Prayer of the Saints - Lesson 8

Dr. James Houston

Prayer of the Saints

th733-08

John of the Cross

Lesson Transcript

In view of the flood of imagery that Teresa has given us, we need to conclude on Teresa by giving a précis of seven aspects of what she’s teaching.

The first thing we might say is that the overcrowded inner life needs honesty. It needs a consistent desire for God. And she certainly shines in expressing that. Secondly, however, the closer we desire God, the more the discomforts we will have to face. Three, goodness we assume is the same thing as holiness. In fact, we’re more subtly prisoners of ourselves when we think of our goodness. She expresses this very clearly. Fourthly, mystical and supernatural experience begin when we delight in the presence and the consolation of God. Fifthly, that hiddenness, as we’ve seen in Colossians 3:1, like the cocoon and the butterfly are really just the beginning of our spiritual betrothal. Sixth, the sermon becomes most vital as the wound of love when we seek out in the depth of our prayer life that we’re not angels, but we remain humans. And finally, our homecoming is into the arms of our beloved in union and fullness of communion. Praise is the test of it all.

So now having made this summary of her wonderful teaching, let us pass on to John of the Cross, who lived between 1542 and 1591. He was younger and lived longer than his mentor. He started schooling in Medina del Campo and then in 1563 he entered the Carmelite Order and at the same time he completed studies in the University of Salamanca, because he was an intelligent young man. He started them in 1564. He was ordained priest in 1567. And now he begins to initiate Teresa’s work among the friars, in other words, to have the male order of the Carmelites. So in many ways, he’s both a founder as well as Teresa, she with the women and he now with the men. And he closely begins to work with Teresa from 1572–1577 when, tragically, he’s kidnapped by his own jealous brothers and imprisoned in Toledo for 18 months. He’s totally humiliated. He’s starved and brought up from the cellar for the evening meal to be thrown the scraps from the table like a dog from his brother Carmelites. Can you imagine it happening? That’s when he goes through the dark night of the soul. Mercifully, he escapes in August of 1578 and now, free, begins to have a ministry of reform in various places, like Beas and Baeza. And then has a very strong ministry for four years in Grenada between 1578 and 1582. In other words, by escaping to the South, he gets out of the clutches of the anger of the Carmelites in the North. So his movement is essentially in Southern Spain; whereas, Teresa’s movement was especially in Castilian and Aragony Spain in the centre of Spain.

[00:05:10]

Alas, there are still, even with his reformed brethren, disagreements. He’s disgraced. There’s false accusation against him and he only just wants to leave the whole country and emigrate to Mexico. And so he ends his life in a cloud in 1591. What we find that he writes from is the lyricism of suffering. It is the joy that reaches me through pain. And the lyricism of John of the Cross during a period that was the Renaissance of Spain in the 16th century is such that no one has ever excelled the lyricism of John of the Cross. At first, as I read as a young man, the Ascent of Mount Carmel and then his Canticle and then his Living Flame of Love and then The Dark Night of the Soul, this is a lyricism that you can’t describe. This is simply felt by the heart. And so one of the great experiences of my life has been stumbling upon these classics with nobody to guide me, nobody recommending them to me. I just discovered them. And yet, they’ve so changed my inner life.

So let me say a little bit more about him. Like Teresa, he came from a Jewish background. His grandfather in Toledo was a silk merchant and the silk business was inherited by his family and so John’s father, as a young, wealthy silk merchant, was visiting Medina del Campo on business. That is to say, up in the north of the central part of the meseta of Castile. And on the way, he stayed with a wealthy widow in a small village called Fontiveros to visit her as a friend of the family. And by this time both his parents had died, so he was an orphan. And this young man was now given the name to cover up his Jewish background of Gonzalo. And passing in her home, he met one of her silk weavers as a beautiful young woman called Catalina Alvarez. She too was orphaned like Gonzalo. She came from Toledo, but she was utterly poor. She belonged to a different social class. She was certainly not a potential bride for a rich, young aristocrat.

And, of course, in those days to trespass the boundaries of [inaudible 00:09:01] was a no-no. But he persisted because he saw her soul. He saw not only the beauty of her body, but the beauty of her spirit as a loving, beautiful woman in her heart. And so he determined to marry her. And so by breaking the social code, his uncles disinherited him, left him without a single penny in the world and just threw him on the street when he married her. The fact is that what lay behind the ferocity of this attack on a poor young man was that the relatives were scared to death that if there was a court case about the scandal, they would have been found out to be hidden Jews—the whole of their past would then be exposed. So as we read between the lines, the real fear that they had in such animosity was they didn’t want the courts to know anything about the history of the family. How fear dominates the human heart.

