TRANSCRIPCIÓN:

St. John of the Cross is one of the doctors of the Church. He has a wonderful spirituality for all of us. And John said his experiences of God were very difficult to put into words. He said they were ineffable, unwordable. And he said, “So what I had to do in order to communicate my experiences of God and understand them,” he said, “I had to take poetry and I stammered in the imagery of poetry to express my experience of God.

We have three major poems of John of the Cross in which his spirituality is presented and it’s very flowing with imagery and nature images.  He’s telling the story as a love story. One of his sources is the Song of Songs in the Old Testament. The love between God and God’s people or God and the soul is a real love story. And John sees his experiences of God captured in that Old Testament scripture and he uses some of that imagery himself to present his experience of God in his poetry and in his spirituality.

One of John’s contributions to the church is to talk about the times when we’re sincere in our prayer. There’s been consolation. We feel we’re doing all right in terms of our relationship with God. But then a time comes when the consolation evaporates and when we don’t have the sense of peace and meaning that we normally had and the words are not there for us. He refers to that as a dark night, a dark experience. And that’s a metaphor in the church that comes from John of the Cross’s poetry.  And in those times, he said the temptation is to redouble the efforts we’ve made to be a good Christian… more prayer, more intense effort. And he’s encouraging us; No, where our prayer brought us to where it should go to kind of the end of our knowing, the end of our able ability to word our lives. And it’s brought us to a prayer where we to a place where we have to listen more deeply into those lives. And so we don’t have anything to say anymore and the meaning’s not there. He said the temptation is to read double efforts. His advice is stay in this experience. It’s a healing experience from God who is helping heal us past where we are even though it feels negative. He says stay in the experience with patience and trust and perseverance and as far as possible try to listen to God in our life. Have an attentiveness to God if that’s possible because God’s approaching us inviting us more fully into our life into a wider freedom in our life into a more intimate relationship but we have to weather this experience and then learn to listen more deeply to God’s approach.

In his experience when he went through a time like this and the words returned, the meanings returned, consolation returned… he’s able to communicate to us that experience. He said what happened in his life was he became more sensitive to his inattention to God. He might call it his miseries. He also felt he had been taking for granted his relationship to God. If he felt good, God felt good about it. And he learned to have more reverence. He said the night experience taught him that he needed to be led more deeply and fed by God. It was a little bit like going up to the burning bush for Moses and hearing take off your sandals, you’re on sacred ground.

Then he also said before the night experience not only was I not aware of my more selfish tendencies and not aware of my inattentiveness to God, I was also critical of my brothers and sisters. I wished they could be more like me. After the night he said, “I esteem my brothers and sisters. I respect them far more than I would respect my own virtue at this point.”

So the benefits of the night are to help us to come into a more authentic relationship with the Lord, more reverence with the Lord, more fraternity to our brothers and sisters. And perhaps that’s one of his most important contributions to prayer life in the Church.