How can St John of the Cross help us to pray?

How can St John of the Cross help us to pray?   I want to begin by saying that I’m somewhat further out from my comfort zone today than I was last week, when I was speaking about his spiritual daughter St Therese of Lisieux.  But, in a strange sort of way, I wonder if this might be vaguely helpful, as I suspect this is perhaps true for some of you as well – so let’s set out on this voyage of discovery together.

For those of you who were here last week, you might remember that I was interested in exploring the idea that the saints show us not so much how as why to pray. I went on to suggest that therefore we should a) be a bit suspicious of a search for methods and techniques in prayer and b) look for evidence in the saint’s own life of the difference prayer makes to them, not so that we can slavishly copy the way they prayed, but to see if their motivation for praying and the effect it had in their lives might offer us consolation and inspiration when we reflect on our motivation and the work God is doing in our lives.   When we look at St John of the Cross with all of this in mind, we might have a couple of objections to the idea of adopting him as a companion for our Lenten prayer, but this is in fact, for me at any rate, a good starting point.  Dominicans like objections, because they remind us of St Thomas Aquinas and are therefore within our comfort zone. When St Thomas writes about any topic whatsoever, he typically begins by thinking of all the reasons people might have to disagree with what he wants to say about it, before going on to give his own opinion. So what are the possible objections here? Why does it seem that we should not spend time with St John of the Cross this Lent?

First, I’ve just said we should perhaps be a bit suspicious of methods (and, as we saw last week, St Therese seems to have been!) and John does have the reputation, at least, for providing various how-to guides, and, what’s worse,  particularly intimidating ones that seem as though they’re meant for – to use another word I suggested doesn’t really belong in conversations about prayer –experts: whereas probably most of us think of ourselves as beginners.  Secondly, he also has the reputation of being difficult in another way, of being negative, gloomy, unhealthily fixated on pain and unappreciative and suspicious, if not contemptuous, of the good things of life – and I hope it’s obvious that none of these attitudes are any part of the good news and nor should they be part of our prayer, even in Lent.  

These are certainly serious charges, and, though it’s obvious that I’m going to attempt to acquit John of them (otherwise why would we be here tonight) I think it is worth taking them seriously. The beginning of the answer to the first objection is that, although John did write quite dauntingly technical accounts of prayer, I am not sure that he would have thought of them as either the most important, or the most successful of his works. And he doesn’t seem to think that they should have the last word – certainly, as we’ll see, they don’t, for him, have the first word, either.   And we’ll come back to that. The answer to the second objection – that John is just not a credible witness to the good news of God’s offer of abundant life, is simply to look at his life, and that’s what we’re going to do first.

Last week when we were thinking about St Therese, we saw how her own community had difficulty in imagining how the prioress of her community would find anything to say about her in her obituary, because she didn’t seem to have done much. Perhaps, in fact this is why so many of us do have a devotion to her – we might imagine something similar would be true of us, and if her apparently rather uneventful life can be the material of great sanctity, then perhaps there’s hope for us too. In the case of St John of the Cross, it’s the opposite: there is a lot to say about his life and times, and at first sight most of it doesn’t seem especially relatable. Exciting, certainly, sometimes disturbing or even shocking, but difficult to see it all as having much in common with our more humdrum, mundane experiences.  And this is true both of the context in which his life was set, and of his inner life and relationship with God.   In fact, though, I think this is the wrong conclusion to draw. In the first place, if ever we are tempted to despair at the scandals and divisions in the life of our Church today, and the bitterness they sometimes produce, John’s story and its setting has something, at first sight depressingly familiar, but perhaps ultimately consoling to say.  But secondly, one of the most obvious facts about St John of the Cross is that he knew, first hand, what it was to suffer, and, as we’ll see, in particular, what it is to know a sense of being imprisoned in suffering,  to suffer and not to be able to do anything to free himself from his suffering. I suspect that there is no one here who hasn’t, at some time or another, known something of this, even if in very different circumstances.  What’s more, as again we’ll see – for anyone who has ever experienced their suffering intensified by a sense of God’s remoteness, of him not being there for us just when we need him the most (which again is, to say the least, not an uncommon experience)  - John has been there too. His disciplined life of prayer, his commitment to religious life, even his holiness, did not protect him.  If you have ever been in a dark place, confined by your pain, or by your fear, and have felt like slapping that well-meaning friend who tells you that if all your troubles would be over if only you trusted in God more – I think you can safely say you have an ally in St John of the Cross (not, of course, that he would have condoned the slapping, but I’m pretty sure he would have understood the temptation!)

