Thursday, July 11 : John Tauler

In a vineyard we turn over the earth and weed around the foot of the vines. A man also needs to be weeded, paying great attention to what might still remain to be pulled up in the depths of his being so that the divine Sun can come closer to it and shine there. If you allow the power from on high to do its work…, the sun grows bright, shoots its burning rays onto the fruit and makes it more and more transparent. Sweetness condenses more and more into it, the rind around it becomes very thin. So it is in the spiritual sphere. Obstacles standing in the way eventually become so tenuous that we can receive the divine touch uninterruptedly, from close to. As often and as soon as we turn to it we find the divine Sun shining within us with greater brilliance than all the suns that have ever shone in the sky. In this way everything in a man is deified to the point that he neither feels, nor tastes, nor knows anything so truly as God, with a knowledge that is well founded, and this knowledge greatly surpasses the mode of understanding proper to our reason. Eventually, the leaves on the shoots are stripped off so that the sun can shine onto the fruit without meeting any obstacle. So it is with these persons: all intermediaries fall away and they receive everything in an unmediated way. Here prayers, images of the saints, practices of devotion, spiritual exercises all fall away. However, one should take care, nevertheless, not to spurn these practices before they fall away of themselves. But then, at this step, the fruit becomes so unutterably sweet that no mere reasoning can understand it… We are nothing but one with the divine sweetness to such a degree that our being is wholly penetrated by the divine Being and loses itself in it like a drop of water in a great vat of wine… Here, our good intentions, our humble efforts, are all simplicity itself, a mystery so essentially tranquil that we are scarcely aware of it.

Roman Extraordinary (Tridentine) Daily Readings – rosary,team