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As I mentioned in my previous article, the demands and the apparent harshness of the path that St. John of the Cross suggests in his writings can seem overwhelming.
But if we read a little more closely, we will find that John has often been presented in an ethereal, almost unrealistic way. In reality, John of the Cross provides us with a very human path to God—a path that is rooted in our everyday lives.
Let’s take a look at three specific ways in which John shows us this human, everyday path to God. It is my prayer that as you read, you will feel more and more encouraged to seek out this God, who is always seeking you.
God Enjoys Being with You. John of the Cross makes it clear that God is present everywhere and at all times. “The Father of Lights,” he says, “is not closed-fisted but diffuses himself abundantly, as the sun does its rays, without being a respecter of persons.” He is “always showing himself gladly along the highways and byways,” and he “does not hesitate … to find his delights with the children of the earth” (Living Flame of Love, 1, 15).
This means that God’s love is available to everyone. He is concerned about every human being. The “highways” that John talks about are the most traveled routes, the roads you would expect a traveler to take. The “byways” are the shortcuts that tend to be dangerous and that people avoid when they can. But that doesn’t matter to God. He will travel the byways just as readily—anything so that he can be with his people.
Finally, by including this quotation from the Book of Proverbs, John is underlining how utterly important this presence of God is not only to creation but to God himself.
According to John, being with the human community is at the heart of our loving God. He loves us, and he loves to walk with us. He knows our ups and our downs. He knows our joys and our sufferings. He is not a distant God who merely looks down from heaven. He is with us. Think about how much you enjoy being with your loved ones. Think about how much you miss them when you are separated from them. That can begin to give you an idea about how much God wants to be with you—how much he delights in you.
Wounded by a Tender and Gentle Love. So God is with us in a very personal way. But what does this mean? Is he observing us silently, invisibly? Is he watching for missteps so that he can correct or even punish us? No, John says. He is with us as a tender lover, as someone whose love has the power to change us deeply. “Since love is never idle, but in continual motion,” he writes, “it is always emitting flames everywhere like a blazing fire … it dispatches its wounds like most tender flares of delicate love.” John continues: “Joyfully and festively it practices the arts and games of love, as though in the palace of its nuptials, as Ahasuerus did with Esther [Esther 2:16-18]. God shows his graces there … so that in this soul might be fulfilled what he asserted in Proverbs: ‘I was delighted every day, playing before him all the time… . And my delights were to be with the children of the earth’ [Proverbs 8:30-31]” (Living Flame of Love, 1, 8).
We can take three points from this paragraph.
First, God’s love for us is continuously active. Once we come in touch with this love, we experience a constant deepening movement in which the Holy Spirit transforms us into that very same love. Through the action of the Spirit’s love in our hearts, we find ourselves being challenged to let go of selfish relationships, both with other people and with God’s creation. Because we were previously so focused on these things, letting go can be painful. It can truly be called a “wound.” Yet the aim of this wound of love is ultimately to bring us to love. So God continues to pour his love into us with tender, gentle stirrings that move us to make changes in our lives.
Second, God is totally taken by the loveliness of each of us. John compares the constant activity of God’s love to the story of King Ahasuerus and Esther. The king is so delighted at having found Esther that he spends months preparing her for union with him. At the end of this preparation period, Ahasuerus is so delighted in Esther that he gives her a crown and celebrates their union by hosting a great banquet. In a similar way, John tells us, God wants to prepare each of us for his love. He is eager to crown each of us and proclaim to the world that we are his beloved.
Finally, John focuses on the fact that God actually enjoys humanity. By giving us a quote from the Book of Proverbs, John seems to be saying that God even “plays with” his people. In fact, in every other place where John refers to Proverbs 8:30-31, he talks about how much God delights in his people. As far as John is concerned, God simply loves being with creation and especially with us human beings. He portrays God and his people as lovers who delight in each other and relate to each other with real joy.
