It’s fair to say that Saint John of the Cross scares many people. He can seem to be proposing a spirituality that is just too hard for us mortals. He tells us we must separate ourselves from all desires and attachments, give our hearts and minds completely to God, not only seeking but passionately pursuing emptiness and poverty of spirit. To every hungry craving, we must answer, Nada, nada, nada. Nothing, nothing, nothing.
We’d rather have a saint who describes an encounter with God like this:
The breath of air,
The song of the sweet nightingale,
The grove and its grace,
In the serene night,
With flame that consumes and gives no pain
Yet these lovely lines were written by none other than St. John the Scary. The truth is that he is one of those unusual people who, if you know them only superficially, seem formidable and forbidding. But as you enter into a more intimate friendship, you begin to learn they have hearts filled with love.
It took me some time to learn this. On a warm Ohio springtime in 1988, just shy of 30 years old, I purchased a copy of The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross and sat down to read. I did this with absolutely no understanding of Carmelite spirituality or the great saint’s place in the life of the Church. My prayer life had been formed almost entirely by the later writings of Thomas Merton, which focus on non-Christian Eastern traditions, especially Zen. I had been practicing the Zen technique of sitting in silence, emptying the mind, letting all thoughts flow past me like driftwood in a stream.
This is not Christian prayer, or anything like it. Interior silence is the end of Zen, but the end of Christian prayer is Jesus Christ. A fervent soul does not need techniques to reach this end, only true desire and love. Maybe Merton and the other similar authors tried to teach me this, and I just wasn’t paying attention. Or maybe they were too focused on the idea that spirituality is a thing that transcends religion. Maybe they, like me, had come to think of Christianity as just a bit bland and in need of a dash of the exotic to spice it up.
Interior silence is the end of Zen, but the end of Christian prayer is Jesus Christ.
Wherever the fault lies, what this study and meditation produced in me was not the desire to know God but the desire to acquire esoteric knowledge. I wanted to be enlightened, so I could rise above the attractions and confusions of life. I wanted, frankly, power–the ability to control myself and not be controlled by the circumstances around me.
With that motivation, I turned to St. John of the Cross, expecting some mind-blowing, consciousness-raising, next-level action. Unsurprisingly, the saint’s writings gave me nothing like that. I got a few chapters into the book, and gave up. I really had no idea what he was talking about. St. John went back on the bookshelf. I continued for a few years in the Zen Catholic path, but the quest for inner silence seemed increasingly unsatisfying. My prayer life faltered and soon ceased.
Fast-forward about 25 years, through law school, marriage, a growing family, a burgeoning legal career, all the very ordinary and welcome blessings of Providence. Eventually the prayer life I had long left behind started to sprout again. Occasional volunteering to cover an hour of Eucharistic adoration at my parish had developed into a weekly holy hour, every Friday at midnight. This was a breakthrough. The sometimes deafening chorus of middle class responsibilities receded into silence before the Blessed Sacrament. I started hearing a much softer voice, which I hadn’t heard for many years. I wanted to pray again, really pray, which means to draw close to God and know what He is saying to me.
Well, I knew that St. John of the Cross was the Mystical Doctor, the great illuminator of Catholic prayer, so I found my old copy of the Collected Works, determined to try again. I started with The Ascent of Mount Carmel (abbreviated here “AMC”), for the simple reason that it came first in the book. And something remarkable happened. It made perfect sense. The same text that had baffled me years before now seemed not only comprehensible but engaging and satisfying. It felt like the voice of a friend long absent and now delightfully present.
The saint told me in plain and quite congenial terms what I should do to remove obstacles to prayer–and it had nothing to do with breathing, or body position, or centering or any other mental techniques I had been reading about. In fact, what I did while praying wasn’t the problem. It was what I did the rest of the time. “[H]e that journeys on the road and makes the ascent to God must needs be habitually careful to quell and mortify the desires; and the greater the speed wherewith a soul does this, the sooner will it reach the end of its journey.” AMC I.5.6. A heart chasing selfish desires will never have the freedom and clarity required to pray deeply. Those who would see God must be pure of heart. This does not happen in 15 minutes a day and an hour on Sunday. It’s every moment of my life.
What I did while praying wasn’t the problem. It was what I did the rest of the time.
Doesn’t St. John of the Cross tell us we had to give up all our possessions and comforts? Actually, no, but we do have to separate ourselves from the desire for possessions and comforts. “[W]e are not treating here of the lack of things, since this implies no detachment on the part of the soul, if it has a desire for them… For it is not the things of this world that either occupy the soul or cause it harm… But rather the will and desire for them.” AMC I.3.4. People who have mastered desire can forego any gratifying thing with perfect equanimity, and they never allow selfish preferences to subordinate the demands of charity.
Won’t all this make me starved and miserable? Quite the opposite: “[I]t is meet that the soul embrace these acts [of mortification] with all its heart and strive to subdue its will thereto. For, if it perform them with its heart, it will very quickly come to find in them great delight and consolation.” AMC I.13.7. It is the pursuit of gratification that sours the soul, not the pursuit of sanctity, which only brings one closer to the source of all joy.
What about mystical experiences? Forget about them. They don’t matter. God can bring about good effects in your soul without these special graces. He can raise up saints, even from stones like us. St. John is quite blunt: “[T]he devil rejoices greatly when a soul desires to receive revelations … for he has then a great occasion and opportunity to insinuate errors.” AMC II.11.12. A man looking for them is looking the wrong way. He who would “seek any vision or revelation would not only be acting foolishly, but would be committing an offense against God, by not setting his eyes altogether upon Christ.” AMC II.22.5.
These are the kinds of things St. John of the Cross is trying to teach us. He does not sound like a grave and foreboding oracle. He sounds like a friend, coming to us with the friendliest advice we might hope to hear. Truthfully, of course, we must expect to encounter difficulties, and to struggle. Be strong, as the Psalmist says, and let your heart take courage. Ps 27:14. But make no excuses, because there is no person, not one, who is unfit for this effort–not when we have so wise and loving a guide to assist us.
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