Reflecting and Responding
John of the Cross
Illuminating the Dark Night
This dark night is an inflow of God into the soul that purges it of its habitual ignorances and imperfections, natural and spiritual, and prepares the soul for union with God through love by both purging and illumining it.
THE DARK NIGHT
SMALL AND STARVING, JUAN DE YEPES (1542-1591), later known as John of the Cross, struggled every day of his young life. His home in Fontiveros, Spain, was modest and poorly furnished. Although wealth ran liberally throughout his extended family, none of it had trickled down to his own father. To compound matters, his father died when Juan was just three, leaving the family destitute. Fortunately, Juan was bright.
By the time he was a teenager, the Jesuits were in charge of John’s education. His big break came in 1568 when Teresa of Avila invited him to join the Carmelite order in order to bring it to men. He agreed and, despite his small stature, made a huge impact. Eventually he became Teresa’s most ardent supporter and closest confidant. He is remembered to this day for his able interpretation of her work.
Although a huge gap in age separated the two (twenty-seven years), in matters of the spirit age is insignificant. John’s rare abilities and brilliant pen helped catapult Teresa’s works onto the religious stage. His efforts were widely recognized and drew both praise and ire from all factions of the church. Eventually he became the focal point of various and enduring controversies, and after twenty-three years of faithful service he was literally tortured to death in 1591.
The Dark Night
John’s three pivotal works are The Ascent of Mount Carmel, The Living Flame of Love and The Dark Night. Both The Ascent of Mount Carmel and The Living Flame of Love document the trials we must overcome in order to arrive at a state of perfect union with God. This perfect union with God goes beyond our ability to experience or comprehend him. But The Dark Night lays out this process most specifically. It teaches us how to understand the ultimate challenges we face in order to live the spiritual life fully.
Before I had read The Dark Night I always thought John’s phrase was an allusion to the most intense experience of God’s absence. But the book is not only about God’s absence; it is also about our ignorance, the absence of knowing God. The Dark Night illumines how little we can know of God on our own. In order to know him we must “annihilate and calm our faculties, passions, and sensual appetites and affections.”
Moving Beyond Our Faculties, Passions and Appetites
John outlines his understanding of our nature as humans by identifying our essential faculties, our dominant passions and our sensual appetites. The essential faculties are memory, intelligence and will. Our dominant passions are joy, hope, fear and sorrow. Our sensual appetites are simply our five senses that allow us to taste, touch, see, hear and smell. The faculties, the passions and the senses together form our natural capacity to order our thoughts and experiences into a meaningful whole. John is concerned that we build structures of meaning and that we understand how these structures are created. This becomes especially important when we realize that despite all our natural ability, the “dark night” takes us beyond our innate capacities and places us on a whole new plane of spiritual understanding.
The Dark Night expects that we will eventually crash into our natural limits. When we do, the light of God’s Spirit will draw us into a whole other dimension. John speaks of our will becoming divine. When we are united with God as an expression of divine love, we move beyond the limits of our natural strength and encounter the strength and purity of his Holy Spirit.
How then should we understand the “dark night”? The dark night is an experience both of deprivation of knowledge and absence of experience. First, God’s wisdom is simply too great for us to comprehend. Second, because our soul is so impure, we initially experience the radiant beams of God’s light as darkness because our soul is so contaminated it cannot reflect any of this light back.
Also, the light of Christ that shines forth from God is so far beyond our natural capacity to understand that we become confused. The confusion is a result of having no developed categories in which we can receive and understand these experiences. The result is pain, affliction and discomfort. The troubling experiences associated with this entire event lead to overwhelming affliction. We become saturated with the knowledge of our own inability to understand. We are confronted by our pitiful weaknesses in our natural, moral and spiritual capacities.