Exalted with the Lord. Some people may think that John’s teaching emphasizes only the path of suffering, but this is not accurate. In The Spiritual Canticle he tells us that all our sufferings on the journey are “nothing in the sight of God.” We cannot give God anything, nor does he need suffering (The Spiritual Canticle, 28, 1). God only wants to see us exalted in a love that enables us to share all things with him. He wants his love to become our love. He wants us to view this creation as ours in him. And he wants us to exercise his compassion, power, and authority with him, free of all greed, oppression, hatred, or possessiveness.
This means that God’s search for us is more constant than our search for God. When we are brought into a life of peaceful and quiet union with God, we should always remember that it is because God is at work, carrying us more deeply into his love and deepening our love for him. He wants to embrace us so fully and yet so lightly that we are captured by nothing except him alone. And at this point, we no longer have selfish desires. Instead, we desire only what God desires—and our desires are inspired by a full, freeing love.
It is in this very process of being loved by God that we learn how to love in return. True, it is only in “the clear transformation of glory” after death that we will finally learn to love God as much as he loves us (The Spiritual Canticle, 38, 3). Still, we can find—and be transformed by—a foreshadowing of that love here and now, in our bodily lives.
A God-Loving Life. John of the Cross was convinced that God is with us, always pouring his tender love upon us. He knew that God wants to exalt us in a manner similar to the way that he exalted Jesus to his own right hand. All this, according to John, is so that we can live the life of God, a life of love. John is clear that this transformed life is not something meant for a heavenly homeland but for right here and right now. It is a life we are meant to live in our historical, bodily life.
Our call to be transformed into God is a call to enter into a God-loving life. But John doesn’t see this love of God as something “purely spiritual,” entirely divorced from this physical creation. So many of John’s images of God are relational and human: mother-child, bridegroom-bride, lover-beloved. They are filled with the passion and sensuality arising out of the love that God places inside of us.
The whole process of purification and dark nights that brings us into union with God is meant to free us to be fully and perfectly sensual and passionate in relating to this created world. Instead of being destructive, as they can tend to be, passion and sensuality can become delightfully constructive. And in this way, John of the Cross challenges us to embrace a lifestyle that risks all for the sake of everything and everyone who is encompassed by God’s unbounded love. In short, it makes us into lovers of creation—people who love with God’s unbounded, passionate love.
Richard P. Hardy has been a professor of spirituality at various universities in the United States and Canada and is the author of John of the Cross, Man and Mystic (Boston, MA: Pauline Media, 2004). He gives lectures and retreats on Carmelite spirituality.
Some of John of the Cross strikes me as rhapsodically idyllic and idealistic, particularly that God enjoys playing with his people, takes such delight in the human race, etc. It is hard to imagine God delighting in this our culture at large considering its massive and crass expressions of unbelief and sin - I do not need to enumerate the obvious. Certainly, yes, God is ever-active in us and present to us in order to love us, transform us, and bring us to the overcoming of a destructive sensuality etc. as John of the Cross says. But our culture has no desire to overcome these things! Rather our culture breeds more and more of it and seems is in fact immersed and buried in such a pervasive sensuality and thus not attuned to the love and transformation God desires to offer mankind. Can we even hear St. John Cross? Even more, much of this culture claims to know God or to be Christian yet retains all sorts of sensuality, grasping onto the goods of this world, etc, etc. So it seems to me that the world first needs to be “ convicted of its sin”, then St. John of the Cross might become a powerful spiritual guide. Or is it that this culture can begin to be transformed simply upon hearing the messages of uniion and transforamtion that comes from his writings?
I agree with the above writer that we need to recognize our immersion in a “world” of secularism, materialism and relativistic egoism closes our hearts to the “presence” of God. In order to grow in holiness we need to be conscious of our sinfulness and seek out the healing found in the Sacrament of Reconcilation. Only then can we receive the grace we need to nurture the gifts of the Holy Spirit enabling us to find that true union we crave with our loving Father In heaven.