Easter 2026 - Reading #40 - Understanding
Reading
Saint John of the Cross, in The Living Flame of Love, describes the deepest experience of understanding as an encounter with God that transcends all concepts: "O living flame of love that tenderly wounds my soul in its deepest center! Since now you are not oppressive, now consummate! if it be your will: tear through the veil of this sweet encounter!"
John explains: "In this state the soul has such vast communications and knowledge of God that it understands clearly that it does not understand. The soul sees that it has entered into an immense and boundless desert, and the deeper it enters, the more vast the desert becomes. And in this desert, the soul discovers that it is not alone: God is there, filling the emptiness with a presence that is beyond all knowing and yet more real than anything the soul has ever known."
For John of the Cross, the gift of understanding, at its deepest, does not produce clear concepts about God but a luminous darkness, a knowing that transcends knowledge, a comprehension that deepens rather than resolves the mystery. The soul understands precisely by understanding that God is beyond all understanding, and in that recognition, finds not frustration but ecstasy.
Reflection
Forty-one days into Easter. John of the Cross takes us to the edge of what language can express. The gift of understanding, at its deepest, is not the acquisition of more information about God. It is the discovery that God is infinitely more than all our information. "The soul understands clearly that it does not understand." This sounds like a contradiction, but it is the testimony of every mystic: the closer you get to God, the more you realize how infinite he is, and the more your understanding becomes a joyful surrender to mystery.
This may seem far from the practical concerns of daily life, but it is profoundly liberating. If God could be fully comprehended by the human mind, he would not be God. The fact that our understanding reaches a limit and then gives way to wonder is not a failure of understanding, it is understanding's greatest success. We have reached the point where the gift of understanding merges into the gift of wisdom, which we will receive next week: the capacity not merely to know about God but to taste and see his goodness directly.
As we close this week on understanding, sit with the paradox John of the Cross presents. The desert that expands the deeper you enter is not emptiness but fullness, the fullness of a God who cannot be contained by any concept, any word, any image, any idea. All our theology, all our reading, all our reflection, and it has all been good, all necessary, ultimately delivers us to the threshold of a mystery too beautiful for words. And that threshold is not an end. It is an invitation. Step through. Wisdom awaits on the other side.