Monthly Osuna: Letter A
May the person and spirit always walk together
“The soul is ruined and dissolute when it allows the mind and thoughts to flit about wantonly, running off wherever they wish. When they finally do wander home, worn out, dying of hunger, they come dragging behind an even heavier load of desire and greed.” (SA 53)
This is a monthly series on Francisco de Osuna’s The Third Spiritual Alphabet.1 In each post, we reflect on one letter from his Alphabet. The Alphabet was written as an aid to recollection. Recollection (being recollected in God) is both a form of prayer and a way of being in the world. This month’s letter is A.
Francisco de Osuna
Francisco de Osuna was a Spanish Franciscan friar in the 16th century. The Third Spiritual Alphabet consists of a series of maxims, each beginning with a letter from the Spanish Alphabet, and commentaries intended to help as aids to recollection. Teresa of Avila, a paragon of the contemplative life, was thrilled when her uncle, Don Pedro, gave her a copy of Osuna’s Alphabet. It was her introduction to the contemplative life.
Letter A
May the person and spirit always walk together (SA 45) Anden siempre juntamente, la persona y spiritu
Osuna prefaces his commentary on Letter A by clarifying that recollection in God is not only possible but possible for anyone. Much as we saw with Mechthild of Magdeburg, Osuna’s recollection is an intentional act of the will as the soul is “not resting but fixing its heart on God” (SA 48). Recollection is possible because 1) nothing can eradicate our inherent capacity to love, and 2) God is “nearer to you and deeper within you than you are to yourself” (SA 50).
“God does not discriminate, this communion is just as available to you, whoever you are, as to other people, for you are no less made in the image of God than others, nor do I think you desire this good fortune less than they.” (SA 47)
Recollecting a Scattered Heart
Osuna summarizes his maxim for Letter A:
“The meaning of our letter is that wherever you go carry your mind along…Do not allow the body to travel one path, the heart another…” (SA 50)
“You…take heed, mend your heart and adorn it; join together all the bits and pieces of your cares so you can approach God with your forces united. Protect the vessel of your heart from the dust of vain thought.” (SA 52)
Our hearts are scattered because our minds are scattered. ”Your heart is like a broken vessel, its fragments the worries of life, each chipped off piece some thought” (SA 51). There is a direct connection between what we think about and the state of our hearts because our thoughts give life to the “passions.”
“The reason the heart is scattered about in so many affections, and longings, desires, reflections, and cares is that the four passions are alive.” (SA 56)
The Passions
For Osuna, the four principle passions are “joy, sadness, hope and fear, which exist in every mortal being.” The problem is not that we have passions, these are given by our Creator, but they are too often scattered and not fitting for the moment we inhabit. The goal of recollection is to fix our heart’s desire and our mental attention on God so that our mind and heart become united and the passions become ordered.
This conception of the “passions” might not be familiar to us, but it is a well-worn concept in both western and eastern traditions of Christian contemplation. In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, those who practice hesychasm as a form of contemplative prayer also focus on controlling the passions by guarding the heart with the mind. The Philokalia, which is a primary spiritual text for hesychasts, dedicates a significant amount of space to the problem of the passions. Consider this explanation by the 7th century contemplative, Maximus the Confessor:
“A thing, a conceptual image, and a passion are each quite different one from the others. For example, a man, a woman, gold, and so forth are things, a conceptual image is a passion-free thought about one of those things; a passion is a mindless affection or indiscriminate hatred for one of these same things…An impassioned conceptual image is a thought compounded of passion and a conceptual image. If we separate the passion from the image, what remains is the passion-free thought. We can make this separation by means of spiritual love and self-control, if only we have the will.”2
The mind is the gateway to the heart. Our passions arise when we are thinking about something and attach “mindless affection or indiscriminate hatred” to the conception or “image” we are entertaining. More often than not, we become attached in this way to our conceptual images without noticing it is happening. We can use the act of scrolling through our social media feed as a metaphor for this experience.
Scrolling through Social Media
As we scroll through our social media feed, we encounter various images, memes, and posts that elicit our passions. A video about sweet puppies gives us joy. We are angered by a poster whose politics are clearly off. We read an article about the state of the economy and feel fear. As we scroll, we make various judgments about the content we are taking in, approving of this and despising that, all while waiting for our lunch order to be ready. This is a snapshot of our everyday experience. What we think about gains entrance into our hearts so that we give ourselves over and become “scattered” as our passions are elicited by this or that.
Osuna’s method of contemplative prayer is intended to re-collect the heart, body, and mind by fixing the attention on God so that these different aspects of the person become a unity. But, of course, his method of prayer is a practice. The goal is to become more and more recollected in our everyday experience.
Francisco de Osuna The Third Spiritual Alphabet (Trans. Mary E. Giles; Preface Kieran Kavanaugh; Paulist Press, 1981)
Maximos the Confessor Philokalia: The Eastern Christian Spiritual Texts (Annotation by Allyne Smith; Trans. G.E.H. Palmer, Philip Sherrad, and Bishop Kallistos Ware; Kylight Paths Publishing, 2010; p.147)