It’s no secret that Blessed John of Ruusbroec, whose memorial is today, has been a long-term influence on this blog. I find him to be one of the finest writers on the spiritual life. His combination of clarity and imagination are without parallel, and the early date of his writings makes him, for the most part, an ancestor in spiritual literature, not a writer who largely depends on the themes of his predecessors. There’s a certain liveliness in his ideas and sketches. He hasn’t siloed anything off yet. His failures are those of the tentative first reachings out of the roots and branches, rather than the petrified forest.

It’s also no secret, I think, that one of my hobbyhorses is the reformulation of Christian prayer experience, in whole or in part, in terms drawn from a phenomenology or imagery-bank of touch. This is, of course, an interest that I share with Pope Francis. But I didn’t get it from him. It comes to me through a series of influences, including those who seem to have proposed it in the abuse crisis as a psycho-spiritual redemption of the sense of touch, not in or for the purpose of any act of physical touch, but in and for the re-integration of the interior sphere of simple one-on-one prayer with God and God alone. From the pre-modern influences with no particular agenda related to trauma healing, however, I think there still remains a lot to learn. The most prominent, most articulate, and most devoted to the theme is John of Ruusbroec.

On vocabulary

For Ruusbroec, an imagery-bank of “touch” is essential, and the core Low Countries Dutch word that he employs is gherinen. In the context of each usage, the term itself clearly connotes a tactile dimension, though a very interior one. It’s God’s touch in the soul.

As Dutch develops, however, a word similar to Ruusbroec’s gherinen but much more common comes into use. The term herinneren becomes the word for the basic verb “to remember.” As far as I know, the Middle Dutch gherinen and Modern Dutch herinneren have no historical relationship one to another. But the similarity suggests to me a creative, if technically misguided, starting point for reflection. I’d like to exploit it.

If we were to put our minds into a (terribly corrupt) folk etymology, we might detect in Ruusbroec’s vocabulary an incipient, or partly exposited, Christian sense of grace taking in all the faculties. We might imagine the phenomenologies of vision and hearing applied to prayer-life having some resemblance to the intellect and the will, perhaps. Meanwhile, the more primordial sense of touch could have some long-distance comparison to the memory. That would show us some features that are true. Touch, in Ruusbroec’s sense, is simultaneously more all-pervading and more indistinct than the other senses, just like memory is more omnipresent and diffuse relative to intellect and will. Touch is held in the whole body, as it were. It even comprises subconscious dimensions. Everything human is implicated. If this uniquely unscientific approach to the language can help us form a basic idea, we can embrace it. But like I say again, it’s an approach that is deliberately fantastic and disconnected from historical language development.

What’s important is that Ruusbroec’s word gherinen penetrates. It charges into the very ground of who we are and plants itself there. Exactly as a bad etymology might indicate, something about the divine touch is more global than our dedicated, focused faculties of intellect and will. It’s also more passive, more received, more foundational, more grossly experiential. That’s a point to start from.

The references to gherinen in Ruusbroec’s corpus are many. Despite the temptation, I won’t attempt a complete study of the topic. I’ll just give some suggestions—lengthy suggestions, but ones that, I hope, are helpful for our spiritual life. I will go through the relevant works one by one, letting our author’s own context and discussions shape the presentation, rather than my own plans and priorities.

The Spiritual Espousals

The usual place to start with the crown of Dutch mysticism is his long, long-famous work called The Spiritual Espousals. Its elucidations are detailed and well-rounded, and they have had a remarkable formative influence not only on Ruusbroec’s own later explanations and partial corrections of his thoughts and emphases, but also on the later Christian tradition of prayer, both directly and indirectly.

First, as I say, note that Ruusbroec is confident about our passivity to divine touch: “A creature undergoes this touch passively,” for “at this level no one is active but God alone.”[1] Such a contact with God—made by God, initiated by God, placing us in a new way within God—is deep inside.

We should not, apparently, try to put this touch in any of our faculties, like the reasoning power or the will. It happens “in the still being of the spirit”[2] or

in the unity of the spirit, where […] a person is above works and above reasons, though not without reason, for the enlightened reason, and especially the amorous power, feel this touch, but the power of reason cannot comprehend or understand the mode or manner of this touch, or how or what it is.[3]

This is a reference to Ruusbroec’s constant teaching that there is some part within us that is above reason, above consciousness, above our ability to patrol with our intellectual powers and our desiderative options. And it’s there that the Blessed Trinity first, primordially touches us.

Next, note that the contact is immediate. No barriers come with it. Just us and God, says Ruusbroec: “This touch calls the understanding to know God in his resplendence and it draws the amorous power to enjoy God without intermediary.”[4] That’s all quite logical and should come as no surprise, “for each time God bestows something on us he gives himself as well as his gifts.”[5] Such a copresence and correspondence of gifts and Gift is a constant of Ruusbroec’s balanced teaching. There is no sustained grace without indwelling.

