My Friendship With The Saint

Dark Night of the Soul
by Saint John of the Cross, Mirabai Starr

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When I first encountered the sixteenth-century mystic John of the Cross, he was introduced to me as Spain's favorite poet and most confusing theologian. I loved him immediately. "I've never had a student who really got John of the Cross," my venerable old professor of Spanish literature, Sabine Ulibarri, remarked. He shook his head sadly, cocking one eye toward me. What could he mean by that? Here was a man who for decades had been teaching a vibrant classic text overflowing with mystical devotion telling me his students didn't respond. There must be a trick, I mused. I feel like I see John clearly. It's like he's speaking directly to me, using my own code of paradox and formlessness.

I took Ulibarri's sly comment as a personal challenge, enrolled in graduate school in philosophy, and began my master's studies on Dark Night of the Soul. Not only did John's message continue to grow clearer, but I developed an irresistible urge to someday compose a new translation of this mystical masterpiece. I wanted to contribute to making Dark Night accessible not only to religious scholars and devout Catholics but to every spiritual seeker who finds her own inner life drying up and dropping into darkness. The temptation to try my hand at rendering a fresh version of Dark Night grew stronger as I began to assign the classic translations of the text in the college humanities courses I taught.

In the blank wall of my students' faces, I could see the same resistance my old professor had lamented years earlier. I had to work hard to awaken their excitement for this work that meant so much to me. It's not that the two existing English translations were inadequate; on the contrary. Their authors, E. Allison Peers, and Kieran Kavanaugh with Otilio Rodriguez, created eminent renditions of the sacred prose. Yet their unwavering faithfulness to literal accuracy and their identification with the Church yielded somewhat ponderous and slow-moving treatises, preserving much of the obscurity of the Renaissance original. While precise, they are not especially readable.

For years, I held this inspiration in silence. I was busy trying to work out my own practice, parent my children, teach college, and write fiction. The translation project felt like a personal indulgence I was compelled to resist.

Though I resonate strongly with the medieval mystics and the Desert Fathers and Mothers, I am not a Catholic. I was born into a nonreligious Jewish family that seemed to unconsciously identify itself with that post-Holocaust generation that had given up on God in the wake of the unspeakable atrocities of Nazi Germany. I spent my teens and twenties in ashrams chanting to Hindu goddesses, watching my breath in Buddhist zendos and stupas, prostrating to Allah with the Sufis, and purifying myself in Native American sweat lodges. But eventually, the juice drained out of my spiritual practices and the fireworks faded. By the time I reached my thirties, nothing remained but a quiet connection to emptiness.

Out of that core of stillness, the seed planted long ago by John germinated and pushed up toward the light. I could resist no longer and embarked upon what has become not only a project of literary translation but a journey of personal transformation as well. I see now that any notion of engaging with such powerful teachings without surrendering myself to them is naive. The deeper I stepped into the landscape of the text, the more powerful was the inexplicable sadness to which I woke each morning, and yet the more profound the stillness that seemed to spread itself inside me. I had to question myself carefully: Who was I to speak for this enlightened being and assign myself as his personal editor? All I could do was surrender to the muse of darkness and keep showing up with my dictionary.

Many of the Baroque overtones in this translation have been removed in hopes of highlighting the essential melodic themes. John is a Christian mystic known for using only the lightest of touches when it comes to direct Christian references. These have been minimized still further, not out of disrespect for Christianity-far from it-but because I felt that this way the universality of his wisdom would shine through even more brightly and touch a greater number of souls who walk a path of suffering, no matter what their religious tradition. In the language of Christian mysticism, the soul is feminine, lover, and God is masculine, Beloved. In the Spanish language, the soul, el alma, is also feminine. Regardless of the physical gender of the seeker we are talking about, the pronoun "she" is used throughout the text to identify the spiritual self in love with God; this is a linguistic convention I chose to preserve.

My own spiritual journey began with a passionate longing for God and has led me through the gardens and fires of each of the world's religious traditions, where I followed and was often disappointed by a host of teachers. The expression of my devotion has moved inward now. Sometimes I wonder if this simple emptiness is enough. Lacking the trappings of ceremony and even words, is it truly a spiritual path anymore? This is not always a comfortable state. And yet it is one that I am certain I share with a vast circle of Western seekers. There is a scattered tribe of souls who started out on their journey long ago with all that same fire and find themselves now back in the world but definitely not of it, wondering if any of it is real-interpersonal relationships, stewardship of the environment, divine union in love with God-and their wondering causes a profound and nameless ache in their hearts.

These are the companions of the spirit I held in my heart as I composed this translation of Dark Night of the Soul.

Copyright © February 2002, Riverhead Books, a division of Penguin Putnam, Inc. Used by permission.

About the Author

Saint John of the Cross (Juan de la Cruz) was a major figure in the Catholic Reformation, a Spanish mystic and Carmelite friar born at Fontiveros, a small village near Ávila.

Mirabai Starr is a professor of philosophy, religious studies, and Spanish at the University of New Mexico who has studied a wide variety of religious traditions including Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, and Christianity. Mirabai is an accomplished translator and fiction writer who brings the sensibilities of both seeker and scholar to her translations. Her most recent work is the translation of St. John of the Cross's mystical writings, Dark Night of the Soul.