So, who was St John of the Cross and where did he come from?

We have leapt backwards over three hundred years since the birth of St Therese, and travelled down from northern France to northern Spain, where, in 1542, Catalina de Yepes gave birth to her third son, Juan. Her marriage was a happy but, in her time and place an unconventional and controversial one: her husband, Gonzalo, was the son of a wealthy silk merchant from Toledo, who on a trip to the small town of Fontiveros on behalf of the family business, met and fell in love with Catalina, a poor young woman who had been orphaned early, and made a meagre living from weaving. When he announced he intended to marry her, he was disinherited by his father. and set up in business on his own account in Fontiveros, but his fortunes were always precarious, and so was his health. He died when John is around 2 years old and Catalina, with her three sons –  the oldest was only 12 – set out on a humiliating and fruitless round of visits to various members of her husband’s prosperous family, hoping that one of them might have compassion on their poverty. None of them did, and for years the little family moved from place to place, with Catalina struggling to support them by her work as a weaver. At some point during this period, her middle son died so that, by the time they eventually settled in the town of Medina del Campo, when John was around 9 years old, he had lost both his father and his older brother.  Shortly after their arrival in Medina del Campo – no one seems to know exactly how this was arranged – John was sent to a school funded by rich and pious benefactors for orphans and other children of poor families, and at some time in his teens a place was found for him working as a porter in the local hospital for the destitute. One of the noble benefactors of the hospital  noticed a striking kindness and compassion in John, as well as academic potential, and so, in  due course he also paid for John to receive further education at a school run by the local Jesuits, with the idea that he would eventually be ordained and serve as chaplain to the hospital.   It’s unclear how he discerned this, but some years later John decided not to become a diocesan priest and instead entered the Carmelite order.  After a year as a novice, he was sent to university in Salamanca –a thriving and prestigious centre for the study of theology as well as all the other subjects that made up the university curriculum of the time: philosophy, ethics, law, astronomy, grammar and music. It must have been a stimulating environment, and John was an outstanding student, but – again, we have no record of exactly why – he became dissatisfied, and he dropped out of his study programme. He was ordained around this time, and shortly afterwards met Teresa of Avila, which proved to be a decisive turning point for him. Teresa, of course, would merit a whole series of Lent talks herself, and we certainly don’t have time to do her justice tonight, but it’s probably helpful just to spend a few minutes thinking about her now, and about the background to the next phase of John’s life.

Teresa of Avila had entered the Carmelite order as a young woman, and, by her own admission the first decades of her own religious life were not impressive. Her prayer, she tells us, lacked enthusiasm, and she recounts her shame when her father came to ask her for spiritual advice, thinking that his daughter the nun would be bound to have words of wisdom and she found she had nothing to tell him. The atmosphere of her monastery probably didn’t help: Teresa lived a fairly luxurious life there, not that dissimilar to what she had left behind “in the world”, with a whole suite of rooms and even her own private chapel, but only because she came from a wealthy family. Sisters from humbler backgrounds slept in dormitories and acted as domestic servants to Teresa and other nuns of similar social standing. Teresa’s own turning point came after a serious illness-   – so serious in fact that a requiem Mass was celebrated for her at another Carmelite convent; her recovery acting as a spiritual wake-up call. She began to long for a simpler form of religious commitment, looking back to the ancient origins of the Carmelite order, which had originally been made up of hermits who lived a very austere life, and, in due course (this really is another topic for another day) established communities of nuns living in accord with this vision. She began to discern, too, that it would be good to have not only Carmelite women, but also Carmelite men, committed to this reform – and this is the point at which she met John.

