Noche Oscura
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by Gerald May
I can't remember exactly when I first encountered the writings of John of the Cross. I'm sure they never mentioned him in my Methodist Sunday school. I must have come across excerpts in the late sixties when I began to explore mystical traditions, but excerpts are a problem when it comes to John. He is one of the most unfairly excerpted authors of all time. The available excerpts were far too austere for me. They said you had to desire the hardest, most painful things in life, deny pleasure, and do battle with attachment. At first meeting, I didn't much like John of the Cross.Then at some point I heard one of our local Carmelites (either Connie FitzGerald or Jack Welch), who gave John a new lease on life in my heart. I read his poetry, and it made me cry and sing. I read his Ascent of Mount Carmel, skipping those oft-excerpted austerity passages in Chapter 13, and picking up in Chapter 14 where he says of course the austerities don't work. This was good news for me; I knew from my own experience that austerities don't work-or rather, I knew I had never been able to maintain a single austerity long enough to know if it worked or not.
Ever since, I've absorbed John's writings like water: small sips when my lips are dry, huge gulps when I'm dying of thirst. Sometimes I spend so much time with him I think one or the other of us must surely cry, "Enough!" But it never happens. He always has something to say to me-something that was already in my heart that I couldn't claim until he put it into words for me. And sometimes, I swear, the little fifteenth century Spanish friar actually shows up in miniature, hovering a little behind me and to my right, grinning, winking, or frowning. Somewhere along the way, John introduced me to his teacher and spiritual mother, Teresa of Avila.
"Taught me everything I know," he said.
Now she hovers behind me too, a little to my left. Between these two there is no escape. I am hopelessly pinioned by their love of God.
What John is most famous for-aside from those abysmal excerpts-is the dark night of the soul. He got the idea from a mysterious ancient author who wrote under the name of Dionysius, whose conversion by St. Paul is recorded in the Book of Acts. This writer (who wasn't the real Dionysius and so today is called the Pseudodionysius) used the phrase "a ray of darkness" to describe God's hidden activity in the human soul. John liked that image a lot.
In the days of the Pseudodionysius, and in John's time as well, darkness didn't carry the negative connotations it does in
today's American culture. When things were said to be dark, it didn't necessarily mean they were sinister or sorrowful; it only meant you couldn't see them very well. The Spanish word John used communicates it well: oscura; things are obscure, mysterious, and you don't know what's happening.
Nowadays, people use "dark night of the soul" in a very negative way, to describe when bad things happen to them: the dying of loved ones, divorce, disease, failure. The more dramatic the calamities, and the more there are of them, the darker the night. The little John behind my right shoulder frowns at this. "That doesn't sound obscure at all!" he grumbles.
He explains that if I think I'm going through a dark night of the soul I'm probably not, because if it really were a dark night I wouldn't know it, because it would be obscure. John is clearly pleased with his clarification, but Teresa, who has now shown up behind my left shoulder, is rolling her eyes as if to say, "God save me from men!"
John tries again. "It's mercy," he says. "It's all God's mercy. The dark night is God's way of keeping us safe.
In spiritual matters, you are most likely to stumble and fall if you think you can see the way to go, if you think you know how to do it. So God makes everything dark, obscure, so you have to let God guide and carry you. That keeps you safe."
The dark night can indeed be hard, John admits, because it does involve liberation from attachments-most of which we'd just as soon not relinquish and many of which we didn't even know we had. But when we glimpse the dawn and begin to appreciate what has really happened, the shining freedom we've been led to, there is sheer delight. John quotes his poem, "O guiding night! O night more lovely than the dawn!"
I contribute my own thoughts. The dark night of the soul happens to everyone, I think. We feel a bit of it every time we taste mystery, whenever we realize how little we know about our life with the divine. Occasionally it may take on tragic proportions, but more often it's utterly ordinary, and sometimes even boring. But always it contains the relinquishment of old ways and the birthing of new, and always it is beyond our understanding. It's like the "Cloud of Unknowing," only God-given instead of self-imposed. I sense slightly dubious looks coming over both my shoulders, so I quickly conclude: "But what do I know anyway?"
John smiles. Teresa smiles. I smile.
© 2008 The Shalem Institute.