The story of the adult Jesus starts in a rather strange and threatening place. It starts away from home in the wilderness. It starts with a man who has abandoned society and conventional ways of living to go out into the wilderness to be with God. People come out to listen to him, but his words are harsh words of warning. Your life cannot go on as it is a time of decision is coming, a time of Holy Spirit and of fire; a time of the shaking of foundations; the uprooting of the familiar and comfortable. John the Baptist is pointing towards Jesus; he prepares the way of the Lord but tonight I want to think of the way prepared some fifteen hundred years later by another John St John of the Cross, the day of whose death in 1591 we commemorate next Friday.
John is most famous for a phrase, which is quite often referred to by Christians who may not know where it comes from. If we are going through a rough patch we can sometimes talk rather melodramatically of experiencing a dark night of the soul.’ What it actually means is something far more profound than a rough patch. Ironically there is an even deeper connection between John of the Cross and our first lesson. John was a Carmelite a religious order founded in the middle of the 12th century on Mount Carmel, the scene of Elijah’s confrontation with the priests of Baal. A medieval legend maintained that monks had lived on Mount Carmel since the time of Elijah whether there is any similarity between John and Elijah remains to be seen but both could certainly seem fierce and uncompromising in their service of God.
John became a Carmelite in 1564. Like so much else in the church of the 16th century the order was in need of reformation. St Theresa of Avila led the way and John supported her in her attempts to make the Carmelite life more rigorous. Reformers often experience serious opposition. John’s enemies had him arrested and imprisoned in a cell in a monastery in Toledo. He eventually escaped with the manuscript of the first of the poetic works for which he is now famous. Their influence is prominent in TS Eliot’s Four Quartets.
I said to my soul be still and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God
I said to my soul be still and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith But the faith and the hope and the love are in the waiting. So Eliot: and now St John of the Cross
I entered in I know not where,
And I remained though knowing naught,
Transcending knowledge with my thought.
or again
As on this falcon quest I flew
To chase a quarry so divine,
I had to soar so high and fine
That soon I lost myself from view.
To say that John’s spirituality is largely to do with self forgetfulness is perhaps to put it mildly. He wrote about self denial at a time when Spain was at its most self confident opening up new colonies and acquiring new wealth and power. John is the least triumphalist and self confident saint of his age. His faith has nothing to do with security, competence or success, which is why it can sometimes, in his prose works, seem dry and threatening. His spirituality arises out of failure and profound anguish the darkness and the fear of his prison cell.
His spirituality does not look for God in nature or worship or community. For John, God is not like anything else so he cannot be found through anything earthly, however moving or beautiful or religious. God can only begin to be found when we are feeling empty, frustrated, isolated and unloved. The dark night begins as everything we think we are, begins to be simplified or stripped away; all our earthly needs and desires come into question and we are forced to ask For the sake of what do I live?’ What do I really want?’
This is the fundamental question behind all forms of asceticism. Ascesis’ means discipline the application of the gospel to every aspect of our lives to money, possessions, work, sleep, recreation, entertainment, hospitality, pleasure, physical exercise, sex, relationships, family, solitude, and so on. If the whole self is brought to God this is what we bring. And God tests every aspect of our lives what is trivial, temporary, illusory, gratificatory.. all that helps us to avoid this fundamental question What do I really live for?’
At first sight such an approach to God may seem impossibly negative and dehumanising. Taken further it may even seem as though God himself is becoming remote and cold and rejecting even hostile. And this is where we come to the true dark night of the soul. It is the point at which the soul is closest to Christ on the cross in the defenceless depth of his forsakenness, utterly without consolation. The dark night of the soul is a living death. It is important to realise that John works with the assumption that human beings in some sense become what they desire or love; we become moulded by what we seek to know and experience. So in this radical stripping down or emptying out of desire and experience and knowledge there is literally nothing to be known or felt in the darkness, nothing to model ourselves on or give us a sense of who we are. This is a radical assault on the self. The senses, the mind, the emotions, the soul are all in darkness. This is not what some might call a mystical experience because it feels as though nothing is there to be experienced, nothing to be understood. All that is left is a naked trust that in this dark place we are where we are meant to be.
There is of course nothing technical about all this. It is not a horrible form of spiritual masochism, not a deliberate technique of self abasement. It is simply what happens when as Christians we begin honestly and seriously to question our lives and all that we live for. Moreover we all at various times some more often than others – experience some form of alienation through fear, frustration, resentment, self doubt, depression, sickness or loneliness. There is nothing grand about any of this. It can be just drab and petty and mean. Usually we try to snap out of it, to find something to distract us from such feelings. St John in his prison cell cannot do that; he has to let these things be, to accept them and so willingly go into the dark place, the dark night, trusting that these things are the way to God. This is a form of spirituality which begins in not running away from our darkest experiences or trying to explain them. What it seeks is the costly self knowledge which comes through pain and failure and the difficulty of believing in God; it is in some sense the opposite of having a spiritual life as that is commonly thought of. It consists in living with spiritual nothingness.
What comes on the other side of the dark night can’t therefore be easily described to do so would be to tie God down to a result, it would give us something to work for. John describes the darkness as that which comes before the dawn, before the light which enables you to see your life, and God in a new light. But what that light will illuminate cannot be known in advance. We will know the world and all that God has made in a contemplative fashion; the sheer otherness of people and things given back to us in wisdom and beauty. But what that will be like, what it will consist in we cannot know this side of darkness, this side of the negation of the self.
This is only a brief introduction to St John of the Cross it casts light only a well known phrase; the question will of course be asked is this a spirituality for everyone or only for specialists? Is it something only for religious, could it be lived in the world of family and office, of career and parenthood? Could it be lived in the life of parish priests and their congregations? The only answer to that question lies in not trying to run away the next time we find ourselves in a dark place of grief and loneliness. Let that be our experience of prayer, the challenge to trust a God we can scarcely believe in and wait.
Elijah calls down fire from heaven; John the Baptists speaks of the one who will baptise with Holy Spirit and fire. One of the last poems John wrote is called The Living Flame of Love’ it speaks of the place that may be found towards the end of the night where God is known as comfort and serenity and ardour. The poem is addressed to God:
O lamps of fire!
In whose splendours
The deep caverns of feeling,
Once obscure and blind,
Now give forth, so rarely, so exquisitely
Both warmth and light to their Beloved.
How gently and lovingly
you wake in my heart
Where in secret you dwell alone;
And in your sweet breathing,
Filled with good and glory,
How tenderly you swell my heart with love.