They seem to have found each other compatible from the beginning, and they soon became friends: it’s one of the outstanding examples in the history of the Church of friendship between men and women bringing about creative developments in religious life: probably the other best known example being St Francis of Assisi and St Clare. And there was a genuinely mutual quality to their relationship: Teresa, decades older than John, giving him maternal advice and encouragement; John hearing her confessions and those of her sisters. They didn’t always see eye to eye: in particular at this stage, perhaps on account of whatever it was that had disillusioned him at Salamanca, John was inclined to downplay the importance of theological study and encourage severe physical penances, while Teresa was something of the mirror image of this, having been damaged over the years by advice from perhaps well-meaning but not especially well informed priests, and being concerned that too much austerity would deter young men and women from considering a vocation as a nun or a friar. Perhaps they acted as a moderating influence on each other. Certainly, John later both wrote some profoundly sophisticated theology and said some very wise and balanced things about penance. In any case,  within a few years, two communities of friars following the reformed way got off the ground,  alongside several convents of nuns in various parts of Spain, and John was settled in Avila, where he acted as spiritual director to the nuns, including Teresa herself, but also ministered in the city, amongst other things teaching children to read and write.

Fairly unsurprisingly, the movement for reform did not go down well with the Carmelite order at large, and what happened to John as a result is truly shocking. On night in early December 1577 a group of friars along with what sounds like a band of vigilante thugs broke into the quarters where he lived as chaplain to the nuns of Avila, and dragged him off handcuffed and blindfolded to Toledo, nearly 100 miles away. There he was incarcerated, first in the monastery prison, then in what was effectively a cupboard -  6ft by 10ft – dark and airless. He was taken out for occasional beatings, from which he bore the scars for years, but otherwise confined there for 9 months, through a freezing winter and a stifling summer, with minimal food and rarely the opportunity to change clothes (and consequently he was infested with lice)  His captors also played really powerful mind games: standing outside his cell and whispering that the reform movement was falling apart, and that they couldn’t see John ever leaving his cell except in a coffin.

After 9 months, he escaped, breaking down the door and letting himself down through a window with a makeshift rope constructed from twisted up bedsheets, onto the wall surrounding the monastery. He then jumped into what he thought would be the street outside the priory, but in fact found himself in the garden of the next-door Franciscan convent, eventually clambering over their perimeter wall and making his way to the local convent of reformed Carmelite nuns who took him in.

Soon afterwards, he headed south to Andalucia, and for a few years, as the Reform movement gradually became better established, led a rather more untroubled life, although his final years were also disrupted by squabbles within the reformed Carmelite communities themselves.  Finally, there was a move to have him expelled from the order, but before this campaign could really gather speed, he fell ill and died, aged just 49.

It’s a colourful, and in some ways dismaying story. But if we listen to those who knew John of the Cross we discover, I think, someone whose prayer inspired really impressive holiness. And what I think is most impressive about this holiness is just how very far it is from what is perhaps a rather common misconception about him as a remote, austere, almost inhuman figure, lacking in warmth or sympathy – and if he had been like that, it would have been fairly understandable, given everything. Suffering, of course, doesn’t automatically make people saints: it can harden and brutalize us instead – the hurt, hurt, as they say. . But in some cases, like that of St John of the Cross, there is something different going on. There are many stories that illustrate the point: one I particularly like tells how he welcomed  a man on the run from the law having set fire to a convent into the community of which he was then Prior. The fugitive later wrote how John “cheered me, brightened my spirits and gave me a feel for God”, going on to describe how he begins to face the turmoil within himself “something”, he says “I could not possibly have done if, under God, the words of advice and example of this holy man were not there before me”.  We don’t, of course know what the words of advice were. But the example seems to suggest that John is someone we might well take as a mentor.

What, then, of our first objection: how might we get St John of the Cross off the charge being above all interested in producing one size fits all methods for prayer?

As I mentioned earlier, John does write several works about prayer, and – to be honest - these are perhaps not the most immediately attractive thing about him.  They are dense, they are complicated, and even John’s most fervent admirers admit that they contain long sections that are more than a little dull. Even if we did think it was a good idea to look for a teach yourself how to pray book, these might not look like the best examples of the genre.  But, in fact, that’s not what they are meant to be, for at least two reasons. First, when it comes to what they tell us about prayer itself, they are descriptive rather than prescriptive: they describe for John’s reader, in other words, what is likely to happen the more they devote themselves to prayer, rather than issuing precise prescriptions for what to “do” when devoting themselves to prayer. This is because, in fact, John would have agreed with that handbook for novice mistresses I mentioned last week, that St Therese was using 300 years or so later: there is no one “mode of prayer” for everyone.  John himself writes: “God carries each person along a different road, so that you will scarcely find two people following the same route in even half of their journey to God”.   And that “God carries” is significant too (and reminiscent of Therese’s preference for the lift rather than the staircase as an image of the life of prayer). The deepest reason that we can’t, and shouldn’t try, to find a one size fits all method of prayer is that this makes it sound as though growth in prayer is our work. But fundamentally, it’s God’s work,  which is unique in each one of us, and we can either cooperate with what he is doing in us, or we can get in the way of it. He does give practical advice on how to do the first and avoid the second. He’s good at this. And it’s by no means all Olympic standard, as we’ll see.

