Teresa of Avila

If Christ Jesus dwells in a man as his friend and noble leader, that man can endure all things, for Christ helps and strengthens us and never abandons us. He is a true friend. And I clearly see that if we expect to please him and receive an abundance of his graces, God desires that these graces must come to us from the hands of Christ, through his most sacred humanity, in which God takes delight. Many, many times I have perceived this through experience. The Lord has told it to me. I have definitely seen that we must enter by this gate if we wish his Sovereign Majesty to reveal to us great and hidden mysteries. A person should desire no other path, even if he is at the summit of contemplation; on this road he walks safely. All blessings come to us through our Lord. He will teach us, for in beholding his life we find that he is the best example.What more do we desire from such a good friend at our side? Unlike our friends in the world, he will never abandon us when we are troubled or distressed. Blessed is the one who truly loves him and always keeps him near. Let us consider the glorious Saint Paul: it seems that no other name fell from his lips than that of Jesus, because the name of Jesus was fixed and embedded in his heart. Once I had come to understand this truth, I carefully considered the lives of some of the saints, the great contemplatives, and found that they took no other path: Francis, Anthony of Padua, Bernard, Catherine of Siena. A person must walk along this path in freedom, placing himself in God’s hands. If God should desire to raise us to the position of one who is an intimate and shares his secrets, we ought to accept this gladly.Whenever we think of Christ we should recall the love that led him to bestow on us so many graces and favours, and also the great love God showed in giving us in Christ a pledge of his love; for love calls for love in return. Let us strive to keep this always before our eyes and to rouse ourselves to love him. For if at some time the Lord should grant us the grace of impressing his love on our hearts, all will become easy for us and we shall accomplish great things quickly and without effort.
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Happy feast day of Teresa of Avila, btw! Here Teresa mentions the "bridge" (or the 'gate' here) that I was trying to identify earlier in recalling Catherine of Siena in my Francis post. And I was a little puzzled that she didn't go further than that - she is a doctor of the church! I was hoping for an explanation instead of the image. But maybe there is no explanation - maybe it is something affective - maybe "bridge" and "gate" are the only sorts of words you can use becuase it is not something cognitive but rather something direct and active - something you literally "go" to - follow - Christ did say, after all, "Follow me," not "Study my teachings" (although he did say "remain in me," "mary has chosen the better part" and "he who hears my word and does it" - all of which are necessary disposative parts, and all of which serve to contribute even better to devotion supposing that one's adherence to God is maintained or increased and enhanced thereby - but it seems that in some places adherence cannot be "improved" or "expanded" or "expounded" - can't be improved at all in any "unpacking" sense but just is. Maybe the "affective" is more effective/active than the cognitive here as my teacher is hinting and as I guess when I am not trying to articulate because when I read systematically it is hard to present this, because if you work with a literal systematization of Aquinas, it does not end up as Aquinas but as a heavily-loaded twentieth-century of Aquinas, making him do things he never would have agreed to do. Yet it is there - I go back to find it with my teacher's help - Aquinas is not systematic in the way that one would try to attack him - attack is a good word insofar as one is overwhelmed and thinks it will be difficult to present him - one goes about hedging oneself in the first place with cross-references - thinking that it is impossible that there can be a self-sustained logic in a single presentation.
Again with "humanity" which I struggle with. i guess I was a platonist since I was rather young - my philosophy began with my religion - I remember when I first looked at my body as something rather distinct from me. I was really little - it wasn't too long after my first communion I think - and we were coming out of Mass, actually, after having received Communion and talking with all the old folks who came to daily Mass like us. Their bodies were old and wrinkly but I recognized how young they were by the way they carried themselves, and I was thinking how they must have thought they were still young - of course I am projecting a distinct or separate thinking process which wasn't the case but more of a sense that I got from regular interactions with these people who were our friends and may be uniting more than one occasion in more than one year. And they were happy. At any rate, I started to think about the Resurrection and looked at my own arms and legs and thought about how they were young and smooth and strong now but eventually I would lose them when I die temporarily but then get them back. And while my thought process was a happy one - on the getting back of my body even better than before, it still was the first occasion that enabled me to think of myself as united but distinguishable from my body. And while it was a happy distinguishing - the ability to distinguish became problematic when misapplied in certain reflections.
However I didn't come up with Cartesianism by my eight-year-old self. I had become imbued with an instrumentalization of the body, for example, through a morbid weight-consciousness since kindergarten due to a large number of influences, not only in the media but in my family and friends. The categories of "young" and "old" which I saw in myself and those whom I saw as my "friends" were more heavily loaded culturally and aesthetically than I thought - and without knowing it I was struggling with their categorizations without being able to resist them - instead of discerning that the highly-aestehtically-loaded categories of "youth" and "age" were the result of a disoriented and misapplied separation of body and soul leading to instrumentalization and too-heavily-weighted focus on bodily age and beauty of youth, I resolved it by thinking of the Resurrection and post-Resurrection to which we were all headed - I had to posit another time of being in order to make sense of being bodily in a Cartesian-influenced society.
I don't know much about Descartes but I think in our culture we objectify the body exceedingly - we can shape it and perform cosmetic operations and use it as a tool for social and sexual advancement. The fact that I had no problem with naming a concept of "sexual advancement" shows another objectification and commodification of sex as something "bodily" and not as something "human". Even the focus on health as something separate and distinguishable from the health of the whole person (a comment my teacher made abotu Descartes on my draft started this whole reflection), which is very prominent today, is a prime example.
Why all this? Because I'm working with passions on the one hand - because I'm undergoing a therapy not only of understanding, but of living right now not only through learning and religion but through every aspect. Trying to make something cognitive about Christ's humanity on the religious "side" is that dimension.
This has largely been about what "it" is not about. I am identifying a consciousness of negative things I'm seeing - bad ways of being, masquerading as "rational". I don't think it is a good thing necessarily to present unless others have the same difficulties (which is not necessarily the case) because presenting errors even as errors can be non-productive not only for others but for oneself - a waste of time and energy unless short and dismissive - unless it is deep-rooted and you have to talk for a bit until something "touches".
And it is also because I don't yet have good articulations so this is substituting.