Love Awakened by Love: The Liberating Ascent of Saint John of the Cross

I tried reading St. John of the Cross and found him depressingly difficult. His style of writing left me feeling that ordinary mortals just don't have it in them to tread the path of the saints.Father O'Keefe makes St. John of the Cross accessible to today's Christians and gives us the encouragement we need to set out on the journey to heaven with the real hope of success.I highly recommend this book to anyone who is seriously seeking God.

I keep reading the pages over and over. There is so much love in this book. For those who have always thought that St. John of the Cross was too dark or complicated for them, read this to see how he truly loved God with all his heart and how we can attain and nourish this love as well.

A moral theologian brings a special approach to the life of virtue which is essential to the Ascent of the mount.

Wonderful commentary on Saint John's works!

Excellent

In this relatively brief work, Benedictine moral theologian Mark O'Keefe gives a contemporary analysis of St John of the Cross's teaching in the area of moral theology.Unfortunately people often get a distorted view of John, especially when they start reading his works. As O'Keefe himself admits, many people stop reading St John not too long after picking up the 'Ascent of Mount Carmel' and hardly get through even the first book. There are many reasons for this, including the rigor of John's own theology, his somewhat terse and repetitive writing style, the lack of systematic structure in the works themselves (John is somewhat erratic in the topics and doesn't complete either the Ascent or Dark Night commentaries), and the demands he imposes are formidable (even small imperfections are enough to spoil the contemplative journey). Added to all this is the encrustation of hagiography that depicts John as an ethereal figure who hated the world and delighted in spiritual masochism and extreme penance.O'Keefe does a very good job of unravelling the core of John's moral theology and his work on the virtues, particularly the theological virtues. He also shows John is not anti-rational or into excessive displays of emotion (even though John's spirituality is deeply affective); in fact, the whole emphasis of John's ascetic program is to bring the (inordinate) appetites under the control of reason. John clearly has little time for the irrational, the extreme or the fanatical, as his ruthless negation of extraordinary supernatural phenomena and the gentleness of his approach to his directees suggests. In fact John condemns those who refuse to work out things for themselves using the ordinary magisterium of the church, the sound guide of those in authority (priests, spiritual directors, bishops, etc) and their own common sense and reason and try to find the answer in a miraculous vision, apparition, or supernatural event (such as a weeping statute of the virgin). John is probably one of the most rational and reasonable of all Christian spiritual writers, showing a respect for human reason lacking in many other spiritual writers.The great strength of John's theology, as that with Augustine and Aquinas, is the focus on the virtues. John doesn't lay down a strict set of rules to be followed by all, rather he is a strong virtue ethicist. This is reflected in his great respect John has for both virtue itself and people who have it, and even more so when virtues are clearly infused and nourished by God in the spiritual life. O'Keefe also does a good job here of showing the relevance of John's virtue ethics to everyday Christian living, and by analogy, even to those without faith.This book is a very good introduction to St John's theology and ethics.