John goes on to demonstrate how the divine ray of contemplation strikes the soul with overwhelming light. Because it darkens the natural light of our reason, it darkens and deprives us of our natural light. In this state we are not only ignorant but also empty. But this purgation is necessary. Without it, we would be unable to experience the satisfaction of all the abundant spiritual delight that comes when we move to a new level of spiritual understanding.
The reason we feel empty is that the dark night sets aside every natural means of experiencing happiness. We simply cannot rely on our natural faculties anymore. Equally difficult, however, is the fact that we have not yet experienced the inner contentment that comes from God alone. We must recognize our need for a twofold peace.
The Refining Fire of God’s Light
By twofold peace, John means our need for both sensory peace and spiritual peace. This is achieved only by the refining fire of God’s light. God’s rays of light affect us in the same way fire consumes a log. Before transforming the soul it purges it of all contrary qualities. This transformation causes blackness and darkness as the soul’s ugliness is burned away.
There are several important things we need to understand in this process. First, the soul will be transformed only by this purging, so we must learn to submit to it. Second, the experiences of suffering that result from the dark night do not come from God but from our own lack and imperfection. Third, our sins will be destroyed through this process. Fourth, the destructive aspect of the fire blinds us to its purifying effect. Fifth, this consuming fire destroys both external imperfection and internal dispositions that are against God. Sixth, we need to be patient in the midst of all this purification since all we can see is our misery. And finally, we must recognize the distinct difference between the internal and external purging so that we realize what is purified and illumined and what still requires additional help.
Ultimately, all three levels of the threefold ascent require that we complete each step in order to move forward in our ascent to God. In other words, on the level of purgation, we experience purgation, illumination and “perfection of purgation” before we can move to the next level of illumination. The same process is necessary on the level of illumination if we are to ascend to the final level of union. On the level of illumination we come to see reality accurately by purging our old perceptions, illumining our new perceptions and uniting with God, sharing his perspective of the world. It is only after we have undergone this development at both of the initial stages that we are able to ascend to final union with God.
The Rhythm of the Spiritual Life
John teaches us how to recognize the rhythm of the spiritual life. Our life with God fluctuates between active and passive insights of sense and spirit. During the passive nights, the absence of presence is not the loss of God but only a transition period when our natural faculties have been surpassed and our spiritual capacities are not yet developed. This is a critical transition point where many of us cease to move any deeper in our life with God. We hit a wall of unknowing and stop rather than persevering and discovering a new dimension in our relationship with him.
In the ancient world, the ultimate goal of the spiritual life was defined as apatheia, a state in which all our thoughts, desires and ambitions are ordered perfectly. John does not intend for us to live without passion, but he does want us to recognize that our only experience of joy and happiness in life comes when we channel every aspect of human nature properly. To channel our desires and passions appropriately, the right thoughts and the right dispositions ultimately lead us to God. It doesn’t happen quickly and it doesn’t happen accidentally, but if we persevere we realize the presence of God at a higher, more complete level.
REFLECTING AND RESPONDING
I liked John of the Cross immediately when I learned how short he was: four foot eleven inches tall. When Teresa of Avila first met John she exclaimed, “I have just met half a friar!” Of course, she also knew that she had encountered a giant of a soul.
I also like the fact that John was such a fun-loving person. A great storyteller and an engaging conversationalist. People reported that when on horseback with a group, John would regale everyone with his lively stories. John, we are told, loved picnics and would arrange weekend jaunts for the friars.
And then I love the way John was able to lift the burden of anxiety from people. Folks would come to him for confession filled with guilt and an oppressive religiosity, and John would tenderly bring them into the love and care and acceptance of God. It was said that John was able to cure people of “the illness of scrupulosity.” So I find John of the Cross immensely appealing and interesting.
For our purposes we are focusing on how John developed the threefold structure of purgation, illumination and union. At the heart of his book The Dark Night (and his other writings as well) are poems John composed while he was imprisoned in Toledo, Spain, for nine months in a room ten feet by six feet. Because he had no pen or paper he composed these poems solely in his head, committing them all to memory.
