OCDS Community reviews ‘Lessons from St John of the Cross’ at annual retreat

By CTK Council

KUCHING — Christ The King (CTK) OCDS Community held their annual retreat in a local hotel from 3-5 June 2023 with the theme, “In this world but not of this world: Lessons from St John of the Cross”.  The Retreat Master was their newly appointed Spiritual Assistant, Fr Philip Tay, OCD from Seremban.

The aim of our spiritual life, according to St John of the Cross, is to achieve union with God. However, to do this, there has to be some kind of desire in a person. In his Spiritual Canticles, the poem opens with a statement of intense desire for the beloved.

The yearning for God lies dormant in many people, buried under the distractions and preoccupations of life. It needs to be brought into consciousness and fostered and nurtured by prayer and penance.

The desire becomes a single-hearted search for God and there is no room for any deviation or compromise or any lesser goal that is not integrated with the desire for the pure honour and glory of God.

We are dealing with a keen sense of God’s transcendence and the will to fit one’s life into God rather than fit God into one’s life. A new beginning starts the journey. A new burst of love for Christ gives the energy to rise above the pleasure principle, which to this point has been a large factor in the person’s life. Personal pleasure is no longer the issue.

The “new and better love” of the heavenly bridegroom, further strengthened by “longings of love,” gives a new focus to life. This love is the human response to God’s prior love (I John 4. 10; Rom 5.5; Gal 4.9) and fuels the “urgent longings” (“Dark Night”) that move the person to nakedness of spirit and transformation in Christ.

This is why it is necessary for us to grow in this habitual desire, which brings the soul the “active night of senses”, the goal of which is to free our soul from the lowest forms of pleasure, so that we can more fully seek God who also produces within us the highest form of spiritual delight, resulting from the perfection of divine union with Him. 

This first step is just that: the first step. Once a person walks through this initial purgation of their appetites and desires, God will take them through three more levels of purgation. But the first step is where we begin.

In fostering this habit, we also need to renounce the satisfaction that comes from our senses. These false loves and inordinate attachments, although not necessarily sinful, nevertheless need to be purged and purified, so as to set our “house” in right order.

This purification, then, involves not only the avoidance of sin but also the readjustment of our appetites and desires (it could be called an “un-possessing” of all the affections that capture our heart but impede our union with God).

This renunciation means that we also need to constantly deny ourselves. Making it a habit to say “NO” to all aforementioned things for love of God is no other than what is called interior struggle, necessary to love God, to acquire human virtues and to progress in one’s spiritual life and thus holiness.

Christian life consists in following Christ and carrying His Cross as He taught us. He does not ask us for an occasional self-giving or a short-lived, fleeting enthusiasm, but rather asks each and every one to renounce ourselves, take up our cross and follow him.

For this is what love is all about: love supposes sacrifice and self-renunciation for the sake and good of the beloved. Anyone who is not willing to renounce himself for the sake, happiness and good of the beloved does not know how to love others but only himself. This is what it means to be a Christian. It is not advanced discipleship; it is basic Christianity.

This is confirmed in Jesus’s words, “Any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14.33). Renouncing all we have is the same as “counting everything as loss.” This is what happens in conversion. We can’t be a disciple without it.

Ultimately, it is about being transformed by the love of God. If we are to be evangelists, we too need to operate under this dynamic of merciful love and seeking out of the sinner. But not so we can give them our opinion on their lifestyles, but so we can introduce them to Jesus, who has the power to transform them. This is radically different from how most parishes operate. Radically different than how most Catholics try to evangelize.

Rather than staying in our comfortable Catholic bubbles, we need to go out. Rather than aiming for changing behaviours, we aim for transformed hearts. Rather than being comfortable with where we are as missionary disciples, we allow God to challenge us to grow where we may not be comfortable. This is what holiness looks like. This glorifies God. This helps us fulfil the mission of the Church to make disciples.

To conclude their retreat on 5 June 2023, one of their new Novices from Sibu Chapter namely Jenny Pau was clothed with CTK Ceremonial Scapular – the habit of the Carmelites. She will undergo two (2) years of formation which, if successfully completed, may lead to the Temporary Promise (TP).