But secondly, these works are not meant to be read on their own. They are actually commentaries on poetry – and reading them – as with any other commentary on works of literature – is very definitely no substitute for reading the poems themselves.  But what is especially interesting is that John himself wrote the poems he is commentating on – and he himself definitely preferred the poems to the commentaries.  We will come back to the significance of this, but it’s probably worth saying a bit more first about the kind of poet John is. This may seem like a huge digression, but I hope that in the first place it will be interesting in itself, but also that it will shed light on what John is doing when he comes to write his commentaries.

Plenty of saints wrote poetry, in some cases very good poetry (as a Dominican, I feel I have to mention St Thomas Aquinas at this point, who wrote the liturgical poetry we often sing on Corpus Christi and at Benediction)  But John of the Cross is in a different league. I’m told that if you look in an anthology of the greatest Spanish poetry through the ages, John of the Cross will quite likely be one of the authors. I don’t know much Spanish, and it’s notoriously difficult to translate poetry, but even in English John’s poems are lovely. His interest in writing poetry began early, probably whilst he was at school with the Jesuits, and it seems to have flourished later on in the early days of his association with Teresa of Avila, who, though she believed herself bereft of poetic gifts,  encouraged the nuns in her convents to write poetry, and to read it too - which is how members of her communities came to set some of John’s poetry to music. Many of his poems would have been particularly appropriate for this treatment, because they are written in the style of popular ballads of the day, sometimes even taking existing texts about romantic love and adapting them to tell the Christian story.

 One, for instance, is based on a popular song which tells the old, old story of unrequited love, describing how a young shepherd boy is pining for love of a beautiful girl who seems indifferent to him and his suffering – he weeps, the poet tells us, because he is forgotten.  Each stanza of the poem ends with a reference to how the shepherd’s heart is “an open wound with love” So far, so conventional, until, in the final stanza of the poem we learn the true identity of both boy and girl:

“After a long time, he climbed a tree,

And spread his shining arms,

And hung by them, and died

His heart an open wound with love”.

So this isn’t any old shepherd, then: it’s the Good Shepherd, dying for love of hard-hearted humanity. But – and I think this is really important – this means that  the humanity represented by the girl in the poem is attractive, beautiful, to Jesus represented by the boy – she is his “lovely shepherdess”.  It’s not just that Jesus feels sorry for us and so comes to save us. He comes because he sees us as beautiful and he wants to be with us, so much so that he dies for love of us. And this idea – the beauty of humanity for which God longs – is a theme to which John returns again and again. Think of this poem, for instance, in which John imagines the coming into the world of Jesus as a kind of a wedding, with God the Son as the Bridegroom and the human nature he takes on at the Annunciation as the Bride.

When the ancient dispensation

Its predestined course had run,

Straight from out his bridal chamber

Came the bridegroom, God the Son.

Once on earth, with arms extended

He embraced his heavenly bridge,

And his blessed Mother laid him

In the manger, at her side.

All around that helpless baby

Animals were standing by;

Men sang songs of glad rejoicing;

Angels joined their songs on high,

Celebrating the betrothal

‘Twixt the Bridegroom and the Bride,

While the Almighty in the manger

As an infant, wept and cried.

Gems, these tears which human nature

Brought to the betrothal rite

And the Maid was lost in wonder

As she witnessed such a sight.

Man was full of joy and gladness,

God was weeping, weak and lone.

Ne’er before throughout the ages

Had so strange a thing been known.

There are several things about this poem which are striking, but right now what is especially relevant is, once again, the beauty of the human partner in this wedding: God the Son is the Bridegroom, but the Bride is also described as “heavenly”. The tears of human weakness which are the gift of the Bride to the Groom are pictured  as “gems”.  There couldn’t be a stronger emphasis on human dignity, I think, than this, to suggest that what is most characteristically human is worthy of entering into a marriage with God, and maybe it does a little more to dispel the picture of John as a gloomy, life-denying individual . Perhaps it even helps us if we fear that we are not beautiful and worthy. It’s true that he does have a lot to say about self-denial and detachment from earthly pleasures – and it would be wrong to pretend that what he says isn’t daunting, or that it couldn’t be used as a stick to beat ourselves with in a way that is unhealthy. But maybe these poems suggest that this is not his intention.

