Monthly Osuna: Letter I
The Heart of Recollection
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 I.
This Letter Speaks of the Soul’s Repose, Saying: Intimately Calm and Quiet Your Understanding. Intimamente asoseiga y acalla tu entendimiento.
The Heart of Recollection
“Stilling the understanding and making the will call out, we form brief prayer that at once uses no means other than love to reach God; and love can immediately join with him.” (SA 556)
“The silence of love is marvelous and most admirable and praiseworthy, that silence wherein the understanding is profoundly quieted, receiving the sublimely contented knowledge of experience. We clearly realize that when lovers are present to each other, they fall silent and the love that unites them supplies the want of words.” (SA 558)
“It is proper to be very quiet and attentive to God. Thus, there are two kinds of silence: In the one the imagination and thoughts revolving in memory are calm; in the other we become forgetful of our very selves, and the interior person is in perfect communion with God alone.” (SA 560)
As Osuna makes clear in this letter, recollection is the spiritual practice of being wholly attentive to God with the desire of the heart. It is prayer without words or mental content. I would add that the “desire of the heart” in question is our general desire for good, which is the one desire that is essential to love.
What does it look like in practice to be wholly attentive to God with the desire of the heart? As I sit in the stillness and silence, my mental focus is my general desire for goodness. What is important to grasp is that my desire for goodness does not need specific, mental content. I don’t need to think about anything in particular in order to desire goodness since my desire for goodness precedes the particulars that I might seek in order to satisfy it.
We have an inherent, God-given desire for goodness. And the object of that general desire is the divine presence. What recollection does is enable us to desire the source of all goodness by letting go of the mental content that secures that desire to some specific object. In this sense, the spiritual practice of recollection is properly apophatic since the divine transcends the upper limit of our cognitive capacities.
Recollection Is More Than Thinking About Nothing
“The recollected do not consider that perfection is tantamount to thinking of nothing at all; if that were the case, those who sleep, unless they dream, and the stunned would be perfect. If you read some place that it is profitable to think of nothing whatsoever, realize that advice is for novices in this devotion that they may learn to humbly turn away from distractions to God…” (SA 563)
“So, realize that this business of thinking about nothing is more than it is reported to be. There is no way at all to explain it because it relates to God, who is indescribable. I will tell you, however, that to think of nothing is to think of everything insofar as we dispense with reason as we see the One who is eminently wondrous. The least good inherent in this thinking about nothing is that the recollected are very simply and very subtly attentive to God alone.” (SA 565)
“We do not claim that there is good in pure privation, nor is there pure privation in this devotion, for if you quiet your understanding in order to be more attentive to God alone and if you direct your heart to him, you are doing a great deal.” (SA 567)
Osuna’s point here cannot be said too often since it touches on a common critique of contemplative prayer. Those who don’t understand recollection through their own experience will sometimes claim that contemplatives empty their minds, which invariably opens them up to demonic influences. Ironically, that claim is the opposite of what Christians have been teaching since the earliest centuries of the faith, i.e., demonic influences work primarily through our thoughts. This is partly why they taught recollection; it is by becoming detached from our thoughts that demonic influences lose their power.
At any rate, from the outside, the practice of recollection can seem counter intuitive. How can I experience God without having thoughts about God? But from the inside, the experience confirms Osuna’s claim that “to think of nothing is to think of everything.” There is an experience of the divine presence available to us in the stillness and silence that by far exceeds in quality whatever mental content about God we released during twenty or thirty minutes of sitting. To let go in this way takes an act of faith, but it’s an act of faith that is validated by the experience.
“Therefore, it is very good to enjoy God in a secret, obscure way, for God loves solitude and hides in the shadows. You should intimately quiet your mind and still your understanding, allowing nothing whatsoever to enter, nor should you even speak loving words when you begin to feel communion with the Lord, though they may seem good and your soul may take pleasure in them. For it is better to be totally attentive to recollecting yourself and perfecting yourself in it. To recollect the heart is to embrace God, and he is clasped the more securely with just one desire.” (SA 574)
Francisco de Osuna The Third Spiritual Alphabet (Trans. Mary E. Giles; Preface Kieran Kavanaugh; Paulist Press, 1981)