A Life of Fire

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

(Page 4 of 7)

Teresa's movement became known as the Discalced Carmelite Order, meaning the "Barefoot Carmelites." The monks and nuns took off their shoes and put on rough sandals in honor of the stark simplicity to which they were striving to return. While King Philip of Spain fully supported the reform, officials in Rome were antagonistic. John paid for his participation in this effort. In 1577, at the age of thirty-five, he was captured by a group of friars committed to upholding the traditions of the established Church. He was taken to Toledo where he was interrogated and tortured. They tried to force him into denouncing the reform, but he refused. And so he was imprisoned in a tiny dark closet that had previously served as a toilet. He was brought out only to be flogged in the center of the dining commons while the monks ate their dinner.

John himself suffered virtual starvation. That first winter, he endured brutal cold and was offered neither cloak nor blanket. In the summer, the heat was stifling and his clothes began to rot on his body. At first he took comfort in his quiet interior connection to God, but over time the divine presence began to fade and John could not help but wonder if his Beloved had abandoned him. He was Jonah languishing inside the belly of the whale.

In the depths of his despair, John composed passionate love poems to God. Since he had no access to writing materials, he committed them to memory. Finally, a Carmelite brother assigned to guard the prisoner, who basked daily in the saint's serene yet passionate presence, secretly procured a scroll, a quill, and some ink, allowing John to surreptitiously scribble his verses in the darkness. Although his creative flow saved his sanity, it could not save his life. Convinced after nine months that if he endured another moment of incarceration he would die, John tied knots in scraps of cloth and slipped through a tiny window at the upper edge of his cell. He lowered himself down the long wall of the monastery and into the safety of the night. He found shelter in a nearby convent of Teresa's nuns, where he crept through the gate, leaned his head against the archway of the chapel, and wept as the sisters recited the Angelus.

After his miraculous escape from prison, John fell into a state of profound ecstasy. He had traveled through perfect darkness and emerged to find the living God waiting for him in the depths of his own heart. The communion between lover and Beloved yielded a permanent transformation in the God-intoxicated man. At the height of this mystical state, John composed the poem "Songs of the Soul: One Dark Night." Later, he described it as "an outpouring of love for God," which he was powerless to resist. Like the Songs of Solomon, John's verses sang of the passion of longing and the ecstasy of secret union with the Beloved-a union that could take place only after the soul had made her escape from the confines of her old house through the wilderness of the darkest night.

Although the poem is a metaphor for the spiritual journey, it reads more like sublime erotica than acceptable theology. And so John's Discalced Brethren gently prevailed upon him to write a commentary on his mystical verses. This gave rise to the brilliant spiritual treatise known as Dark Night of the Soul.

For the next two decades John dedicated himself to the necessary evil of administrating the reform, which spread all over Spain, and to the sweet simplicity of guiding the spiritual lives of his Barefoot Sons and Daughters. He continued to compose love poems to God and to write theological commentaries on them. Drawn to alleviate suffering wherever he encountered it, John was known for his gentle kindness and childlike playfulness. Although the doctrine of the dark night is harsh and uncompromising, the priest, it seems, could not bear to see anybody sad or sick. He was as likely to gather the monks for a hike up into the Andalucian hills to contemplate their God under the open night sky as to call them to the confessional.

As the years unfolded, John grew less and less at home in the world. His silent raptures would last for hours. He was continuously struggling to call himself back down to the business at hand while all his soul wanted was to float upwards in loving contemplation of the divine. Conversations with Teresa would begin with passionate declarations of the greatness of God and end in rapt silence in which both of them became transfixed by the glory they had been extolling.

Toward the end of the saint's life, envies and disquietudes within the reform itself led to a secret effort to remove him from the sphere of influence. John was about to be sent to the New World-a mission to which he willingly consented-when an old leg wound, suffered in prison two decades earlier, became suddenly infected and spread to his back. His Superior insisted that he receive medical attention and gave him two options: to seek care in the convent of Baeza where the nuns adored him, or to travel to the monastery of Ubeda where no one knew him.

True to his humble nature, John chose Ubeda. The Prior there, a bitter man who had heard stories of the sick priest's lifelong sanctity, took an immediate disliking to him. He savagely neglected John's care, complaining of the costs the patient exacted from his operating budget. John's condition grew worse. When John felt that his death was approaching, he called the Prior to him so that he could apologize for all the trouble he had caused. Struck by the dying saint's radiance, the Prior was overcome by remorse. He, in turn, begged forgiveness of John and the heart-opening he experienced that day irrevocably changed him.

That night, John's closest Discalced Brethren found their way to his side and gathered around him in a circle of love. Filled with the poetry of divine love, he died whispering the words of the Psalmist: "Into your hands, Beloved, I commend my spirit."

Forty years after his death, the first complete edition of John's writings was published. Ninety-five years later, he was canonized by Pope Benedict XIII. It was not until the middle of the twentieth century that John of the Cross was officially named patron of Spanish poets. Unlike his beloved friend and mentor, St. Teresa of Avila, John was not a charismatic character. In fact, his lifetime was characterized by a series of excruciating misunderstandings. His small stature and quiet nature rendered him nearly invisible; if it weren't for Teresa's constant efforts to draw attention to his spiritual mastery, he may well have died in simple obscurity.

John's passion was reflected in his writing. Yet, the same poetry that brought comfort and inspiration to the monks and nuns in his care drew the dangerous attention of the Inquistion, which eventually destroyed him. From the tightrope of renegade spirituality, John might just as easily have tumbled into persecution for heresy as canonization for sainthood.

Even now, John is little known outside of Spain or beyond the confines of academic and theological studies. Many people toss around the term "dark night of the soul" in reference to a period of personal pain arising from a bad divorce or a career catastrophe. Few people are familiar with John as the articulator of a brilliant and penetrating teaching on love and emptiness.

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.