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

 

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Russell Whitesell often chided his disciples to: “Seek the company of Holy Men.”

 

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