St. John of the Cross was unjustly imprisoned by his peers in 1577 A.D. Before his escape, he used nine months of deprivation and darkness to begin composing a spiritual poetic masterpiece that would illuminate the journey of faith for Christians throughout the centuries that followed.
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Toledo, December 1577. A small-statured friar is kidnapped in the night by his own fellow friars, who oppose the religious reform he's carrying out alongside Teresa of Avila, and locked in a tiny dark cell inside a friary. He'll stay there nine months, enduring severe deprivation and mistreatment. Little light, little food, no contact with the outside world.
It's in that cell that John of the Cross composes, from memory, since he doesn't even have paper or pen, part of what will become one of the most beautiful poetic works ever written in Spanish, the Spiritual Canticle, which he'll rework and complete in the years that follow.
A love poem filled with images of lovers searching for each other in the night, largely born out of that darkness and that captivity. He manages to escape by climbing down through a window on knotted sheets, and from there he writes his most famous works, including Dark Night, which gives us an expression we still use today, even outside religious contexts, to describe the darkest moments of life, the dark night of the soul. But here's the thing. For John, that dark night isn't simply psychological suffering, and it's not an automatic passage everyone goes through.
It's a precise mystical category, God's purifying action on the soul, stripping away false securities to open it up to a deeper union with him. His story tells us something powerful. God can turn even total darkness into a place of purification and encounter, not a dead end.
