Christian Catholic Mystic Hermit of God and His Church Eternal: Marvelous to Ponder and Receive

 I find this powerful, and it is where I'm "at" spiritually at this point.  So very helpful if I can but absorb and free myself more from the temporal of body and all the body and temporal of this realm seems to require.  Surely the weight can be reduced,  simplified, of course--the temporal needs and responsibilities.  But my mind and heart and soul can be freed; I know it.  But I don't know quite how other than ask Jesus to help and provide this freedom so I can endure the temporal encumbrances.

This from John of the Cross in Spiritual Canticles--powerful and shocking in a way, but seems where I am spiritually now, and why temporal churches are that which God has progressed me through and into this other of His Mystical "Church" if it can be labeled something that has such strong temporal connotations and denotations, both.  

I have guilt about it or did, and realize it is actually as it ought to be, and is best in progressing in Christ and out of the temporal churches and temporal world which hold no more means of enduring in the world, not really, so on to the spiritual and mystical of His Real Presence and otherwise kind of suffer out the aspects of temporal. 

Yet, I ought to free myself from as much as feasible of temporal yet that is the problem having a body here and the body needing abode and to keep going, and abode and temporal with many responsibilities that are temporal.

Thank  you, John of the Cross, for these thoughts, truths, and realities of spiritual growth and progression, and in Scripture as Paul writes of dying to self and being alive in Christ.

[It] ought to be known that when a soul treading the spiritual road has reached such a point that she has lost all roads and natural methods in her communion with God, and no longer seeks him by reflections or forms or feelings or by any other way of creatures and the senses, but has advanced beyond them all and beyond all modes and manners, and enjoys communion with God in faith and love, then it is said that God is her gain, because she has certainly lost all that is not God and has truly lost herself.

Entire selection:

Saint John of the Cross (1542-1591)

Carmelite, Doctor of the Church

Spiritual Canticle, 29,11 (© Institute of Carmelite Studies)

“Whoever loses their life for my sake will find it”

“I lost myself and was found” The one who walks in the love of God seeks neither gain nor reward, but seeks only to lose with the will all things and self for God: and this loss the lover judges to be a gain. Thus it is, as St. Paul asserts: “For me death is gain” [Phil 1:21], that is, my death for Christ is my gain, spiritually, of all things and of myself. Consequently the soul declares: I was found. The soul that does not know how to lose herself does not find herself but rather loses herself, as Our Lord teaches in the Gospel: “Whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Mt 16:25). Should we desire to interpret this verse more spiritually and in accord with what we are discussing here, it ought to be known that when a soul treading the spiritual road has reached such a point that she has lost all roads and natural methods in her communion with God, and no longer seeks him by reflections or forms or feelings or by any other way of creatures and the senses, but has advanced beyond them all and beyond all modes and manners, and enjoys communion with God in faith and love, then it is said that God is her gain, because she has certainly lost all that is not God and has truly lost herself.