John of the Cross

It’s certainly been quite a month, and it’s hard to believe that October is already here and 6 days old.  The Pope’s historic trip to England and the relics of Don Bosco visiting the area took me off my regular rhythm of postings, but I don’t think that was such a bad thing. 

The feedback I’ve been getting has been pretty positive, but more than one person said that they can’t make heads or tails of the philosophical portion of our program.  I take this as a problem with the author, not the reader.  The purpose is to make things clear for everyone, not to muddy the waters even more.  There are others who know a lot more about things like phenomenology than I do and explain it better than I can, so I’ll leave it to them.  But I don’t want to abandon the Theology of the Body, and as I wrote before, you don’t have to understand the philosophical background to appreciate John Paul II’s work.

Drawing by St. John of the Cross that influenced Salvador Dali's 20th century portrait of Christ Crucified

One figure we must talk about first though is St. John of the Cross (Juan de Yepes).  John Paul did one of his doctoral theses on him, and knowing a little about him is important because he was such a big influence on TOB.

St. John (1542-1591) was the child of a Spanish nobleman who had abandoned his inheritance to marry a “commoner,” the daughter of a silk weaver.  When his father died young, the Yepes family wouldn’t give any help to the widow and her children.  They lived poor, sometimes on the streets, but John managed to work his way through school and became a Carmelite priest.  He was involved in the reform of that order, a task that led to great hardships for him.  When people, including dedicated Christians, fall into bad habits it can be difficult to change.  Some of his brother Carmelites resisted the call to reform, at one point putting him under what we might call house arrest.  He spent nine months locked in a tinny cell, enduring public humiliations and punishments.  It was during this time that he suffered a great spiritual crisis, as you could imagine, but also a time when he wrote some of his deepest spiritual poetry.  He finally escaped one night and went on to continue his work.

The Catholic Encyclopedia that we find online points out something I found interesting; that St. John, while a master of spiritual theology and Doctor of the Church, was not really a scholar in the usual sense.  We can read Teresa of Avila, his contemporary and collaborator in the Carmelite reform, and a trained eye can see her influences clearly (I’m not talking about my eyes, by the way).  The same could be said of many great thinkers, including John Paul II.  They read a great deal, what they read helped shape their minds and then influenced their own writings.  Out side of Sacred Scripture and St. Thomas Aquinas, John of the Cross seems to have few influences.  His mystical insights are drawn from experience.  In his life he understood suffering and rejection, as well as the joys of friendship in Christ, and most of all union with God.  All this went into his poetry and spiritual writings.  More on this extraordinary Saint and his spirituality next time.