Saying Yes to God

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

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Say when you were very young the veil lifted just enough for you to glimpse the underlying Real behind it and then dropped again. Maybe it never recurred, but you could not forget. And this discovery became the prime mover of the rest of your life, in ways you may not have even noticed.

Say you have explored a multitude of spiritual paths. Maybe you have been the embodiment of devotion within each. You perform more austere austerities. Your attention to liturgy is so pointed that you become sacred language. You meditate into the small of the night. Your breath grows so gentle that it can scarcely be detected.

Say these practices fill your heart. They make you feel holiness like wind through every fiber of your being and think rivers of holy thoughts. You recognize the communities they bring you to as your own lost tribe. You get very good at being a Sufi or a Taoist, a contemplative Christian or a yogini. The passion of your love for God intensifies.

Say that while each of the world's great spiritual traditions may hint at that vastness you have longed for, none of them returns you to its threshold. Each of your chosen paths is about something, when all you've ever meant to choose is nothing. Simply because this is where you first saw God: in the emptiness.

Say prayer starts to dry up on your tongue. Sacred literature becomes fallen leaves, blows away. Meditation brings no serenity anymore. Devotion grows brittle, cracks. The God you bow down to no longer draws you.

Say you bow down anyway. You repeat your mantra along the line of your prayer beads, continue chanting the divine names, melodious. You reread the scriptures, go to mass. You find satisfaction in none of these, yet you persevere. Why not? The things of the world are no competition. You long ago lost interest in material gain, in social status, in interpersonal drama. This wretched limbo lasts for years.

Say each of the familiar spiritual rooms you go to seeking refuge are dark now, and empty. You sit down anyway. You take off your clothes at the door and enter naked. All agendas have fallen away. You grow so still in your nondoing that you forget for a moment that you are or that maybe God is not. This quietude deepens in proportion to your surrender.

Say what's secretly going on is that the Beloved is loving you back. That your first glimpse of the Absolute was God's first great gift to you. That your years of revelation inside his many vessels was his second gift, wherein, like a mother, he was holding you, like a child, close to his breast, tenderly feeding you. And that this darkness of the soul you have come upon and cannot seem to come out of is his final and greatest gift to you.

Because it is only in this vast emptiness that he can enter, as your Beloved, and fill you. Where the darkness is nothing but unutterable radiance.

Say he knows you are ready to receive him and to be annihilated in love.

Can you say YES to that?

A Life of Fire

On his deathbed at the age of forty-nine, as the Last Rites were being administered and the appropriate sacred texts recited, John of the Cross interrupted. "Please," he begged his friends, "read to me from the Song of Songs." It is the passion of the lover longing for union with the Beloved, expressed so lyrically in the Songs of Solomon, that characterizes John's entire spiritual journey. It was the ultimate transfiguration of self in God for which John had been waiting all his life and to which he endeavored to gently guide all the souls in his care. To achieve that sweetest of goals, John had walked through unspeakable darkness.

John of the Cross was born John de Yepes y Alvarez in 1542, in the small town of Fontiveros, Spain. Haunted by abject poverty, his family wandered from place to place seeking their livelihood. As an adolescent, John found work at a hospital where people with syphilis came to die. John tended these patients with the depth of compassion that imbued all his relationships from then on. During this time, John was befriended by a Carmelite priest who, deeply impressed by the young man's fine mind and gentle spirit, arranged for him to be sponsored to study theology at the famous University of Salamanca. This required that John join the Carmelite Order. Inexorably drawn to a spiritual path, John enthusiastically agreed.

But monastic life was disappointing. The purity of prayer he craved was obscured by the blind adherence to the ritual and dogma of the institutionalized Church. Disillusioned by the trappings and yearning for direct experience, the young priest seriously considered dropping out of the Order and going into seclusion, where he could devote himself to undistracted contemplation of the divine.

But then the paths of John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila crossed. The flame that she was recognized the flame that he was and the resulting conflagration quietly changed the world.

On a practical level, the dynamic fifty-two-year-old nun was busy trying to reform the Carmelite Order. When she first encountered the twenty-five-year-old priest, Teresa immediately recognized in him a profound quality of sanctity coupled with clear vision. Here was a man yearning for the same life of simple contemplation that she was struggling to win back, a devout Carmelite disillusioned by an institution that had lost its holy inspiration. Teresa named John confessor to the nuns in her first reformed convent. Their mutual admiration grew to adoration, and they spent the rest of their lives in passionate spiritual partnership. The mystical poetry of the twelfth-century Sufi saint, Jalaluddin Rumi, reflects a similar connection: the dervish Shams'i'Tabriz was Rumi's living spiritual inspiration.

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.