The saints

Saint John of the Cross

Mystic and Doctor of the Church · Feast day December 14 · 1542 to 1591 · Spain · Also known as Juan de la Cruz

Saint John of the Cross was a Spanish friar, poet, and mystic who worked with Teresa of Avila to reform the Carmelite order, and who, out of imprisonment and profound suffering, wrote some of the greatest spiritual poetry ever composed. His teaching on the dark night of the soul has guided countless believers through seasons when God seems absent, into a deeper and purer love.

By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not.Songofsolomon 3:1 (KJV)

Poverty and the hunger for God

John was born in 1542 in a village near Avila in Spain, into deep poverty, the youngest son of a man who had been cast off and disinherited by his wealthy merchant family for marrying a poor silk weaver beneath his station. His father died when John was only a boy, and his widowed mother struggled desperately to keep her children alive through hunger and want, moving from town to town in search of work and bread. One of John's brothers died, it was believed, simply of malnutrition. Out of this hard beginning John learned early the dignity of the poor and the emptiness of the world's securities, lessons that would run through all his later teaching.

As a boy he worked in a hospital for the poor and the plague-stricken in Medina del Campo, caring for the sick and the dying while he studied when he could at a school run for poor children, and later with the Jesuits. He grew into a small, quiet, intensely serious young man of great intelligence and an even greater hunger for God, a hunger that nothing the world could offer had any power to satisfy. That hunger set the whole direction of his life, and it would drive him first into the cloister and then, through suffering, into the very depths of the knowledge of God.

The meeting with Teresa and the reform

John joined the Carmelite friars and was ordained a priest, but he found the order comfortable and lax, far from the solitude and prayer he craved, and he thought seriously of leaving it altogether for the stricter, more hidden life of the Carthusian monks. At that crossroads he met Teresa of Avila, the great reforming nun, then in her later years and engaged in renewing the Carmelite order and restoring it to its original ideals of poverty, silence, and deep prayer. Teresa, a shrewd judge of souls, saw at once the extraordinary depth in this young friar, and she persuaded him not to flee to the Carthusians but to stay and pour himself into her reform of his own order instead.

John threw in his lot with her, and though he was much the younger of the two, he became a spiritual father and guide to the reformed movement. Together they founded and shaped the reformed branch of the order, the Discalced or barefoot Carmelites, who went back to the austere original Carmelite way of life. It was demanding, often thankless work, and it met fierce and mounting resistance from those within the order who resented the reform and regarded John and Teresa as troublemakers overturning a settled way of life. The conflict grew bitter, and it would soon fall on John himself with a cruelty that nearly killed him and yet made him the writer the church remembers.

The prison in Toledo

In December of 1577, friars of the unreformed branch, determined to crush the reform, seized John, carried him off by night, and imprisoned him in their monastery in Toledo. He was shut in a tiny, windowless cell, in reality a converted closet barely large enough to lie down in, dark, freezing in winter and stifling in summer, and there he was held for nine months. He was fed on scraps, deprived of the sacraments and of any change of clothes, and periodically brought out to be beaten before the assembled community and pressed to renounce the reform and return to the old ways. It was a calculated attempt to break him in body and spirit, and it very nearly succeeded in destroying his health.

But it was the making of him as a mystic and a poet. In that lightless cell, stripped of every human comfort and consolation, sunk into a darkness so total that God himself seemed to have vanished entirely, John descended into the very depths of suffering and there, in the depths, found God present in a way beyond all feeling and all image. Having no paper for much of his imprisonment, he composed poetry in his head and memorized it, and there he began the luminous verses of the Spiritual Canticle, a soaring love song between the soul and Christ modeled on the Song of Solomon. After nine months, one night, he pried loose the fittings of his cell door, lowered himself from a high window on a rope made of knotted strips of blanket and cloth, and escaped into the dark streets of Toledo, carrying out with him the poetry that would make him immortal.

The dark night of the soul

Out of that ordeal came John's most famous and most enduring teaching, the dark night of the soul. He observed, both from his own extreme experience and from years of guiding others in prayer, that God very often leads the soul that genuinely seeks him through long seasons of terrible darkness, in which prayer goes utterly dry, all sweetness and sense of God's presence disappear, and the believer feels abandoned, empty, and alone. This darkness, John taught with great tenderness, is not a punishment and not a sign of God's absence, but is itself a purifying grace, a hidden work of God stripping the soul of its clinging attachment to spiritual comforts and consolations, and even to its own comfortable ideas of God, so that at last it may love God for himself alone, in naked faith, and not for anything he gives.

He set all this down in his great prose works, the Ascent of Mount Carmel, the Dark Night, the Spiritual Canticle, and the Living Flame of Love, weaving together profound and demanding theology with poetry of an extraordinary and delicate beauty. His counsel is austere but shot through with hope. He calls the soul to a radical letting go of everything that is not God, of possessions, of ambitions, of even the most precious spiritual experiences, promising over and over that the darkness itself is the path, the very road by which the soul climbs the mountain to union with the God it aches for. To countless people in the centuries since who have passed through seasons of spiritual emptiness and feared that their faith had died in them, John of the Cross has been a sure, gentle, and trustworthy guide, showing that the night is not the end of the road but the way through it.

A small man wholly given

John spent the rest of his life in the service of the reformed order that had cost him so much, founding communities, directing souls with great gentleness, and continuing to write, always poor, always self-effacing, indifferent to honor and to comfort alike. He loved solitude, nature, and silence, and he directed both nuns and simple laypeople with the same patient wisdom, meeting people exactly where they were. In a final irony, near the end of his life he fell out of favor even within the reform he had helped to build, as new tensions divided its leadership, and he was stripped of his offices and sent away to a remote friary, and in his last illness was treated harshly by a superior who disliked him, all of which he bore in silence and deep peace, without a word of complaint.

He fell mortally ill and died at Ubeda in December of 1591, still not yet fifty, worn out by a lifetime of poverty, penance, and suffering. As he lay dying he asked that the verses of the Song of Solomon be read aloud to him, for that book of love had been the companion of his soul all his life, and he died in the night listening to it, at peace. He was later canonized and then declared a Doctor of the Church, honored as one of the supreme teachers of the interior life and of prayer. His slender body of poetry is counted among the very treasures of the Spanish language, and his spiritual writings are read far beyond his own tradition by everyone who longs to understand the deep places of prayer and the mystery of a faith tested and purified by darkness.

Why John of the Cross still matters

John of the Cross speaks with unmatched authority to the believer in the dark, the one whose prayers feel empty and hollow and whose God seems to have fallen silent and gone away. He teaches, from the very bottom of his own dark cell, that such nights are not failures of faith or signs of divine abandonment but are often God's deepest and most loving work, drawing the soul past every comfort and every consolation to himself alone. By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth, sings the ancient poem he loved above all others, and the whole of John's life and teaching is the promise that the seeking, even in the thickest dark, even when he is not found at once, is answered in the end by the God who was never truly absent at all.

A note for all traditions: the saints are honored across the church as examples of faith and, in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, as friends who pray with us, never worshiped, for worship belongs to God alone. What Scripture records and what later tradition holds are distinguished above. In every tradition there is one Lord, Jesus Christ, and every believer, not only the saints, is called to follow him.

Related: Saint Teresa of Avila · How to pray · Saints for December 14 · Saint of the day