to pray as we ought ,” the Apostle reminds us that “the Spirit Himself intercedes with inexpressible groanings” (Romans 8:26).  Prayer is, first a foremost a gift.  It is a gift, but it is a gift that we are naturally inclined to receive.  As St. Thomas repeatedly says, whatever is given is received according to the mode of the receiver.  There is a natural way then to receive the gift of prayer.

Why it is Necessary

St. Alphonsus Liguori in his treatise on prayer said that “all the saints have become saints by mental prayer.”  The saint is telling us that in order to become rich soil, we must practice mental prayer.  He is not alone in this assessment as all of the saints say something similar.  Understanding why mental prayer is the entry point into a life of holiness will enable us to rely more fully on this method.

Our supernatural destiny is the Beatific Vision by which we will see God face to face.  What this means is that we will know Him directly and this knowledge will lead to an eternity of loving Him.  Prayer ought to in some way mimic this. In this life we can only know Him by way of intermediaries, “in a mirror darkly” if you will.  But this knowledge is still real knowledge even if it is only by way of reflection.  We can know the sun directly by looking at it, but even a man who has only seen the moon still knows the sun.  Mental prayer is the means, in this life, by which we come to knowledge of God through discursive reasoning upon both Revelation and Creation.  But in order to be a true preparation for our eternal destiny, it must not just be intellectual musings, but must consist in acts of the will as well.  In fact true prayer must always find its terminus in movements of love.

St. John of the Cross demonstrates these movements in his Spiritual Canticle. He begins by meditating upon creation:

O woods and thickets, planted by the hand of my Beloved! O green meadow, coated, bright, with flowers, tell me, has he passed by you?”

Pouring out a thousand graces, he passed these groves in haste; and having looked at them, with his image alone, clothed them in beauty.

Ah, who has the power to heal me? now wholly surrender yourself!   Do not send me any more messengers, they cannot tell me what I must hear.

Spiritual Canticle 4-6

Seeing God’s presence in a simple meadow that has been clothed with beauty, He is moved to wonder and then pleads for God to heal him and surrender Himself to John.  His musings have moved from the intellect to the will, from the head to the heart.

Mental prayer is the entry point to deeper level of infused prayer because it is the only truly human way of praying.  Because it is in accord with human nature, it is also the means by which prayer purifies us.  Through the power of abstraction, we can say that the “thing known is in the knower.”  This means that the thing known becomes a part of the knower.  When the thing known, is the One Thing that Needs to Be Known, then He necessarily becomes a part of the knower.  This is why those who truly pray are never heretics.  But it is also why not only our thoughts are purified, but our desires too.

Setting Our Expectations

If God wills all men to be saved and prayer, as we have shown, is absolutely necessary for salvation, then all men are given the grace to pray.  God not only wills our salvation but also provides all that is needed to make that happen.  What this means is that we should expect the grace of prayer because God has promised it.  God desires that we pray and if we remain open to it, He will provide us with all the necessary graces to reach levels of prayer that we thought only possible for great mystics.  This is for everyone.  We need only to beg Him for the grace of perseverance and then show up day after day.

At the outset we said that there are few among us that are immune to the effects of living in a technocracy.  Those few, if St. Alphonsus is to be believed, are the future saints who practice mental prayer.  Rather than trying to manipulate God through technique, they set themselves up to receive the gift of prayer and God delivers by raising up saints so desperately needed in our times.