By means of the divine contact—though it is in some sense also not a “means,” for it brings God to us immediately—the soul enters into diffuse, almost uncoordinated and non-specific acts of “contemplating and observing its inmost depths where the touch abides.”[6] The experience is all-encompassing and general. The reason is because God is too much. Ruusbroec, two centuries before John of the Cross, uses Aristotle’s metaphor: “like the eyes of a bat when confronted with the sun’s brightness,”[7] so is the eye of our mind before God. He adds that that’s why God’s presence is known more like touch. From the famous “blind bat” metaphor, Ruusbroec rushes, not to an external sense that we don’t have (echolocation), but to one we do have, touch. This sense is so much more primordial and indistinct. It hides so much more while revealing.

God initiates contact. For all this, however, Ruusbroec isn’t a quietist. In fact, I’d say that a profound spirituality of anti-quietism is one of his greatest gifts to the contemplative tradition. So, our mediaeval author specifies further that it is people “who, through the practice of virtue and interior exercises, have fathomed the depths of their being to its source, which is the door to eternal life, are able to experience the touch.”[8] That is, we have to know ourselves through Christian living. God can, of course, do anything. He can knock us down off our high horse at any moment. But in the normal, usual course of things, we need to apply ourselves to the virtuous, loving life as Christians understand it. And then, that creates space, both through what we do well and what we honestly see ourselves incapable of attaining, for God to do his thing.

That we are incapable of getting to the deepest depths and highest heights ourselves is patent. What Ruusbroec has in mind is “an interior stirring or touch in the unity of the spirit, where the higher powers of the soul have their abode.”[9] He further describes it as “an interior stirring or touch of Christ in his divine resplendence, and it takes place in the inmost part of our spirit”[10] and “a life of love at the highest level of its activity, above reason and understanding.”[11] In a later chapter, he expresses it thus: “a divine stirring or touch in the unity of our spirit, an influx and ground of all graces, gifts, and virtues.”[12] Its locus is

in the unity of our higher powers, above reason—though not without reason, for we do perceive that we are being touched. But if we try to determine what this touch is or where it comes from, then reason and all creaturely powers of observation fail. […] Here, then, our active powers must submit passively to God’s action, and this is the beginning of all gifts.[13]

In other words, like much of the tradition says about the Gifts of the Holy Spirit, we’re led more than we lead.

The Holy Spirit is the principal agent in acts of contemplation and in the active life when it is truly permeated with and overflowing from contemplative prayer, whether transparent or somehow masked. Sure, we do our part. Ruusbroec has already told us that. But something about the more profound tactile dimension passes above our ability to realize it, and as we approach that deepest or highest part of ourselves, our life, our contemplation, and our action, we somehow, while being more activated and alive, are also more passive to the Spirit. It seems a paradox. But it’s one that the spiritual writers speak of often.

Now, Ruusbroec wants to clarify one more thing. God loves us to a degree that we cannot possibly fathom. We plunge deep; he’s deeper still. We rise high; he’a higher still. Never think otherwise. The Three Divine Persons come to us to set up a home and dwell with—in—us. When that happens, we start to act out “love in itself, the foundation and ground of all the virtues.”[14] Not that we weren’t living charity before. But as we go along the good road, we are touched. We realize more the touch by God. And as a consequence, it is, conversely, “God [who] is touched.”[15] Things go both ways. God touches us. He starts it all off, and his action passes beyond our reasonable and conscious control. Yet, as his power takes us, we ourselves touch him.

Ruusbroec displays here a subtlety and complexity that shouldn’t be underestimated. Because we are touched by God, we are wounded by love—a theme that the reader of the sanjuanist poems and prose knows so well. Yes, that’s true. But at the same time, because we touch God through the action realized in us and brought forth in us, God himself is wounded, so to speak, by love. Ruusbreoc says it directly: “each spirit is wounded by love. These two spirits, that is, our spirit and God’s Spirit, cast a radiant light upon one another and each reveals to the other its countenance.”[16] Neglecting for the moment the mixed metaphors and the departure from our tactile theme, note the fullness, the reciprocity. We are wounded by love for God, by his touch. But God is wounded by love for us.

On our side—and probably on both sides—the wound is as if incurable. We crave more. God has truly contacted the entire ground of all that we are and seek. In fact, every moment of touch can only accentuate the problem: “At each new touch our spirit falls into a state of hunger and thirst and wishes in this storm of love thoroughly to savor and penetrate this groundless abyss in order to find satisfaction.”[17] There is a certain disequilibrium (to borrow and repurpose some other Ruusbroecian imagery). It propels us towards a new state. Whatever the pace, we have a trajectory that ends but in God.