[00:10:14]

Why do I tell you this story? Because what John’s father did was what John did with Christ. What Gonzalo did with Catalina Alvarez is what John did in embracing the poor Christ. And if you see that, the key to an understanding of all the convoluted writing that is very dense and many, many different people have tried to interpret what is the dark night of the soul. The dark night of the soul is fundamentally when your love for Christ transcends any human love for reputation or career or profession, any of these things. And you certainly get the consequences. And the people who give you the persecution most of all may well be those who call themselves followers of Christ. Isn’t it ironic? That when you’re reforming Christianity at the level that John was reforming then you get a huge blizzard of problems on your head. And it’s going to come from the Church; it’s going to come from within the Christian community. And that’s what happened in the life of John.

Gonzalo had three sons: Francisco, Luis, and Juan. John was the youngest. In the poverty of the family, Luis died young from malnutrition, for they were scarcely living above starvation level. And when you’re cultured and you’re a man of letters, as the father was, you can teach your son to be intelligent and a man of letters too, but if you can’t dirty your hands and you can’t do menial work, you’re in the worst possible state. You’re a bum on the streets. And today, as we know, the dislocations of society we see is creating extraordinary situations. And sometimes when I see young people on the street begging and we turn away from them, I really have to say I should spend time with this person and ask him why he’s there. How prejudiced we are to the poverty of those around us.

[00:12:54]

John of the Cross then had the inheritance of a great intellect and was very precocious as a young scholar. But when his father died when he was only three years old, he never knew his father. He knew the memory of his father from his mother. And I’m sure it was that memory that was absolutely primal for what was to happen to him later in his life. So if we just sum up one of the maxims that John later gives to us, he says, ‘Love does not consist in feeling great things, but in having detachment and suffering for the sake of the beloved.’ Let me repeat that. ‘Love does not consist in feeling great things, but in having detachment and suffering for the sake of the beloved.’ Again he says, ‘This is how we can recognise the person who truly loves God, if he or she is content with nothing less than God. Satisfaction of heart is not found in the possession of things, but in being stripped of them all and in poverty of spirit then we have a life that is in Him’. And at the heart of the spirituality of John is simply love. His father had made a huge sacrifice for the love of a woman that was beneath him. John made a huge sacrifice for the love of Christ.

Like Gonzalo, his father, John was gentle, sensitive, caring, so even as a teenager he was given the job as a nurse for the sick and the poor in the local hospital. But at the same time, he had the benefit of training in the Jesuit school nearby and so, thanks to the Jesuits, his scholarship was encouraged and at 21 the hospital administration offered him the opportunity to be ordained as a chaplain, but he refused. He wanted to be close to Jesus and so he joined the Carmelite order instead. And while he was just beginning in the stages of relating with the order, he went to the University of Salamanca in 1564, like the Oxford of that time, and spent four years studying philosophy, theology and Biblical studies. And then in the middle of that, in 1567, he met Teresa. She was now looking out for friars to establish the male side of the reformed order she was creating. So he joined the order and became ordained as a priest and served in the order and began to walk very closely, as we’ve seen, with Teresa between 1572 and ’77.

And while he was administering to her nuns as a confessor and chaplain in Avila, one night he was kidnapped by some of the resistant members to the reform. Can you imagine, as we’ve said already, anything so crazy and so debilitating? And imprisoned in the monastery of Toledo, he was put in a cupboard that had been the latrine and so there was still the hole in the ground of the latrine. And it was so small a cupboard he couldn’t lie down. And so for something like eight months, he had to kneel to get any rest. He couldn’t lie horizontally. And then twice a week, he was brought out—just twice a week—for the dinner in the evening, shown all the tantalising food they were having and given the scraps, like a dog, on the floor.

