Finding Saint John Of The Cross: Darkness, Desire and The Journey Toward Union (The "Finding..." Series)

The phrase is everywhere. The experience is real. But what did Saint John of the Cross actually mean?"Dark night of the soul" has become one of the most widely used phrases in contemporary spiritual writing- a synonym for any serious personal crisis, any period of loss or disorientation that strips away what is false and leaves something more essential in its place. People reach for it because it fits. But John of the Cross, the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic who coined the phrase in a prison cell in Toledo, meant something far more specific, far more demanding, and far more hopeful than its popular usage suggests.Finding Saint John of the Cross returns the phrase to its author- and in doing so, opens one of the richest and most searching accounts of the interior life in the Western tradition.John of the Cross was born into poverty in 1542, worked as a hospital orderly in his teens, received a Jesuit education, and entered the Carmelite order at twenty-one. In 1567 he met Teresa of Ávila, who redirected his life entirely. Ten years later he was seized by members of his own religious order and imprisoned for nine months in a cell six by ten feet, where he was given minimal food, beaten regularly, and left in near-total darkness. In that cell, without writing materials, he composed from memory one of the great poems of the Spanish language- the Spiritual Canticle. He escaped on a rope of knotted blankets, carrying the poem in his head and on scraps of paper in his pocket. He was forty-nine years old when he died, having been stripped of his offices by a rival within the order he had helped to found.What he left behind was a map of the interior life unlike anything else in the tradition.This book traces that map in full. Beginning with the biographical foundations- the poverty, the meeting with Teresa, the nine months in Toledo- it moves through John's central teachings: the two stages of the dark night, their distinguishing features, and their relationship to the psychological crises with which they can be confused; the logic of detachment and the nada that opens onto a fullness no attachment can provide; the three theological virtues as instruments of emptying rather than possessions to be accumulated; the erotic mysticism of the Spiritual Canticle and the consuming fire of the Living Flame of Love; and John's radical insistence that contemplation is not the province of religious professionals but the birthright of every soul willing to pursue it with sufficient faithfulness and patience.The book closes with the legacy- Thomas Merton, Edith Stein, T.S. Eliot, Gerald May- and with the question that John ultimately leaves every reader: does any of this name something you have already experienced? Read more