Question: Is not the person who has been transported to interior detachment freed from external exercises? Answer: One sees few people reach the cond… - Henry Suso

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Question: Is not the person who has been transported to interior detachment freed from external exercises? Answer: One sees few people reach the condition you describe without their strength being wasted. The efforts of those who really achieve it affect them to the marrow. And so, when they realise what is to be done and left undone, they continue to practise the usual exercises, performing them more or less frequently as their strength and the occasion permit. Question: Where do the pangs of conscience and other anxieties of seemingly good people come from, as well as the unrestrained latitude (of conscience) in other people? Answer: Both types are focusing their attention on their own image but in different ways; the one group spiritually, the other bodily.

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About Henry Suso

The Blessed Henry Suso (21 March 1295 – 25 January 1366), also known as Amandus or Heinrich Seuse, was a German-Swiss mystic of the Catholic Church, born at Überlingen on Lake Constance, he died in Ulm and was declared Blessed in 1831 by Pope Gregory XVI, who assigned his feast in the Dominican Order to 2 March. He was, along with his friend and contemporary Johannes Tauler, one of a triumvirate of thinkers belonging to the Rhineland school, also called The Rheno-Flemish school, of Catholic mysticism of which Meister Eckhart was the founder and supreme proponent. Blessed Jan Van Ruusbroec is also sometimes held to be a mystical teacher of this school.

Also Known As

Alternative Names: Henrichus Sysus Henri De Berg Heinrich Susa Heinrich Seuse Heinrich von Berg Heinrich Suüse Errico Susone Henry Susonne Henricus Sisus Amandus Beato Enrique Suso
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Additional quotes by Henry Suso

Question: Does a detached person remain unoccupied all the time, or what does he or she do? Answer: The activity of really detached people lies in their becoming detached, and their achievement is to remain unoccupied because they remain calm in action and unconcerned about their achievements. Question: What is their conduct toward their fellow human beings? Answer: They enjoy the companionship of people, but without being compromised by them. They love them without attachment, and they show them sympathy without anxious concern - all in true freedom.
Question: Is such a person required to go to confession? Answer: The confession that is motivated by love is nobler than one motivated by necessity. Question: What is such people’s prayer like? Are they supposed to pray, too? Answer: Their prayer is effective because they forestall the influence of the senses. God is spirit and knows whether this person has put an obstacle in the way or whether he or she has acted from selfish impulses. And then a light is enkindled in their highest power, which makes clear that God is the being, life and activity within them and that they are merely instruments. Question: What are such a person's eating, drinking and sleeping like? Answer: Externally, and in keeping with their sensuous nature, the outward person eats. Internally, however, they are as if not eating; otherwise, they would be enjoying food and rest like an animal. This is also the case in other things pertaining to human existence.

After this the disciple turned again in all seriousness to eternal Truth and asked for the power to discern by outward appearance a person who was truly detached. He asked thus. Eternal Truth, how do such people act in relation to various things?
Answer: They withdraw from themselves, and all things withdraw along with this.
Question: How do they conduct themselves with respect to time?
Answer: They exist in an ever-present now, free of selfish intentions, and they seek to act perfectly in the smallest thing as in the greatest.

One thing you must know: Just as there is no comparison between actually hearing the sound of harp-strings sweetly plucked and listening to someone talking about it, so too there is no comparison between words which are received in pure grace, issuing from a living heart, spoken by living lips, and those self-same words committed to dry parchment — especially words in German. For these somehow grow chill, losing their vitality like roses cut. For the enchanting melody which, more than anything else, moves human hearts, then fades away, so that the words are received now into the dryness of dry hearts. No harp-strings were ever so sweet but, when stretched across dry timber, they fall silent. An unloving heart can no more understand a love-filled speaker than a German an Italian. Therefore, an eager enquirer should hasten to the out-flowing streams of these sweet teachings so that she may see and observe them at their source in all its living and wondrous beauty – that is, the in-flowing of present grace which is able to restore dead hearts to life.

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