ST. JOHN of the Cross is a Carmelite who lived in Spain during the Middle Ages. That was the time that he, together with Teresa of Avila, started a reform movement within the Order of the Carmelites.
He felt that it was God, Himself, who inspired him to this so much needed reform. He felt that it became like a dark night for him, as if he was put in a prison and in there, he wrote a beautiful poem:
no one saw me through the dark –
and I saw nothing then,
no other light to mark
the way but fire pounding my heart”.
St. John of the Cross feels that he has become like a waste land that is longing for a drop of rain.
He got fearful now that his brothers had deserted him and he feels that even God Himself has deserted him.
He lays down and he feels as if he is sinking down into a lake that is full of emptiness and depression. He is left behind without faith, without love, without a future. God has become more and more dark, strange and invisible for him.
Together with Christ hanging on the Cross he prays: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
He thought that he was on the road to a new future but there is no future for him anymore and the past has faded away. This has become a deep hole.
And yet, he knows that the people who have put him in prison have eventually no power over him and over his Carmelite vocation.
Christ, himself, runs away as a frightened deer. His being is not caught in reassuring images and pious practices neither in beautiful spiritual experiences. His being is like a hidden presence of God whom he is conscious of, because God escapes his eyes and his groping hands.
God reveals himself only in the scorching pain of a desire that cannot be extinguished and in the emptiness of his soul where any consciousness of oneself has disappeared.
Christ remains untouchable for the arrows of his spiritual feelings and thoughts, but nevertheless has the arrow of his disrupting love touched him deeply.
His touching doesn’t show itself as a track of his disappearing presence- recognizable in the fabric of the "I" – but as a pure absence and as the fear that everything has been lost forever and there is no return.
With all his power calling Him, has he also himself gone out from the last portion of what he remembers of the "I".
He has been hidden forever from every – even the smallest – form of self-consciousness.
“Who is Christ after all?” this question can only be asked when there is ‘nobody’ left who can answer this question. Christ has "gone."
This is a going that affects all of us on an ever deeper level. Only Christ can offer us a solution, but His Face is the painful and inhuman death on the cross.
In this he draws us with him, every time again. When there is nothing left from what seemed to be our beloved, and only pain, despair and fear remains, it is tempting to call to others for help, who can give a place to our experience and give some meaning to it.
St. John of the Cross knows in his lonesome and cold prison cell that this is his vocation, far away from all those self-manifestations and success stories.
Even when he has returned to freedom, he will never leave this lonesome and quiet cell.
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