John knows us and our disordered appetites. This book can most closely be compared to a user’s guide to the human soul. John himself was constantly immersed in the Word. It is completely saturated with Sacred Scripture as St. Here are just some of things I gleaned from the AoMC: Since I have just begun to explore the on-line world, I am quite sure there are many other versions, but my intent here is not provide an exhaustive list of resources, but only to let you know there are options if you find reading the great Carmelite too daunting. (This is an original translation and will not match any of the more conventional ones, also, I found the chapters to be off by one in the last 3 parts.) As each part concludes, you are automatically moved to the next part. Midway though I discovered an 8 part YouTube presentation of the complete book, this being the link for Part 1 of 8. Last time I listened to my audio CDs which is how I began this time as well. One thing which helped was listening to it. This spiritual novice needed to go over some parts multiple times for the full import to sink in. The message is not new, the methods and details are from the Mystical Doctor’s own perspective. He wants us to surrender our intellect to dark Faith, let go of our memory to dark Hope and above all, give over our will to God through saying ‘no’ to all that we believe gives us joy, so that we may be able to embrace the Only One Who will or can give us Himself, Him-Who-is-All-in-All. So here John is attempting to teach us what most other Spiritual Masters also insist on, the simple yet also not-so-simple axiom, let go and Let God.
He wants us to understand first of all that Union must be God’s Way and not ours-something which sounds simple and would be if we, humans, trying to be so clever, looking for shortcuts and ‘methods’, were not constantly getting in the way of the Almighty. John’s point in writing AoMC is to teach the path of Union with God. So long as one is a serious lover of Christ Jesus, this book can be for you. Yet it is my hope to encourage those of us ‘little souls’ not to avoid Ascent of Mount Carmel out of fear or humility. There is so much here one could devote an entire lifetime just to studying this work by the ‘Mystical Doctor’-his title as one of the 36 Doctors of the Catholic Church-quite apart from all the rest of his major and minor writings.īeing neither scholar nor saintly, this is not a review of such high caliber. John’s four masterpieces*, it is probably the second best known after Dark Night of the Soul. Have I thus any mastery of the text? No, just much time and effort.Īugust 27, 2020: This, my second read of Ascent of Mount Carmel, was much richer than my first experience with it. My own review says I read this only twice, but I know for sure that this will be at least my fourth read of this text, not to mention all the other times I have read sections for various reasons.
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