[00:17:36]

He nearly starved. He became very emaciated and ill. And when he saw there was no prospect of escape, that they were there to humiliate him in spirit, to destroy him in body and get rid of him, with kindly help from inside, the person that probably that had fed him scraps in his solitary confinement, this friend loosened the locks on his door and tore the strips of his sheet, his blanket, to make it into a rope and one night he escaped. And it was while he was in this state of utter humiliation and destitution that he wrote the first of his sonnets. If you look at The Dark Night of the Soul, you will find there the reference to his first poem, On a Dark Night. It was on a dark night he escaped and fled and went into the shelter of the reformed Carmelite convent that was in the city and took refuge there for a few nights. They tried to hunt him down, but the nuns kept the intruders out and then they sent him down to Andalusia to be in safety. And there his life started again.

What John means by the dark night of the soul are many different things. For him, the concept of night is the concept of disorientation. It’s the concept of not being in control of your life. You don’t have safety. You have no certainty. You have no control over your life. It’s death. It’s like The Exultet, which was one of the medieval songs that was sung concerning the poor Jesus on Easter morning. This is the night when Jesus Christ broke the chains of death and rose triumphant from the grave: ‘The power of this holy night,’ says the hymn, ‘dispels all evil, washes guilt away, restores lost innocence, brings mourners joy; it casts out hatred, brings us peace and humbles earthly pride. Night truly blessed when Heaven is wedded to Earth and man is reconciled with God.’ It’s a beautiful medieval poem. That’s the positive side of the dark night, but for the dark night of the soul it is go through the deprivation of the self.

[00:20:41]

So for John, he explores three levels of the dark night. Fundamentally, the night is the life of negation. And for John, the life of negation is first that we have to enter into a relationship with God, that to appreciate the love of God is not to do so from our natural dispositions. Here we have an echo, of course, of William of St. Thierry that the first stage of the Christian life is associated with the natural life. Or, again, it’s like the first three mansions of Teresa. It’s the dispositions of a good person wanting to do good things for God. But that goodness is not enough. It’s ‘Not by works of righteousness that we have done, but by His mercy he saved us.’

When we think of how in the world did John ever survive his humiliation and the answer is that these lyrics of joy are so intense, so concentrated that really we can scarcely understand the meaning behind them. And so his books are really his expressions or expositions about these lyrics. So when you read the lyric then you have to read the book that expands on the poem. And as we’ve said, the Ascent of Mount Carmel is the first that you should read about the process of purgation. And then there’s The Dark Night when you get this profound experience of negation. And there’s the Living Flame of Love which indicates the wounded lover in the flame of love in such ardour for God. As he says in the Ascent of Mount Carmel 1:14, ‘A more intense kindling of the other better love takes place when there’s the vanquishing of the appetites and the denial of their carnal pleasures.’ It’s what he saw his father do, to give up wealth, to give up status, for the love of a simple woman. We give up our status, we give up our professions, our possessions, whatever it is, for the love of Christ. And without a sense of God’s love you can’t do this. You can’t make the exchange for something better until your eyes see what is better. You have to experience the love. And how God helps us to appreciate this happens through disappointments and bereavement, perhaps the brokenness of a career, perhaps bankruptcy, many things that will be a trauma that set us on this other journey.

[00:24:10]

The second aspect of negation is a form of love and union with God that is involved in the ongoing steps of our conversion to Him, being changed into to His likeness. We have to recognise that to desire God will cost us everything. To go in search of Him is therefore to leave everything behind. And when you’re in that situation, you discover you can’t live as you used to live. You have to go through disorientation. One of the books that you may need to help you through this intense experiencing of John of the Cross that so few can really interpret is Denys Turner and his book is called The Darkness of God, in which he talks of these three different negations. And so, as he explores, our third negation is when our love for Christ grows more and more and where the result of that journey is that we’re no longer in charge. We don’t know where we’re going. What is going to happen in the course of the journey and its consequences? We don’t know. We’re living in darkness. We’re no longer self-directed, no longer self-willed. So the third night is the night of trust, utter trust.

And so, as Denys Turner suggests, there are three languages of selfhood. The first night is the night of the psychological self. It’s the night when we see ourselves in terms of our narrative. But our psychological self has to be stripped. In other words, the first night goes counter to the therapeutic self of secular counselling. It’s not going to be a life of self-sufficiency. It’s going to be the opposite. So a great deal of this therapeutic culture today is helping to equip secular men and women be able to perform emotionally as atheists. That’s the subtlety. It seems so wise. It’s so sensible. But it’s only sensible and wise from a human perspective. It has no reference to God.

