St. John of the Cross

Extract

The first monastery of the Carmelite Friars of St. Teresa’s Reform consisted of a small house with a porch for church, one single room for dorrnitory, a kitchen which also served as the refectory, and, a garret for choir. Its roof leaked, and in winter the snow would fall on the coarse habit of Fray Juan, who had changed his name of St. Mathias to John of the Cross, for it was the Cross with which he was in love, and the mystic teaching he gave to the Church is sealed with the sign of our salvation.

Mystics, alas, seem to be en vogue again among writers Christian and otherwise — alas, because mysticism by its very name seems to suggest mystery, dark and wonderful experiences, losing oneself in the One or the All (it does not matter which), tempting men to spiritual experiments which can only end in disaster. But mysticism is nothing of the kind, and anyone who longs for mystic experiences or who would understand Christian mystics with such notions in . his head is grievously deceived. ‘Do not seek Christ except on the Cross,’ St. John once said to one of his friars, and the Christian mystic who always seeks God through Christ, will also be found only on the Cross.

There is, perhaps, no other Saint whose life as well as whose doctrine bear the imprint of the Cross so openly, so challengingly even, as the life and the writings of St. John, whom the Church calls in the Collect of his Feast ‘Perfectae sui abnegationis et Crucis amatorem.’