The direction is set and the impulse has been given. If we persist, there can be solidity in our life: “God’s touch and his giving of himself, together with our striving in love and our giving of ourselves in return—this is what sets love on a firm foundation.”[18] There can be union with God: “God’s touch and our striving in love become a single love.”[19] The duality between our work in the virtues and the touch that God descends to place in us begins to vanish. All is love. All is mercy. All is grace. This itself is righteousness:

Through […] God’s touch love remains active, for this righteous person has established for himself a truly spiritual life in both rest and activity; such a life will continue forever, though after this present life it will be transformed into a higher state.

It is in all this that a person’s righteousness consists.[20]

The Sparkling Stone

It is typical of Ruusbroec that the main exploration of a topic occurs in the early work, The Spiritual Espousals, and that later writings give nice gems of summary or intriguing insight. This is the case, too, for the prayer-phenomenology of touch.

In the work called The Sparkling Stone, our author refocuses his reflection in terms of centrifugal and centripetal, or diastolic and systolic, motions of touch. Consider this sequence:

God’s outward-flowing touch enkindles restlessness and demands our own activity, namely, that we love the love which is eternal. But his inward-drawing touch draws us out of ourselves and calls us to dissolve into nothingness in unity with God. In this inward-drawing touch we feel that God wishes us to be his, for in this touch we must renounce ourselves and allow him to bring about our blessedness. […]

The more we savor this grace, the more do we desire to savor it; the more we desire to savor it, the more deeply do we open ourselves to God’s touch; the more deeply we open ourselves to his touch, the more does the flood of his sweetness flow through and around us; and the more this flood flows through and around us, the more do we feel and know that God’s sweetness is incomprehensible and without ground.[21]

Or this one:

Whenever we feel that God is touching us from within, we are tasting his fruit and his food, for his touch is his food. This touch both draws in and flows out, as I said earlier. When it draws us in, we become wholly God’s, learning how to die and how to see. But when it flows out, he wishes to be wholly ours, teaching us how to live in the richness of the virtues. When his touch draws us in, all our powers fail; we are then sitting under his shadow, and his fruit is then sweet to our taste, for God’s fruit is the Son of God, whom the Father begets in our spirit. This fruit is so infinitely sweet to our taste that we can neither swallow nor assimilate it; on the contrary, it consumes us and absorbs us into itself.[22]

And finally this one:

God’s outward-flowing touch makes us alive in our spirit, fills us with grace, enlightens our reason, teaches us to know the truth and to distinguish among the virtues, and keeps us standing in God’s presence with such great strength that we can bear all savor, all experience, and all God’s outward-flowing gifts without having our spirit fail us. But God’s inward-drawing touch calls us to be one with him and to expire and die in a state of blessedness, that is, in that one love which enfolds the Father and the Son in a single state of blissful enjoyment.[23]

Without the earlier lengthy explanation, I’m not sure what sense we’d make of this. The complementary, bipolar motions of touch are a powerful metaphor, and as the passage stands, it’s a useful little précis of the earlier doctrine. I’d have to say that I do find it charming and compelling, but it’s certainly unusually dense.

The importance of the tactile basis for understanding God’s love for us never abates. In fact, the penultimate paragraph of The Sparkling Stone ends—crescendos, I daresay—like this:

When he feels himself to be one with God, then God himself is his peace, his enjoyment, and his rest. This is an entirely fathomless abyss, in which a person must die to himself in a state of blessedness and come back to life through the virtues in whatever way love and its touch require.[24]

Mirror of Eternal Blessedness

We can again find largely the same teaching, condensed and resumed, in a second later work of Ruusbroec. First, he speaks of four ways of loving, and within this exposition we again encounter a prayer of touch, which connects into the whole story that incudes the other three modes of loving:

There is a love which is above and beyond your comprehension. This love is the Spirit of our Lord. In this love you will be raised up to dwell and rest in unity with God, above your power of rational understanding.

There is also a love which is within you. This is God’s grace and your own good will. In this love you possess the richness and fullness of all your virtues. God thereby lives and dwells within you with his grace and his gifts, while you can become ever more pleasing to him.

There is in addition a love which is between you and God. This love is a holy desire which rises up to God’s glory, accompanied by thanksgiving, praise, and all the exercises of love. This love between you and God, together with these exercises, will always be renewed through the touch of the Holy Spirit and the good will and affection of your heart.

