The Sermons of Johannes Tauler · 33 of 124

Second Sermon for Passion Sunday

He that is of God heareth the yvords of God. — John viii, 47.

Dear children, although you may not live up to God’s word, yet you should none the less hear it, and then you should speak about it. For as long as you continue to love it and wish to possess it, it is in a way yours, and you will yet be made eternal partakers of it. We meet with those who turn away from high spiritual doctrine, because they cannot comprehend it, and they think they have no concern with it; and at last they have an aversion either to speak about it or hear others do so. I have no notion of these things, one will say, and it is best that I have nothing to say or hear about them, for I am better without them, and so I wish to remain; and then they even try to turn others away from high spiritual thoughts, as if they, too, had better avoid them. But meanwhile, though pretending to be well satisfied with their own way, they know in their hearts that it is not the best. All this indicates plainly that they will never reach their best interior state, nor partake of the infinite Good, except God leads them through a season of grief and mental trial.

Insight

There are those who turn away from high spiritual doctrine because they cannot comprehend it, and they think they have no concern with it. Tauler's pastoral instinct is to refuse to give up on these listeners. Even if you cannot live up to a teaching, hear it. The wanting will work in you. The Sufi tradition has a parallel teaching about the murid who hears a saying he cannot yet receive: the saying does its work over years, and one day he discovers he is the saying. Tauler is naming a reliable fact about religious life — the things you cannot yet practice still shape you if you keep them in earshot. Aversion to high teaching is a worse sign than incomprehension of it.Rumi, Mathnawi VI on hearing what the heart cannot yet hold; cf. the medieval Latin tradition on lectio divina (Guigo II, Ladder of Monks).

St. Bernard says: “O man, dost thou yearn for a noble and holy life, and dost thou beg this favor of God? If thou dost, then persevere faithfully in this state of soul, and thy prayer shall be granted thee a single day, yea, even one hour before thy death; and if God does not grant it thee in this life, then all the more surely will He do so in eternity in union with Himself.” Therefore, never give up thy hopes and thy prayers because they are not immediately heard and fulfilled or are heard only for an occasional moment. And be not disheartened because

It may happen that thou shalt afterwards quite cease to think of it; but, for all that, the love of it and the longing to observe it with which thou didst first receive it, shall always shine brightly in God’s sight, and in His own good time He will make His word efficacious for thy eternal welfare.

What we can actually do may not amount to much, but we can always desire to do great things. A man may not play a great part in act, but he always can have great good will; and whatsoever he would wish to be, supposing that his whole heart and soul and mind are in his wish, that as a matter of fact — in some true way, at least — he actually is. We have little strength to do, much strength to desire to do, and that it is that constantly grows within us, and finally goes forth from us into the heart of God. Of course, we do not mean that a man should idly dream that he would like to be equal to such or such a saint or angel, but simply this: I long most earnestly to give myself entirely and exclusively to God — to God alone. If a man cannot be God’s as much as he would gladly wish to be, yet let him be as much God’s as he can be. Whatever a man is,* let him be that to God wholly; and what he cannot be to God, let him wish earnestly yet to become, by God and in God. And it may well happen, that we have God more in this state of privation than in some states of possession. Therefore, be thou God’s man; wait patiently on God; hold God to thee and in thee and with thee; nothing will now ever go wrong with thee.

Insight

You may not play a great part in act, but you can always desire to do great things. Tauler's pastoral relief: the direction of the longing is what is being weighed, more than the performance the longing has so far produced. A man who is not yet what he wants to be, but wants it with whole heart, is already in some real sense what he wants to be — God reads the orientation, and the orientation accumulates in the soul whether or not the outward life has caught up. Augustine compresses this into one line in the Confessions: our heart is restless until it rests in you. The restlessness is the measure. Many people exhausting themselves over their failures are missing the fact that the failure is being weighed against the wrong scale.Augustine, Confessions I.1; cf. Bernard, De Diligendo Deo on the four degrees of love and the direction of longing.

Do not for a moment suppose that our Lord God will grant thee special favors, such as perfect spiritual contentment, enlightenment or warmth of love, as He sometimes does in the beginning of conversion. That thought is only a sort of alluring snare, such as the falconer uses to capture his hawk. Our Lord deals with His own thus: First, He teaches them, and then He lets them work for themselves. Just as He caused Moses to make his tables of the law after the pattern He Himself had set. So God allows a man to stand by himself, and, having awakened, enlightened and attracted him, after a time he does so no more; He leaves us now to utilize His graces. We must arouse our own slothfulness, awaken our consciences and perceptions, light up the fires of energetic action, and serve God diligently at our own cost. While children are yet quite young their father helps them in everything, giving them all that they need and turning them out to their play, happy and contented and well provided for — all at the father’s expense and care. When they are grown, he gives them a share of his property and bids them care for themselves; all playtime is now over and done, and they must learn how to become rich men by their own exertions.

God treats us the same way. The beginning of a devout life is all joy and sensible devotion, for He is now alluring us by His gifts. He so manages that we find His will in everything that we do; His will coincides with ours entirely. But presently all this is changed. Now God insists that we shall give up our own will in spite of ourselves; in fact go against our own will — a very hard and unpleasant task, indeed. We must learn to suffer; and, besides, we must grope along in the dark; and, although we are quite willing, yet it is not by our natural will, but in spite of it, that we yield all guidance to Him. Thus did our Lord prophesy to Peter: “Amen, amen, I say to thee, when thou wast younger thou didst gird thyself, and didst walk where thou wouldst. But when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hand and another shall gird thee, and lead thee whither thou wouldst not.” (John xxi, 18-19.)

Thus in the beginning we fettered ourselves with God’s will by the help of His loving and sweet influences, and we went by His leave whithersoever we would, our will and His being perfectly in harmony. And now it is altogether different; He will bind us all unwilling and lead us whither we do not want to go. Against all our natural inclinations He will lead us by dark paths into Himself. This He will continue till He has stripped us of our natural will, wholly brought it under subjection and totally consumed it. His purpose is that finally to will and not to will shall not any longer be considered by us, nor giving and keeping, nor having and lacking. The end will be to forget all things created, and let them go from us and let them stay away from us, and, instead, to accept and possess God alone, to have Him alone in all joy and sorrow. We become most dear children of God only when neither happiness nor misery, pleasure nor pain can keep us back from God. What all this means in the soul cannot be described, but this much is plain: It is incomparably better than if one were all afire with devotional sentiment, accompanied with a lesser degree of thoroughgoing self-renunciation, having more self-chosen spiritual methods with pious feelings, and at the same time less true-hearted loyalty to God. May God help us to the better state of His love. Amen.