Monday in the Week of the Third Sunday of Advent
John of the Cross, Mystic and Monastic Reformer
1591
Today the Church commemorates John of the Cross, Carmelite priest, poet, and teacher of prayer, who sought union with God through a love purified of every lesser possession.
John was born Juan de Yepes in 1542 at Fontiveros in Spain. His father died while John was very young, leaving his mother to raise her children in poverty. The family moved in search of work and eventually settled at Medina del Campo. John learned several trades but showed little aptitude for them. He found a place serving the sick in a hospital and studied at a Jesuit school while helping to beg the alms that supported the patients.
In 1563, John entered the Carmelite Order. He studied theology at Salamanca and was ordained a priest in 1567. He had begun to consider leaving the Carmelites for the stricter solitude of the Carthusians when he met Teresa of Ávila. Teresa asked him instead to help renew the Carmelite friars in a life of poverty, prayer, and the ancient discipline of the order.
John joined the first small reformed house at Duruelo. Its poverty was severe, but men came to share the life. He later guided students at Alcalá and served as confessor to Teresa’s nuns at Ávila. As the reform grew, opposition within the Carmelite Order hardened.
Members of the unreformed branch seized John and imprisoned him in their monastery at Toledo. He spent nine months in a cramped cell and endured hunger and harsh treatment. His Carmelite captors brought him before the community for punishment. In the darkness of the prison, poetry took form in him. He composed much of the Spiritual Canticle and other verses in which the soul seeks Christ as the beloved through absence, longing, and transforming love.
John eventually escaped from the monastery and found refuge among Teresa’s sisters. The reformed Carmelites later received a separate structure within the order. John founded a college at Baeza, governed communities, and continued to teach and write. His major works grew as commentaries upon his poems: The Ascent of Mount Carmel, The Dark Night, The Spiritual Canticle, and The Living Flame of Love.
For John, the dark night was the work by which God freed a person from attachments, false images, and the demand to possess even spiritual consolation. The soul could not reach union with God by collecting religious experiences. It had to receive purification as grace, persevering in faith and love when familiar supports disappeared.
John described divine union with the image of fire entering wood. At first the flame exposes dampness and drives out what resists it. Then the wood grows warm, catches fire, and shines with the properties of the flame. Grace did not destroy the human person. It made the person radiant with the life of God.
John’s final trials came from within the reform he had helped to establish. He resisted the policies of Nicolás Doria, the vicar-general who headed the reformed friars. Doria removed John from office and sent him away. Sick with fever and infection, John chose to go to the monastery at Úbeda, where its prior received him with hostility. John died there on December 14, 1591.
John’s brothers in religion had imprisoned him. His brothers in reform stripped him of office. Yet neither prison nor rejection could prevent Christ from drawing him into love. John’s words still accompany Christians when prayer offers no consolation and God purifies desire beyond everything that can be grasped.
May Christ keep us faithful through the darkness we do not understand and kindle in us the living flame of love, until every power of our lives is united to God.
Let us pray
Judge eternal, throned in splendor, who gave John of the Cross strength of purpose and faith that sustained him even through the dark night of the soul: Shed your light on all who love you, in unity with Jesus Christ our Savior; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.