Catherine of Genoa lived from 1447-1510. She was born to a prominent religious family, was well educated, and married a wealthy but unfaithful man. Catherine was converted to the contemplative life and after she and her husband lost their fortune, they worked among the poor and the sick. Catherine is best remembered for her acts of charity, matched only by her deep spiritual writings.
Catherine is part of the vibrant strand of mysticism in the Christian tradition. She speaks of "hanging by God's thread of pure love."
I invite your comments on the reading by Catherine of Genoa. Please click on "comment" and share your response!
A few words about the Christian mystical tradition:
"Mysticism is nothing more or less than a love-driven way of knowing God, that is centered in direct, immediate experience of God’s presence –- as contrasted with the efforts of our minds to think through, capture, and describe the object of our belief in clear language, theological subtlety, or scientific precision.
A mystic is a person who has fallen in love with God. We are not afraid of lovers -– no indeed, all the world loves a lover. They attract us by their ardor, their single-mindedness, their yearning to be one with the object of their love.”
Mysticism is a way of living that makes this consciousness of God’s presence the shaping context, the compelling energy of our lives."
John Kirvan, God Hunger
Descriptions of the mystical experience by Vintage Christian writers:
Christ filling the hearing, sight, touch, taste, and every sense
Origen
Thomas Merton
A blind feeling of one’s own being, stretching unto God
The Cloud of Unknowing
The pure, loving gaze that finds God everywhere
Brother Lawrence
Francis de Sales
Ignatius of Loyola
Douglas Steere
Seeing God in everything and everything in God
with completely extraordinary clearness and delicacy
Marie of the Incarnation
John of the Cross
Teresa of
Walter Hilton
Continual communion through all things by quite simply doing everything in the presence of the Holy Trinity
Maximus the Confessor
Bernard of Clairvaux
Divine wakefulness with pure and naked intuition
Gregory of Nyssa
Augustine
Hugh of St. Victor
Jan Van Ruysbroek
Right understanding, with true longing, absolute trust, and sweet grace-giving mindfulness
Julian of
Awakening to the presence of God in the human heart and in the universe which is around us... knowledge by love
Dom Bede Griffiths
The world becoming luminous from within as one plunges breathlessly into human activity
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
2 comments:
How to live in Mystery and live a more mystical life in the midst of the mundane is what comes to mind as I read Catherine of Genoa. Her words strike chords so deep they are like those moments when we see profound beauty or know profound pain and are completely speechless.
She writes from intimate union with the holy God. And the questions she raises as I read her are high and holy ones. She writes as one who walks deeply in holiness. But what of us who are more earth-bound?
In Section 2 the question lingers: How do we live every day more occupied with Him and feeling a greater fire within? I mean, really, how do we do this and still function in the workaday world? I can do this. Of course I can. I can easily think on Him, to be occupied solely on Him when I am alone with my Lord, my books, my prayer bench, my journal. Or on a silent retreat.
But what about when the bills are overflowing, the dinner is still uncooked, the phone is ringing off the hook, and the crisis du jour is boiling over? What about when that homeless person walks with outstretched hands towards me when I’m in a hurry and not wanting to be bothered? But what about I’m in the middle of a relationship with a friend whom I disagree with? Or when a driver, thinking he is on the racecar circuit cuts me off at the pass on the highway? Do I really want to be more occupied with God than with my agenda?
It is easy to think of Him as I walk in the splendid beauty of the Rockies just outside my home. It is easy to think of Him when the kids are doing well, the job is fun and rewarding, the offer of love is on the table with the man I’m dating.
But, what happens when the opposite is true? What happens when the world is caving in and all is not well? What happens when I’m in the middle of an event in which the Holy Trinity and I don’t see eye-to-eye on? What happens when I want my attachment to pleasure, as Catherine speaks of in section 7, more than I want His pleasure?
Then being more occupied with Him isn’t all that easy.
To be occupied of Him more requires desiring His holy ways more than my willy-nilly waverings. And, the reality is that sometimes the thought of Him is just not so present in the midst of the moment.
I wonder if perhaps the key is how Catherine ends section 9: All I need to do is lift you up before His face.
First, I come knowing I can’t do this alone. I need a community of other Christ-followers who will be safe places for me to disclose my wavering needs. Then I come present to my own lack of being present to the Presence of God. And in that place of confess, of telling my own longing as being more important to me than the longing for the Holy, something profound is rolled out as an invitation to more. And I am again moved to wanting to be occupied of Him and not of me.
If I am ever lifting my face to His face, and also being lifted by the holy hands of others who ache for Christ as well, then there is this holy knitting that does not so easily unravel. And in that place of gazing steadfastly at Him, perhaps that is where the other occurs. I no longer want all things my way. I want to get out of my own way of blocking the light, as she mentions in section 4, and see the real Light that will be my way forward away from me into more of Thee. But the question remains, will I move that far in my longings, or will they remain good words never acted upon?
Oh to pray with Catherine: “I do not want to turn my eyes from you, O God. There I want them to stay and not move no matter what happens to me, within or without.”
Just reading the blurbs from the blog site as the writers described their idea of mysticism... whoa... so moving. Each one I thought,"Yes, that's it..." But the sentence that captures my heart is from Julian of Norwich.
Then there's Catherine of Genoa's experience of walking hand in hand with The Holy One...yet living here on earth. I do believe His grace is available and sufficient for us... to live in deeper awareness and awakefulness to Him each moment. Yes, more of Your grace, O God, to live a more contemplative "day-by-day."
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