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When people read John of the Cross’ two books, Ascent of Mount Carmel or Dark Night of the Soul, they tend to come away overwhelmed.
John can sound so demanding that we think to ourselves, “How can I possibly live out his words today? Do I really have to suffer as much as he did—or as much as he talks about it?” But I believe that when we understand John’s view of the Christian life, we discover a very human and complete path to God.
So in these next two articles, I want to look at John’s teaching from another angle—an angle that will help us draw closer to God. I want to show how John’s teachings really are encouraging and hopeful, and how he is convinced that all of us can come to the point where we are able to love each other with the very love that God has for us.
Finding Harmony. In the Prologue of his poem, Living Flame of Love, John expresses a theme that flows through all of his works: “For God declared that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit would take up their abode in those who loved him by making them live the life of God and dwell in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”
John tells us that his poem speaks of the process in which we come to live a new life as the Trinity takes up its home in our hearts and helps us live the life of God here and now. With God in us, we can see as God sees and love as God loves. And we do this with our whole person, not just with our intellectual understanding. Our very flesh and blood, our bodies and our passions, are deeply involved in this transformation. According to St. John of the Cross, all the elements of our human nature—body and soul, sense, and spirit—are brought into harmony and filled with God’s own life and love.
Before this transformation, we tend to experience a kind of disharmony between the way we are living and the way we want to live. Our deep-seated desire to be united with God increases our impatience and frustration, to the point where we feel an almost frantic yearning to escape “the conditions of this life” (Living Flame of Love, 1, 36). We experience a disharmony between the way we live and the way we want to live. Then, after experiencing this release of grace and power we find ourselves in a totally different situation. We find ourselves in harmony with God. The disharmony is melted away, and we find ourselves living the life God wants us to live. Our will and God’s will are one.
The Call to Surrender. According to John of the Cross, the Holy Spirit accomplishes this transformation by love—a love that does not destroy but delights in us. At the same time, John is clear that this transformation process involves a necessary emptying, on our part, of our old ways that separate us from God. He is also clear that this emptying can be painful despite the good work that is going on inside. In other words, for the transformation to occur, we need to surrender.
This is where many people find John to be too harsh or demanding. But while he does talk about the pain involved in dying to our old life, John makes it clear that this is something we begin to desire because of the love we are experiencing:
In that sweet drink of God, in which the soul is imbibed in him, the soul most willingly and with intense delight surrender wholly to him, in the desire to be totally his and never to possess anything other than him… . And since he transforms the soul in himself, he makes it entirely his own and empties it of all it possesses other than him. (The Spiritual Canticle, 27, 6)
There is no doubt that for John of the Cross, God does everything. But this does not mean that we remain passive, merely sitting back and waiting. Rather, God challenges us to enter into the process by actively loving and surrendering to him. In fact, he wants us to become as active as the flames of love by which his Spirit transforms us.
Becoming God. John calls this process of transformation a work of “divinization.” In the Living Flame of Love, he tells us that those people who are transformed in God actually become God through participation. And in a beautiful prayer from The Spiritual Canticle that speaks of oneness with God, John underscores the profound unity between God and those who are divinized: “that I be so transformed in your beauty that I may be alike in beauty, and both behold myself in your beauty, possessing your very beauty.” Thus I shall be you in your beauty, and you will be me in your beauty” (The Spiritual Canticle, 36, 5).
According to John, we can be taken into God’s own divine life. Our attributes of thinking, acting, and loving can be so transformed by grace that God’s infinite wisdom and love become our wisdom and our love—to the degree possible in this earthly life. And it happens not by force but by love.
In this light, it’s important to see how John combines the qualities of power and strength with the experience of delight, sweetness, and embrace. Yes, God is almighty and all-powerful; but we experience union with him as delightful and sweet. As he says in more than one place, it is a love that wounds and causes suffering. But it is the sweet suffering of someone smitten by love, struggling to embrace this love and let it purge him of all that is opposed to it.
On a final note, John reminds us that this process of divinization is something that we will never be able to explain fully. The work of the Holy Spirit in our lives is both delicate and deep. It is understood only as we experience it in our own hearts.
A Lifelong Process. Sometimes readers find John of the Cross too “scholastic,” especially in his detailed discussion of the intellect, will, and memory. But we should remember that John is a product of his time and that he uses terms familiar to his original audience. When John speaks in terms of purifying the “faculties” of the soul, we should remember that he is really talking about the whole person—our bodies as well as our minds—being transformed to bring the love of God to life in this world.
This kind of transformation fills our human intellect with supernatural light so that it becomes divine, united with God’s mind. It fills our will with the love of God so that we love as God loves. And it changes our memory, our affections, and our desires into those of God. As a result, John says, our soul can become a “soul of heaven” and yet fully human, living this life here and now.
As we said above, John talks about this process of divinization by using St. Paul’s words about the “old self” and the “new self” (Ephesians 4:22-24). Little by little, we find ourselves, with the help of grace, turning our attention to God more and more, and in the process turning away from sin more and more. Over time, if we are faithful in following the movements of God’s grace in our hearts, we become “divinized.” Not only are we turned toward God, we are “wholly converted into divine love” (Living Flame of Love, 1, 26).
According to John, it is God who gives us everything that is necessary to put off the old life and put on the new life—to change and focus fully on him. This process is a pure gift, an undeserved grace. It is not something we can accomplish on our own and it does not happen overnight. Rather, the process occurs over a lifetime, within the concrete circumstances and events of our lives.
This conversion into divine love means that it is the Holy Spirit who is acting in and through us as we continually seek to be “moved by the strength of the Holy Spirit.” At this stage of spiritual growth, everything we do in love—indeed all of our acts—can be said to be divine, because according to John the Spirit is the one who does them, acting in and through the love and actions of the transformed human person.
Out of the Dark Night. In this article, we have seen three primary things that John of the Cross teaches. First, God lives in us and wants to transform us. Second, it is possible for us to become transformed and even divinized. And finally, it may take a lifetime, but being united with God is the most honorable way to live and the greatest way to give him glory.
If we “empty” ourselves of the old self-life, we can be filled with God’s divine life. If John were alive today, he would tell us that all who are in a state of grace and who are trying to surrender their lives to God each day will find themselves climbing out of the “Dark Night” and into the very life of God. They will also find that this transformation is a joy, simply because God himself is overtaking us and living in us. n
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.
It would be great to hear more about how the “emptying” referred to is accomplished (ie. - how do we cooperate with God’s grace to “put on the new man"). Perhaps this will be the subject of future articles...?
Good question, Christopher. I too would like to know more. Maybe part of “emptying” concerns my deep recognition that I am really nothing ( as St. Catherine Siena says ) , that I am not the source of my own being but rather creature thus owing all to God, that I am full of tensions and contradictions, and at bottom am anxiously in need of God’s mutual indwelling presence.