There is finally a love which is beneath you. This love is an outflow of charity toward your neighbor through works of mercy, in every way that your neighbor stands in need and you are aware of these needs. In this love you will hold to your good practices and your rule, to good customs and good works, and to an orderly way of performing exterior works in accordance with God’s commandments and the ordinances of the holy Church.[25]

Ruusbroec is careful to distinguish various, interconnected dimensions of our life. And he stresses that any love between God and us “will always be renewed through the touch of the Holy Spirit and the good will and affection of your heart.” The first phrase is pretty central. God touches our heart at a level that passes understanding, and the symbolic universe of touch is apposite because it encompasses so much more of our being, grounds so many more of our experiences, and remains so much farther beyond conceptualization and exhaustion in concepts and images.

In a subsequent section, the Low Countries genius returns to the theme of touch. We are reminded that love pushes ever onward. Touch introduces restlessness, woundedness. To wit,

that infinite love which is God himself reigns in the purity of our spirit like the glow of burning coals. It sends forth brilliant, burning sparks which, in the fire of love, touch and enflame the heart and senses, the will and desires, and all the powers of the soul to a stormy transport of restless, formless love.[26]

The reason that Ruusbroec gives this time is actually pretty simple and clever. Touch, he says, implies duality. Things touch only insofar as they are different. They contact only inasmuch as they are not identical. But the nature of this divine touch in the depths and heights of our being renders that distance, so to speak, intolerable:

Insofar as we embrace and touch each other, we feel a duality which does not allow us to remain in ourselves. Although we are above reason, we are not without reason and therefore feel that we are both touching and being touched, loving and being loved, and always being renewed and returning to ourselves.[27]

Love enkindles love. Touch reaches out to close the distance. As majestic and daring as the interior tactile sense of God is, it is also dissatisfied with itself, until Lover and Beloved are united.

Conclusion

One of the gifts that John of Ruusbroec has given the Church—and myself in particular—is a preoccupation with framing the encounter with God as one, not just of intellect, will, mind, and heart, but also of something deeper, wider, more penetrating, farther-reaching. God touches us. In some sense that gathers together the whole of our being, God’s presence is spiritually immediate and spiritually tactile. Ruusbroec tells us this over and over. He never relents.

In fact, one of his great insights is that the tactile sense connotes something far beyond concepts and images. It grounds our experience to a far more substantial degree than the more high-fallutin’ senses of vision and hearing. It’s without medium. It’s visceral and primordial. God touches us. This entails a spirituality of prayer and the active life that originates in and continually circles back to “a divine feeling which is above reason,”[28] but not contrary to it.

In a world obsessed—then as now—with the conscious ponderings and manipulations of experience and reality, Ruusbroec’s is an important, challenging, and compelling declaration. We truly have to let go and let God, in a way that we can hardly put into words or images. All attempts to put this into a program or a formula will fail. Love surpasses the law—touch surpasses even sight and hearing, reason and will. It pierces the memory, then beyond, into the ground of everything we are. And even when we cannot put this into words, we may feel it; we can feel it.

Ruusbroec, though, is never a quietist. Living out our faith may bring us to the point where we realize how much God was always there. That’s true. But it’s equally true that experience of the stirring and touch of God flourishes in living. It is “God’s touch […] which brings about a renewal of grace and of all virtues.”[29] We are touched by God. We touch him in turn. This leads us to go out to all the others whom God grounds and stirs in their heart of hearts, too, whether they know it yet or not.

On this day of celebrating a little-remembered blessed who is one of the biggest figures in my life—may God bless you, may he seek you out, stir in your heart, make that intimate contact, and lead you on and out and within.

[1] John Ruusbroec, Spiritual Espousals II.2/3.C, in The Spiritual Espousals and Other Works, trans. James A. Wiseman (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1985), 112.

[2] Ibid., 113.

[3] Ibid., 112–113.

[4] Ibid., 113.

[5] Ibid., II.4.C, 135.

[6] Ibid., II.2/3.C, 113.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid., 114.

[9] Ibid., II.2/3, 77.

[10] Ibid., II.2/3.C, 112.

[11] Ibid., 115.

[12] Ibid., II.4.B, 131.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid. II.2/3.C, 115.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid., II.4.B, 131.

[18] Ibid. II.2/3.C, 115.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Ibid., II.4.C, 135.

[21] Sparkling Stone, II.D, in The Spiritual Espousals and Other Works, 177.

[22] Ibid., II. E, 179.

[23] Ibid., II.F, 181.

[24] Ibid., II.G, 183.

[25] Mirror of Eternal Blessedness I.B, in The Spiritual Espousals and Other Works, 191.

[26] Ibid., III.B, 238.

[27] Ibid., III.C, 240.

[28] Little Book of Clarification II.B, in The Spiritual Espousals and Other Works, 261.

[29] Ibid.