Vigils Reading – Office for the Dead

MAY THE VISION OF YOUR BEAUTY BE MY DEATH

From the Spiritual Canticles of St John of the Cross5 ◊◊◊

The soul is right in daring to say: “may the vision of Your beauty be my death”, since she knows that at the instant she sees this beauty she will be carried away by it, and absorbed in this very beauty, and transformed in this same beauty, and made beautiful like this beauty itself, and enriched and provided for like this very beauty.

David declares, consequently, that the death of the saints is precious in the sight of the Lord. This would not be true if they did not participate in His very grandeurs, for in the sight of God nothing is precious but what God in Himself is.

Accordingly, the soul does not fear death when she loves, rather she desires it. Yet sinners are always fearful of death. They foresee that death will take everything away and bring them all evils. As David says, the death of sinners is very evil. And hence, as the Wise Man says, the remembrance of it is bitter. Since sinners love the life of this world intensely and have little love for that of the other, they have an immense fear of death.

The soul that loves God lives more in the next life than in this, for the soul lives where it loves more than where it gives life, and thus has but little esteem for this temporal life. She says then, “may the vision of Your beauty be my death. For the sickness of love is not cured except by your presence and image.”

The reason love sickness has no other remedy than the presence and the image of the Beloved is that, since this sickness differs from others, its medicine also differs. In other sicknesses, following sound philosophy, contraries are cured by contraries, but love is incurable except by what is in accord with love. The reason for this is that love of God is the soul’s health, and the soul does not have full health until loves is complete. Sickness is nothing but a want of health, and when the soul has not even a single degree of love, she is dead. but when she possesses some degrees of love of God, no matter how few, she is then alive, yet very weak and infirm because of her little love. In the measure that love increases she will be healthier, and when love is perfect she will have full health.

The soul does well to call imperfect love “sickness.” For just as the sick is too weak for work, so is the soul, feeble in love, too weak to practice heroic virtue. It is also noteworthy that the soul who feels the sickness of love, a lack of love, shows that she has some love, because she is aware of what she lacks through what she has. The soul who does not feel this sickness shows that she either has no love or is perfect in love