The Seat of Gold

Extract

Contemplative life produces an all-embracing love of God and our neighbour. We see this in a study of the Carmelite Rule and in a reading of the great Carmelite mystics. ‘To love’, says Saint John of the Cross, is to labour to divest ourselves and to detach ourselves from all that is not God. (Ascent, 2). We are to be detached from ourselves, from self-love, thus only shall we come to love God, and to love our neighbour for his sake. A Carmelite writer tells us. ‘Saint John is the Doctor of the Cross because he is the Doctor of Love. It is a cross radiating love, a tremendous love of God, and of man and of all the beauty that God has created. The same writer continues: Throughout his works John of the Cross has sung of the depths of beauty, the demands, the sufferings, the triumphs of love'.