Union with God/St. John of the Cross

Sometimes when you are “in the zone” in prayer, and contemplation seems particularly rich and fruitful, you can have one of those moments when the presence of Christ is intensely felt.  Saints throughout history have tried to put their experiences in words, but words are always inadequate when trying to describe an experience of God.

Using their natural gifts, some saints have tried to describe a method of attaining union with God.  Always, though, they acknowledge that this cannot be accomplished by one’s own effort.  Any experience of union with God comes by way of God’s grace and is total gift.  It’s not like we can make it happen by following a set of instructions, but because it is such a wonderful experience, our saints often try to help us understand how it might happen for us as well by explaining the process they themselves experienced.

The other thing that has always amazed me about saints, such as St. Augustine, for instance, is their willingness to share their deepest, darkest secrets with the world.  Thank goodness they have, because as we learn about their personal weaknesses, we find in their humanity a happy connection to ourselves.  God in his infinite wisdom has given us men and women with whom we can relate--not perfect people, but truly people like us in many ways.

Some of what we know about being in union with God comes from saints that were ordered to write about their experiences.  This was not easy for them.  They found it hard to find the time to write and often feared that they would write something in error.  Not wanting to lead others astray, they had to entrust their work to their spiritual leaders in the hope something good could be found in their writings and if it was bad, it would be thrown out.

Some of our saints, such as John of the Cross (a Doctor of the Church) wrote in such high mystical language it is often hard for the beginner (or even an advanced student of his work) to totally comprehend.

Beautifully, though, in his work Dark Night of the Soul, he moves his student from his lived experience in the physical world (where he was imprisoned and escaped), to the depths of his mystical love.

When you read, “On a dark night, kindled in love with yearnings . . . . I went forth without being observed, my house being now at rest . . . . In darkness and secure, by the secret ladder, disguised . . . .” you can almost see him scaling that prison wall with a rope of bedclothes in the middle of the night as he sought to escape the prison where he endured torture for nine months.

But then, as he explains each stanza in detail, we learn that it is the spiritual darkness that falls on each of our lives, of which he mostly speaks.  He leads us to understand that great happiness can be found in our journey to God, in darkness, where our enemies are conquered and we are purged of those obstacles that get in the way of our union with God.

Like I said, he gets pretty deep.

But the reason I mention him now, is because I can see a parallel between  St. John’s Dark Night of the Soul and God’s writing in the Word of his Son, Jesus Christ, whom we meet in the manger.

Like John’s sublime poetry, the Father meets us in the physical world and moves us beyond it.  To stand before the manger and study its design and marvel at its workmanship, is to limit ourselves to this earthly reality.  If we do not recognize the beauty of the Incarnation and the saving action of God entering the world in the infant Jesus, it is no different than limiting the meaning of John’s words to his physical reality of imprisonment.  To do this is to miss everything. 

We can almost always assume that there is more to be experienced than what we can see around us.  By God’s grace and our openness to this spiritual reality, I think that we, like John, can find great hope in moving from confinement to freedom, from earth to heaven.