The heart of John’s work is expressed in his now famous phrase “the dark night of the soul.” This centers on his teaching of detachment—nada in Spanish. The idea is that nothing is important except for God. We are stripped of every attachment and entanglement in order to be utterly simple and naked before God. We are not even to cling to mystical experiences of one kind or another. Nada!
John’s poetry, even in translation, is quite captivating. Listen:
One dark night,
Fired with love’s urgent longings
—Ah, the sheer grace!—
I went out unseen,
My house being now all stilled . . .
Now, this image of the “house being all stilled” is a reference to the stilling of the human senses: the faculties, the passions, the sensual appetites. There is, John teaches us, the need for a silencing of all humanly initiated activity if we are to be truly attentive to God alone. This even includes all the religious activity we use to respond to God. All of our normal ways of acting and responding are to be stilled; as John puts it in The Ascent of Mount Carmel, “Nothing, nothing, nothing, and even on the Mountain nothing.” Nada! Listen to another snippet of his poetry:
O living flame of love
That tenderly wounds my soul
In its deepest center! Since
Now you are not oppressive,
Now Consummate! If it be your will:
Tear through the veil of this sweet encounter!
O sweet cautery,
O delightful wound!
O gentle hand! O delicate touch
That tastes of eternal life
And pays every debt!
In killing you changed death to life.
Of course the “flame of love” is the purifying work of the Holy Spirit. And, note, this is a purifying that wounds the heart: “O sweet cautery, / O delightful wound!” Purity of heart does indeed leave its mark.
The “union” material in John of the Cross is quite moving. Consider this from The Living Flame of Love: “Oh, how happy is this soul that ever experiences God resting and reposing within it. Oh, how fitting it is for it to withdraw from things, flee from business matters and live in immense tranquility, so that it may not even with the slightest mote or noise disturb or trouble its heart, where the beloved dwells.” Or, consider this from The Dark Night: “Only the love of God, which is being united to the soul, imparts the heat, strength, temper, and passion of love.”
Perhaps it would help you to understand John of the Cross if I share briefly one period that could be thought of as a “dark night” for me. By every outward standard things were going well. Publishers wanted me to write for them. Speaking invitations were too numerous and too gracious. Yet through a series of events, it became clear to me that God wanted me to retreat from public activity. This was an action that some would see as professional and literary suicide. But that was a matter I had to leave in hands greater than mine. I had heard the kol Yahweh, the voice of the Lord saying, “Be still!” And so I did.
I stopped all public speaking. I stopped all writing. And I waited, silent, hushed, hidden. No doubt God had important things to teach me. Things that would go deep into the subterranean chambers of my soul. Things that demanded extended periods of stillness and attentiveness. Things that could not be learned while I was distracted by the blare of human adulation . . . and criticism.
At the time this began, I did not know if I would ever speak or write again—I rather thought I would not. As it turned out, this fast from public life lasted about eighteen months.
I waited in silence. And God was silent too. I joined in the psalmist’s query: “How long will you hide your face from me?” (Ps 13:1). The answer I got? Nothing. There were no sudden revelations. No penetrating insights. No spiritual ecstasy. Not even gentle assurances. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Nada.
It was as if all feeling, all emotion, all human responses had gone into hibernation. I was being stripped of dependence on all exterior and interior results. I became dead to all the busyness, self-promotion and superficial drives of the world around me. I was learning trust in God alone. It was as a good friend put it: “You are learning to ‘lay low’ in the Lord.” And so I was.
This discipline of silence ended finally and simply after eighteen months with gentle assurances that it was time to reenter the public square. The “dark night” had come to an end.
Now, it is important for you to know that this was a one-time event. Never before nor since have I sensed any similar guidance. Apparently, God is not interested in repeat performances.
O God of darkness and of light, you have promised light for the way. All we see right now is utter darkness. Still, we believe. In your time and in your way please turn our darkness into your glorious light. Amen.