Saint John of the Cross

His own brothers of the old Carmelite observance had kidnapped and locked him up because he had bravely sided with Mother Teresa of Ávila’s reform. He was starved on dry bread and water, and flogged till he bled in front of the community. His rotting habit crawled with lice, and there was no sunlight except through a small slit high up, just enough light to read his Office for a few minutes at midday.

Yet out of that humiliation, loneliness and utter darkness rose the most beautiful mystical poetry in the Spanish language and in all Catholic spirituality: the Spiritual Canticle, the Dark Night of the Soul, the Living Flame of Love.

The family sank into extreme poverty. When John was only three, his father died of tuberculosis. His second brother, Luis, also died of hunger and malnutrition. His widowed mother had to trail from town to town with her two young sons, begging, before settling in Medina del Campo.

There, young John was taken into a charity school for poor orphans. He studied while also serving in a hospital for poor patients with venereal and incurable diseases. He washed bandages with his own hands and cared for foul-smelling, sore-covered bodies with rare tenderness.

At twenty-one, in 1563, John entered the Carmelites in Medina del Campo, taking the name John of Saint Matthias. He was then sent to the University of Salamanca, one of the most renowned in Europe, to study philosophy and theology.

In 1567 he was ordained a priest. But feeling that Carmelite life at the time was too lax and noisy, he was set on leaving the order to join the Carthusians, a strictly contemplative order, in search of complete silence.

She persuaded him that he need not go far to look for another order:

“Stay, Father, and help me reform our own Carmelite family!”

John agreed on condition that the work begin at once.

He wore a coarse habit, went barefoot, lived in a house with a ceiling so low he had to bow his head, and knelt in prayer every night on the freezing earth floor. He became the spiritual father and teacher of the first generations of Reformed Carmelite friars.

From 1572 to 1577, at Mother Teresa’s invitation, he became confessor and spiritual director to more than one hundred and thirty nuns at the Monastery of the Incarnation in Ávila, and his guidance brought a fresh spirit of conversion that changed the whole monastery.

There he was thrown into a dark, cramped cell, once a closet cut into the stone wall and only about three square meters, with no window except a tiny slit of light. For nine long months he was completely cut off from the outside world, not allowed to say Mass or read, enduring cruel floggings and humiliation.

“One dark night, fired with love’s urgent longings, oh, happy chance! I went out unseen, my house being now all stilled...”

Kept safe by Our Lady, he found refuge with the Reformed Carmelite nuns in Toledo. His escape sent shock waves through the order.

He wrote theological masterpieces that became the foundation of Christian mystical theology: “The Ascent of Mount Carmel” and “The Dark Night of the Soul”.

He set out a deep teaching on the purification of the soul: to reach complete union with God, the Absolute, the soul must pass through two “Nights”: the Night of the senses, purifying earthly passions, and the Night of the spirit, purifying the intellect, the will and the memory.

“To come to enjoy everything, desire to enjoy nothing; to come to possess everything, desire to possess nothing; to come to know everything, desire to know nothing; to come to be everything, desire to be nothing!”

He taught that God surpasses every human idea, image and feeling. To meet Him, the soul must bravely let go of every earthly attachment and walk entirely in the darkness of pure faith, firm hope and ardent love.

Yet John of the Cross accepted it all in gentle silence. He wrote to a spiritual daughter:

“Where there is no love, put love, and you will draw out love!”

In the autumn of 1591, he fell gravely ill from a gangrenous ulcer on his foot. He was moved to the friary at Úbeda. The prior at Úbeda, who held an old personal grudge against him, treated him very cruelly: he shut him in the smallest, shabbiest room, forbade visitors and denied him proper medicine. John of the Cross patiently bore all that pain as a final sacrifice.

On August 24, 1926, Pope Pius XI declared him a Doctor of the Church with the title “Mystical Doctor”, Doctor Mysticus. In 1952 he was proclaimed patron of Spanish poets. The Church celebrates him on December 14 each year.

The cramped prison cell in Toledo, where he wrote his immortal poems in captivity, is now part of a carefully preserved historic site, reminding pilgrims that sometimes the most beautiful pages of the human soul are born in the darkest places.

He reminds each of us:

“In the evening of life, we will be judged on love!”