Monthly Osuna: Letter R
Love, Goodness, and Contemplating a Blade of Grass
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 R.
This Letter Speaks of Love, Saying: Apply Love to Everything and Draw Love from Everything. Referir y sacar deves do toda cosa el amor. (SA 405)
Contemplating Goodness
“Through our own efforts and with practice of proper devotion, we can love and bless God for every one of the things he created. Each one will be a step on the ladder that raises us to love the Lord and whereon we rejoice and thank the Lord for creating even a single blade of grass and endowing it with unique grace. Delighting in that tiny blade, we acknowledge in heart and desire the infinite glory that accrues to God, for he reveals in even the blade of grass divine wisdom and goodness and infinite power.” (SA 417)
“You should do this through all his creation, seeing God in each and every thing with the aid of your affection and loving will rather than by your understanding.” (SA 416)
“I once knew a person who, seeing a rooster spread and flap its wings to crow, truly felt his entire being moved and opened to love God most sweetly.” (SA 442)
In this letter, Osuna encourages the contemplative to “refer to God, purely and essentially, every virtue and goodness you encounter in creation.” We do this by “drawing love from them to place in the fountain of all perfections who is uncreated goodness” (SA 441). Osuna covers a lot of territory in this letter, but I will stick with the general practice of seeking to perceive divine goodness through creatures, which one can do since creation’s own goodness is a participation in and reflection of divine love.
Seeking Love In All Things
As a spiritual practice, Osuna offers two steps to help us refer all goodness to God: 1) seeking to perceive the goodness of created things, and 2) seeking to perceive their transcendent source (God/Goodness).
The first step requires an attentive regard, i.e., an unconditioned attention of the heart. There are a couple ways that we might attend to the created goodness of something. We might attend to its goodness as regards its relation to ourselves and others. This is an easier form of attention because it involves our natural point of view. I can easily perceive the goodness of those things that benefit me and the ones I love. This can be a helpful form of attention, but it is also beneficial to try and transcend self as the point of reference.
“The authentic and pure values- truth, beauty, and goodness- in the activity of a human being are the result of one and the same act, a certain application of the full attention to the object.” Simone Weil (GG 120)2
We can also attend to a thing’s inherent goodness by bracketing, as much as possible, our own thoughts about it. This is where our practice of recollection will be of benefit since we will have acquired some aptitude in letting go of thoughts without conditioning them through ego and judgment. To contemplate something without judgment is to let it speak for itself. This generous form of attentive regard toward something for its own sake opens our perception to values that both include and transcend us. From this generous form of attentive regard, we can move to the second step: seeking to perceive the transcendent source of created goodness.
Seeking Love Through All Things
“Those who follow recollection speak to God alone and, unaided by imagination, lift to him pure love…Saint Augustine considered this when he said, ‘My God, what do I love when I love you? Not bodily graciousness nor physical beauty, not the splendor of light nor sweet melodies of songs, nor the gentle fragrance of flowers, nor aromatic perfumes, nor manna nor honey, not the bodily limbs waiting to be embraced. I do not love these things when I love my God; I love a light and a voice, a fragrance and a taste, an embrace of my inner being, and my soul sees a light that brightens no other place, hears what time cannot contain, smells aromas not borne on breezes, tastes unending sweetness, and delights in undying light.’” (SA 439)
“You can attain to this love if you become accustomed to drawing out love from everything and setting it in the inconceivable God, who though you do not see him is more present to you than you are to yourself and who governs you and preserves this life that sustains you.” (SA 440).
The second step is to locate the inherent goodness of creatures in their source. In other words, we should practice recollection. By its nature, recollection of the heart removes the differentiating aspects of various instances of goodness in order to contemplate goodness, per se. And. it is only with the desire of the heart that transcendent values can be contemplated since the intellect, by nature, can only consider particulars.
The common factor, then, in both steps is our reliance on the desire of our heart instead of the content of our intellections. In this sense, attentive regard is always silent and still, even when contemplating a single blade of grass. What changes in the second step, however, is our focus from observable particulars to their source and from observable instances of goodness to the inscrutable, divine presence that creates and sustains them. Still, the practical suggestion for making this step is recollection. Osuna never strays far from encouraging the simple practice of recollection; everything else is preparation.
Becoming Love Toward All Things
“We can indeed say that charitable love renders human actions angelic…let us build ourselves on love and let us thrust our roots down in love. Built like sturdy structures and rooted like trees, we will be founded on love for God that makes us the dwelling place and temple in which God resides, and rooted in love for our neighbor that makes us fruitful trees, sending up protective leaves and nourishing fruit.” (SA 411)
Finally, in seeking creaturely and divine goodness as objects of contemplation, we participate more in the good we seek, and we share that goodness with others. Invariably, the fruit of contemplation is more love for others. It is virtually impossible to give our unconditioned, attentive regard to others and not love them more. Simone Weil touches on this when she says the transcendent values of goodness and beauty that we see in human activity is the result of full attention. It’s in giving our full and generous attention to others, attention unconditioned by ego and judgment, that we begin to see others for their own sake, seeing in them and desiring for them the goodness we seek with our hearts. Happily, out of the treasure of a heart so attentive comes instances of beauty and goodness toward others as divine love permeates and flows uninterrupted.
Francisco de Osuna The Third Spiritual Alphabet (Trans. Mary E. Giles; Preface Kieran Kavanaugh; Paulist Press, 1981)
Simone Weil Gravity and Grace (Trans. Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr; Routledge Classics, 2002)