So we have seen two short poems in which John talks about the death and the birth of Jesus, and shows how Jesus is born, and dies, for love of us. But he also writes three poems, known as the Dark Night, the Spiritual Canticle, and the Living Flame of Love.  These too, are very clearly about love, but they are very different in other ways. They are much longer, for one thing, and they don’t – or don’t seem to – tell us anything about the life of Jesus. Indeed, if we were to produce an anthology of poetry on different themes and we knew nothing about the background to these texts, we would almost certainly simply put them in the section devoted to romantic love. Think, for instance, of this from the Living Flame of Love:

How gently and lovingly

You wake in my heart,

Where in secret you dwell alone;

And in your sweet breathing,

Filled with good and glory,

How tenderly you swell my heart with love.

In fact, though, if the shorter poems take inspiration from secular ballads, these longer ones are closely related to material we find in the Bible, in the Old Testament  Song of Songs. Now, the Song of Songs, too is, of course, very much a love poem, perhaps originally composed for a marriage feast, and it’s there in the scriptures partly for the same reason that Jesus performed his first miracle at the wedding at Cana: it’s a reminder that intimate human love is blessed by God. It has also always been seen, both by Jewish and Christian readers, as something else as well, as symbolising the loving relationship either between God and the individual soul, or between God and Israel, or God and the Church.   But these two ways of reading the Song of Songs  aren’t contradictory, and the more symbolic interpretations aren’t necessarily dreamed up by puritans who feel embarrassed talking about sex: they are not a prudish denial of the goodness of human love and intimacy, as though there is one kind of love which we might call spiritual, which is good, and another, which is physical or fleshly that is bad. That would be to make the Song of Songs say something it most definitely does not say.   Rather, they are, or should be, a recognition that the power and the beauty of human sexuality is a fitting picture of an even more powerful, more beautiful love, the love of God for his people, and for each one of us made in his image. This, as we have seen, is exactly what St John of the Cross also seems to be saying in his shorter poems and ballads: God coming to be with us and save us as the greatest of all love affairs. But, especially in one of his longer poems, the Spiritual Canticle, the resemblance to the Song of Songs is so great that words from the two poems sometimes seem almost interchangeable.  

Here, for instance, are a few lines from near the beginning of the Spiritual Canticle:

Where have you hidden,

Beloved, and left me moaning?

You fled like the stag,

After wounding me.

I went out calling you, but you were gone.

And here are a couple of verses from the Song of Songs:

Hark! My beloved

There he comes,

Leaping over mountains,

Bounding over hills.

My beloved is like a gazelle

Or like a young stag.

And the resemblance between the two poems is not at all surprising when we think about the circumstances that led to John writing the Spiritual Canticle.  It is said that there are more commentaries dating from the Middle Ages on the Song of Songs than on any other book of the Bible. St Bernard of Clairvaux alone wrote 86 sermons on this rather short text, and, according to legend, the monks who cared for St Thomas Aquinas when he was taken ill on what would be his last journey pestered the poor man to preach to them about the Song of Songs on his deathbed. St John of the Cross would certainly have been deeply familiar with both the SS itself and with many earlier reflections on it. According to his earliest biographers, when John was in solitary confinement, he somehow procured some scraps of paper on which he recorded the poem he had composed in his head. More recent scholars have suggested that the Spiritual Canticle actually dates from shortly after his escape, as he began to process what had happened to him in Toledo. In either case, it is closely related, at least, to his experience in prison. It seems highly probable that he was seeking and finding solace in the Song of Songs,, and in writing his own meditation on it. I think we can almost say that reading the Spiritual Canticle gives us an opportunity to eavesdrop on St John of the Cross doing lectio divina, and the text he has adopted for his spiritual reading is the Song of Songs  which he knows by heart.

