T.N.G. SIGNS
OF THE TIMES - N.M. January 29,
2006 (#153)
Greetings from
Russell's Remnant: www.oocities.org/dkone_us
Jacopone da
Todi’s Essentials on
the True Spiritual Path
Dr. Russell
Whitesell’s life parallels da Todi’s life in many ways. Comparing Dr. Whitesell’s life with that of
Jacopone’s could give one an insight into the struggle one goes through on the
spiritual path to oneness with God. The
following is taken from Evelyn Underhill’s biography of da Todi:
Humility is the soul’s central need,
and the beginning of its wisdom. The
next need is poverty, humility’s dramatic expression; for the climb is long and
hard, only to be managed by those who cast away all encumbrances. Japopone see the whole path from illusion to
reality as a series of renunciations of our proud, separate sense of self-hood
and ownership, a giving up of all personal claims upon the Universe which makes
us free of the whole. First in the
cruder forms of self-abasement, then in the deliberate surrender of personal
feelings, preferences, intellectual conceptions, progressive self-stripping to
the point of apparent “nothingness” alone makes man capable of Eternal Life.
Poverty, then, is a mental and
spiritual as well as a moral necessity; a “three-fold heaven.” The first heaven is found by those who have
killed the material desire for wealth, the mental desire for learning, the
heart’s instinctive love of reputation.
Out of these, we may hope to reach the Stellar Heaven of the
virtues. Yet even here we remain at the
mercy of the “four winds” of feeling (joy and sorrow, hope and fear). These tempests of repulsion and desire will
only be quieted when we have “annihilated our separate wills.” This surrender brings us to the “second
heaven” of peaceful love, where we are conformed to the rhythm of the Divine
Life.
Then, become as a part of all things
– we are freed from the tyranny of fragmentary desires. But still the busy intellect has not been
put in its place. It continues to
possess its own ideas, and therefore to be possessed by its own
limitations. Entangled in these, it
ranges around, seeking to understand; only to find that the brick-built
conceptual universe intervenes between itself and reality. So, if the “third heaven” of mystical union
with God is to be achieved all separate thought must enter meekly into the
“heaven of ignorance,” where it is content to be still and know. There wisdom transcends knowledge, and love
transcends desire. This, says Jacopone,
is the testing-house where the academic and the real mystic part company. The first is still held in the realm of
speculation; lofty indeed, yet tethered to the earth, like a captive
balloon. The second has the free flight
of a bird within the Being of God, his native air. The wings of humility and adoration hold him up. He needs not to see, because he is at home.
Yielding himself without reserve to
that Greater Life which is “present everywhere to those who can receive it,”
his small measure is swallowed up in the measureless; his little, ardent love
that burned so fiercely is found to be a spark of the single fire. Within that furnace he receives again, pure
of illusion, all that he has renounced.
His last stage
is not that of the bloodless dreamer, but of the “whole man.” Jacopone says “Powers are perfected,
defects are healed.” Surrendering one
by one those graded falsehoods in which we live so comfortably lapped, he finds
himself, at the moment of apparent destitution, inheritor of all the riches of
the House of God.1
1
Jacopone da Todi, Poet and Mystic: A Spiritual Biography by
Evelyn Underhill. pp. 245-248. Published by E. P. Dutton & Co. New York
1919
***
Russell
Whitesell often chided his disciples to: “Seek the company of Holy Men.”