But the second identity is the self of numerical identity. That is to say that you have all these different experiences about yourself. You have all these rich memories of self-improvement and self-development, of all the abilities and skills that you’ve cultivated through knowing so many different people and all the things that have helped you. It’s certainly a much more enriched social self, but the notion of the self is such a social construct. So one of the most tragic things that happens to people is when they have amnesia and they’ve lost their memory. In losing their memory, they’ve lost their self. The disintegration of identity has taken place. I know this so well as my wife entered into her loss of memory. To be privileged to be her memory was a wonderful privilege. Custodian of somebody else’s memory was, for me, the golden era of our marriage. And so it was John of the Cross that helped me to walk with Rita.

[00:28:40]

But of course, it’s in this time that we can get so depressed. We become so disorientated, so destabilised. There’s been the disintegration of the self, loss of sleep, loss of appetite, loss of coordination. A lassitude that can almost paralyse us. All of this we can understand psychosomatically. So there’s a lot of disintegration and deprivation going on in the dark night of the soul. But John saw that this is seeing the night from a positive view. It’s where faith thrives, where faith grows and matures, because now faith is a certainly of things not seen. You don’t see the night. You don’t control your environment. But it’s in the night that what the Desert Fathers said you vomit the false self.

[00:30:00]

So ultimately, the last night is the night of the will. It’s the night when our desires have to be redirected. It’s the night when we’re seeking to know the will of God rather than our own desires. And so you have to be in the presence of the Lord to enter the third night. For John, it was in the latrine. That’s where he couldn’t sleep, where he didn’t have enough to eat. But it’s when he began to have these ecstasies of lyricism, that his sprit became so transcendent. And so he describes in the third stanza of his poem The Dark Night of the Soul, ‘In the happy night in secret when none saw me, nor I beheld ought, without light or guide save that which burned within my heart.’ The one light he had was the light of love burning within his heart. But outside it was cold. It was dark. There was no guide. There was no direction. It was the night not only of sensual deprivation or of moral deprivation, but now all that’s left… All else is burnt up. All that’s left is simply love. In some ways, it’s all expressed in a very simple children’s chorus: ‘Turn your eyes upon Jesus. Look full in his wonderful face. And the things of Earth will grow strangely dim in the light of his wonder and grace.’ It’s when everything has turned into darkness, when all is gone, that his face shines. And so this is how John experiences God.

[00:32:24]

So as we summarise this intense teaching, that is teaching like no other has ever given us, what he represents for us is that unless we’ve known the darkness we will never appreciate the light. And the great darkness is what conditions us to have a great light. We all know that the brightest stars are only seen on the darkest night. And that’s what John experienced. So what he wants to do is to correct all our presumptions, all our attitudes about ministry and service and all the things that we think are so obviously good and important. So just two years before he died, having gone through all this and you think he’s suffered enough, now there was a conspiracy to totally defame him, to actually attack the whole moral integrity of who John was as a person in Christ, to totally destroy him in all the eyes of the Carmelite community.

I have a dear friend who’s been a wonderful physician; in fact, so wonderful that he was given a whole region of the state in which he lives to be the model for other physicians. Last year he retired. And just after his retirement, one wicked woman defamed him and said that he had abused her body. It was totally untrue, but because of the bureaucracy of the judiciary to process this he’s been for a year in the dark night of his soul like John of the Cross. Can you imagine anything worse happening to you than when you can celebrate your 40 years of being an outstanding physician that suddenly you’re defamed? Well of course, I’ve given him John of the Cross to read. And of course, none of us are ever safe. We never know what somebody can so mischievously do. And so I think of another doctor, when I told him this, who’s an outstanding man who has the Order of Canada, which is to say that he’s an outstanding medical doctor in crisis relief and Red Cross work—amazing man, what he’s done—oh, he says, how I thank God that once when I was examining a woman, I had a sense that she is dangerous. So he called in a nurse to witness what he was doing. He said that has preserved my reputation all my life.

[00:36:06]

And so what happened to John is what can happen to any of us in our situation. And how encouraging it should be then for us to realise how much wisdom we need in relating with other people. We’re never safe. And John teaches us such lessons in such prudence that we need. And so the end result of what we find is such a fragrance about John. His grace is like glory that can fill us and so the living flame that he is is a wonderful, wonderful inspiration for our lives. We thank God for him.