But why is it this biblical text in particular that seems to have preoccupied John? No doubt it is partly because, at a time when he was traumatized by both physical and emotional humiliation at the hands of his gaolers the emphasis  in the Song of Songs on the sheer beauty of the woman and the intensity of the man’s desire for her, spoke of the possibility of his own dignity, his own beauty, being restored to him through God’s love for him.  But there is another, less comfortable theme that runs throughout both the Song of Songs  and the Spiritual Canticle– the theme of searching, and sometimes searching in vain, longing for consolation, and longing in vain. As we saw, this is the very first line of the Spiritual Canticle: “where have you hidden, beloved” Later in the poem, the narrator calls out to his beloved “Why, since you wounded this heart, don’t you heal it”. The woman in the Song of Songs meanwhile speaks of how “I sought the one I love; I sought but found him not. I must rise and roam the town, through the streets and through the squares; I must seek the one I love”. And this seems to have been something that was likely to speak with particular urgency to John in his incarceration. According to the earliest accounts of his life, John didn’t endure his treatment with Teflon-coated stoicism. It undermined his mental stability – as it was surely intended to do. He found himself wondering if the meagre food that he was allowed had been poisoned. He began to doubt his own integrity – he had vowed obedience to his superiors and here he was imprisoned for disobedience. He was tempted to think both that the Carmelite Reform movement had come to nothing, and that Teresa and her companions would believe he had abandoned them. And, precisely at this time when he was so profoundly in need of comfort, God himself seems to have abandoned him. As one contemporary commentator put it “during the time they had him in prison, he suffered great inner dryness and affliction…[the Lord] withdrew and left him in inner darkness along with the darkness of his cell”.

We cannot, of course know with certainty what was going on in John’s heart either in that cell or when he pondered on his time there in the months after his escape. But the impression we receive from the poem – and its echoes of the Song of Songs – is of someone who refuses to give up, not because he is sure of the strength of his own character, or virtues, or psychological stamina, but because the one thing he is sure of is the strength of his longing, his longing for God, his longing for the life to which he believes God has called him, and because he discerns that God is himself somehow hiding within that longing.  Some of you may at this point be reminded of one of my favourite Taize chants: de noche iremos, which sets to music some words of the 20^th century Spanish poet Luis Rosales, written in memory of St John of the Cross. The English translation reads: “by night we will go, by night, without light we will go to seek for the source. Our only light is our thirst”.   I think it is therefore well worth reading John’s poetry prayerfully at moments of crisis in our own lives: when we do feel imprisoned and abandoned, even abandoned by God. For one thing, it may reassure us that we have not, as perhaps we sometimes fear at such times, “lost our faith”: we may not know where God has gone, but the very fact that we are looking for him, or maybe even that we are wanting to look for him, or wanting to want to look for him, means that we have not. And it can also be consoling to know that, even if we do feel abandoned, even by God, we have a companion in so great as saint as St John of the Cross. If we think back to last week, we might remember that his spiritual daughter St Therese of Lisieux knew something similar at first hand too. We shouldn’t feel intimidated either by his reputation for world-denying severity or by a sense that he only writes for a spiritual elite. Neither impression of him is really accurate. So, do read the poems: they give a rather different one.

But this, finally, brings us back to those dense, rather dry works on prayer. As we’ve seen, besides his shorter ballads and romances, John wrote three longer poems (maybe more,  of course, but three that have survived): the Spiritual Canticle, the Dark Night, and the Living Flame of Love. The first two seem to have been composed in the relatively immediate aftermath of his captivity (or, in the case of the Canticle, just possibly during it); the third seems to have been written later, as a gift to Dona Ana de Penelosa, a noblewoman who approached him for spiritual direction. I’ve suggested that they are a good deal less obscure and “not for the likes of us” than we might expect, but they are undeniably mysterious. They are truly great poems, and great poetry always contains more might be seen at first sight. It is not surprising, therefore, if the first readers of these poems, which in the case of the Spiritual Canticle and the Dark Night, seem to have been Carmelite nuns, and in the case of the Living Flame Dona Ana, asked John to provide explanations, commentaries on his own work, so that they could be more confident in their own reading, just as people have always looked for explanations of the Song of Songs – that’s precisely why there are so many ancient and Medieval commentaries on it.   And so he wrote four, one each on the Spiritual Canticl and the Living Flame, and two on the Dark Night, which is the shortest, but perhaps the greatest of the three poems, and I’m going to try to say a little about just one section of the second of these, which I’ve chosen because it seems to me that it might be something helpful for us to hear, particularly at this time of year.

