St. John of the Cross is well-known for his devotion to austerities. Barefoot the year round, wearing only his meager habit, eating sparsely and sleeping on boards, he tamed his appetites with a zeal that we can consider daunting at the very least. But less well known is his tender heart and persistently joyful demeanor. He was a man imbued with hope.
The Holy Father has announced the 2025 Jubilee Year of Hope. We are called to live the hope that all Christians have, in the coming of our Savior. This hope can carry us forward. But we must understand that hope is not a matter of mere optimism, still less an expectation of better times or easier progress. St. John of the Cross teaches us by his example what kind of hope we must have.
Consider the decisive step he took to separate himself from the Carmelite establishments of his day. Like St. Teresa of Avila, he considered the existing rule of life too lax, and he longed for a return to the original disciplines of the monastic life. St. Teresa convinced him that her reform of the Carmelite order would provide him the life he sought. So he followed her example.
He made his promises to abide by the new rule on the First Sunday of Advent in 1568, at a ramshackle farmhouse in the small village of Duruelo, northwest of Segovia. In this humble dwelling, he and two other Carmelite fathers established the first house of Carmelite priests that was organized under the reformed rule of St. Teresa. To any contemporary observer, it would not have been an auspicious beginning. But St. John was content. An 19th Century biographer writes of the place, “Its poverty-stricken state had an irresistible charm for him, and he entered it with joy in his heart because he had found his true rest on the earth. … He had neither shoes nor stockings–nothing to protect his feet from the ground: he was as poor as a man could well be, and in as poor a monastery as any in the world.”[1]
Details such as these from the saint’s life have led some to think of him as kind of hippie-mystic, a simple soul who mostly wanted to write poetry and get back to nature. This sense of him does not do credit to his rigorous formation in Scholastic theology, and his profound devotion to the Church and to his Catholic faith. The intellectual foundations of his writings have remained solid for centuries and have earned him the title of Doctor of the Church. For him, the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity were rich with significance and implications that illuminate the way to intimacy with God.
Following his forebears in the tradition, St. John aligned each theological virtue with one of the faculties of the soul: faith with the understanding or intellect, hope with the memory, love with the will. Each virtue perfected the corresponding faculty. In a single extraordinary chapter of The Ascent of Mount Carmel, he lays out the relation between the essential functions of each human soul and the divine realities that dwell in a person who is truly alive. AMC Bk II, Ch. 6, section 1. Faith acts in the intellect to bring it to a higher level of operation that clarifies our understanding of everything we see. Love focuses and directs the will, with respect to every decision a person must make, for we are made to love.
Hope, in its turn, is not mere optimism, but an infusion of heavenly grace that transforms the memory. For it is in the memory that resentment and regret lurk, and they sap our strength for the trials ahead, tempting us to look at the future with gloom and despair. The hope of a Christian confronts every trial, even death itself. Christian hope does not just raise our spirits; it raises a battle flag against all the troubles of this life.
St. John of the Cross endured many hardships and treacheries, but his hope was unbroken. Sometimes he had to conform his actions to circumstances. He allowed himself to be arrested and bound like a criminal by factions in the Carmelite order who opposed the Teresian reform. He went quietly along as they marched him barefoot through the winter countryside, and when one of his captors apologized for the rough treatment, he only responded that he was not being treated half so harshly as he deserved.
He patiently submitted to months of captivity, in which deprivation and abuse were regular experiences. But he was not simply passive. Like a good soldier, he was waiting for orders. He eventually received a series of visions in which Our Lord and Our Lady promised to deliver him from his captors and showed him how he might escape. His hope was far sturdier than the flimsy makeshift rope he used to lower himself out of a high window. And the rope wasn’t long enough; hanging there outside the monastery wall, in complete darkness, having no real idea how far he was above the ground, and whether he would land on grass or rocks–he let go.
When we live in Christian hope, we do not cling to a particular outcome, but to the sure knowledge that God will be with us, come what may. May we place all our hope in our Emmanuel, now and until the end.
[1] This and other details of his life come from the beautiful biography written by David Lewis, Life of St. John of the Cross. London: Thomas Baker, 1897. pp. 46-47. The book is in the public domain and is available at www.archive.org.
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