San Juan de la Cruz

Yesterday was the feast of St. John of the Cross.

I love St. John, but with a holy fear and a bit of trembling. For those who come to know him, he inspires awe. He was also my PhD dissertation subject of analysis.

Three years of chewing on his words.

I can say with gusty conviction that those three years I spent reading and re-reading his poems and commentaries, letters and aphorisms were years of unparalleled challenge in my life.

Why?

First and foremost, the task of mastering anything is an arduous one that brings out the worst and the best in you. Like academic boot camp. In addition, mastering texts of such depth, complexity and challenge was an arduous, even if ardent, journey.

But that was not the real challenge.

The real challenge was this: digesting St. John's words in mind and heart is like eating enriched uranium. It has the capacity to burn and wound, or to expose and break down your inner world, rearranging it in ways that can be both disorienting and frightening. If you have ever tasted the truth of the question, 'Have you been read by a good book lately?', you will get the gist of my point.

St. John is a master of self-knowledge, and especially of knowledge that exposes within the reader the profoundly ego-centric dynamics of our spiritual life. Original sin's primary effect, he says, is to make us curvatus in se – curved in on ourselves. As he pithily puts it, 'Most seek not God within the self, but rather seek the self in God.' In other words, so much of my own spiritual life is about 'me' and not about 'God.' Conversion is at root, for St. John, the dismantling of the elaborate machinery of this inward-curved, ego-centric inner-world, and the gradual re-construction of a self that is made in God's image: oriented fundamentally toward love of God and of neighbor.

For St John, it's nothing other than going down, in full-existential depth, into the watery font we once pledged to die and rise in.

Or

It's a call to Heliotropic life: wholly Sun-centered.

This dismantling process is indeed a painful, relentless and ruthless project of divine grace flowing from the life-giving Cross; one that draws us through what St John famously calls the 'dark nights'. But its end is joy. Many Christians, St John says, though they live in a state of grace still refuse to pass willingly through this purging process and instead hide in self-pity, worldly distractions and pleasures. Their final re-orientation and ego-dismantling will have to await Purgatory's refining fires when the choice to freely engage God's grace will be no more.

But the revolution is for here, not there. For St John, it is those Christians who freely consent to these dark nights, and to the graced revolution from ego-centrism to theo-centrism, who rock the world with a sanctity made of costly grace.

Why?

Because they have freely consented to allow God to unleash His radical redemption into the world through/with/in them. These revolutionaries unleash God's holiness, God's truth, God's reign, God's beauty into both Church and World.

The truest reformers are the reformed. They are radical because God's redeeming grace has redeemed them down into the deepest roots of their soul.

What might that revolutionary path look like in daily practice? Let me allow St John answer that question. I only ask that, as you read this selection, you to imagine John speaking these words into your state in life – if that is not a monastery, then marriage, single life, work, the sick bed...

To practice the second counsel, which concerns mortification, and profit by it, you should engrave this truth on your heart. And it is that you have not come to the monastery for any other reason than to be worked and tried in virtue; you are like the stone that must be chiseled and fashioned before being set in the building. Thus you should understand that those who are in the monastery are craftsmen placed there by God to mortify you by working and chiseling at you. Some will chisel with words, telling you what you would rather not hear; others by deed, doing against you what you would rather not endure; others by their temperament, being in their person and in their actions a bother and annoyance to you; and others by their thoughts, neither esteeming nor feeling love for you. You ought to suffer these mortifications and annoyances with inner patience, being silent for love of God and understanding that you did not enter the religious life for any other reason than for others to work you in this way, and so you become worthy of heaven. If this was not your reason for entering the religious state, you should not have done so, but should have remained in the world to seek your comfort, honor, reputation, and ease.

May this Advent prepare your life to receive a Savior who wants to save you in ways you cannot yet imagine....

Be not afraid.