The Dark Night poem begins, again in tones very reminiscent of the Song of Songs:

One dark night,

Fired with love’s urgent longings,

Ah! The sheer grace!

I went out unseen,

My house being now all stilled.

John here interprets this “going out” as being what happens when a believer resolves to take his or her prayer life seriously - and so it seemed like a not bad place to focus during Lent, when perhaps we all try to make similar efforts. What is likely to happen next does indeed sound all too familiar, but, though perhaps it’s not that flattering to our pride, it is also rather encouraging, and, again, far from austerely demanding.  Beginners in the spiritual life he tells us, are like weak children: we shouldn’t expect too much of ourselves, as we haven’t yet gained adult strength.  John then goes on to talk of the temptations such beginners face in terms of the seven deadly sins but – and this, again, is really significant, I think -  whereas we might think of some of the seven as “spiritual” – pride, envy and anger – for instance, and others as concerned with the physical and the fleshly –gluttony, for example – John is quite sure that these too can take spiritual forms. It is as possible to be greedy for spiritual experiences as for luxurious or excessive food. It is indeed even possible to be greedy for penance, and John has some very harsh words to say about those who are:

Some, attracted by the delight they feel in their spiritual exercises, kill themselves with penances, and other weaken themselves with fasts. . Such individuals are unreasonable and most imperfect. They subordinate …obedience, which is a penance of reason and discretion and consequently a sacrifice more pleasing and acceptable to God, to bodily penance. Bot bodily penance without obedience is no more than a penance of beasts. And, like beasts, they are motivated in these penances by an appetite for the pleasure they find in them. …

So, it can actually be more of a penance to do fewer, or less severe, penances. Counter-intuitive, perhaps, but actually completely reasonable. If the point of penance is to conform our will to God’s, then it will often involve not doing what we currently want – even if, perhaps especially if, what we want is to suffer. And to hear John of the Cross, who knew as well as anyone, what it is to suffer say this is, I think perhaps quite an important lesson for some of us to hear and make our own.

There is plenty more where this comes from, but I’d like, finally, to turn back to John as a poet, and how as a poet he can teach us to pray, because here above all, I think he gives us freedom each to follow where the Lord is leading us, rather than providing a rigid method to which we must adhere. We have seen that John himself is adamant that there is no one size fits all technique for prayer: no two people are carried the same way for even half of their journey. But John also tells us that there is no one right way to interpret his poetry: “though we give some explanation of these stanzas, there is no reason to be bound to this explanation”. Here he concurs with what other poets have said about their own work: W B Yeats, for instance, when asked to explain one of his poems responded “you must not cite me as an authority. If an author interprets a poem of his own, he limits its suggestibility”. What any poem suggests to you might not be what it suggests to me, and it might not even be what it suggested to its author.  This insight is very much of a piece, I think with what I find perhaps the most moving  and inspiring of all the anecdotes I’ve read of John as a spiritual guide. A nun in one of the reformed Carmelite convents describes him as being outstandingly holy not because of what he said in homilies or confession, but because of what he enabled other people to say, and because of how he himself reacted to what they said: “as he was so holy, it seemed as if every word we spoke to him opened a door for him”.

You might in your own time, then, like to spend a bit of time with the poem on your handout: this is the great Dark Night, and see what it suggests to you.

There is just one thing it suggested to me as I read it, that, as far as I know, is not in John’s own commentary on the work, and that I’d like to share.

The poem begins, as we have noted, with a reference to “going out” from a still house, out, into the night. A little later on we are told of a “glad night”, a “night more lovely than the dawn”, and a night that has “united the lover with his beloved”.  When I read these words, what springs to my mind is something that we will all be invited to do in just a few week’s time: to go out by night to attend the Vigil on Holy Saturday, and listen to the words of the Exsultet, the paschal proclamation: to hear again how this is the night as clear as the day, the night when heaven is wedded to earth, the night of joy and gladness.

And I dare to think St John of the Cross might approve of this interpretation. For all the pain he experienced in his own life, for all the strenuous efforts to overcome sin that he encourages us to undertake, it seems to me that what above all John wants to show us is the passionate love of God for his beautiful human creation. And because of that passionate love, neither the demands of Lent nor the agony of Good Friday is the last word. Only the joy of Easter is.