Making Friends with a Saint
On a warm Ohio springtime in 1988, just shy of 30 years old, I purchased a copy of The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross and sat down to read.
On a warm Ohio springtime in 1988, just shy of 30 years old, I purchased a copy of The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross and sat down to read. I did this with absolutely no understanding of Carmelite spirituality or the great saint's place in the life of the Church. My prayer life had been formed almost entirely by the later writings of Thomas Merton, which focus on non-Christian Eastern traditions, especially Zen. I had been practicing the Zen technique of sitting in silence, emptying the mind, letting all thoughts flow past me like driftwood in a stream. I will have more to say about this method of prayer later.
I suppose I expected to find esoteric knowledge and to immediately understand it. I wanted to be enlightened, so I could look around me at the attractions and confusions of life and sort them out. I wanted, frankly, power--the ability to control myself and not be controlled by the circumstances around me. I got a few chapters into the book, and gave up. I really had no idea what he was talking about. St. John went back on the bookshelf.
Fast forward about 25 years, through law school, marriage, a growing family, a burgeoning legal career, all the very ordinary and welcome blessings of Providence. The prayer life I had long left behind was starting to sprout again. Occasional volunteering to cover an hour of Eucharistic adoration at my parish had developed into a weekly holy hour, every Friday at midnight. The sometimes deafening chorus of middle class responsibilities receded into silence, before the Blessed Sacrament. I started hearing a much softer music, which I hadn't heard for many years. I wanted to pray again, really pray, which means to draw close to God and know what He is saying to me.
Well, I knew that St. John of the Cross was the Mystical Doctor, the great illuminator of Catholic spirituality, so I found my old copy of the Collected Works, determined to try again. I started with The Ascent of Mount Carmel, because it came first in the book. And something remarkable happened. It made perfect sense. The same text that had baffled me years before, now seemed not only comprehensible but reasonable and satisfying.
Part of the reason was that The Ascent addressed the specific spiritual need I had at that time: freeing myself from selfish desires and appetites. The saint writes:
Freedom cannot abide in a heart dominated by the appetites-–in a slave's heart. … The appetites are wearisome and tiring for a man. They resemble little children, restless and hard to please, always whining to their mother for this thing, or that, and never satisfied.
AMC I.4.6, I.6.6*
This is the essence of St. John's teaching on austerity. It's not about punishing your sinful, miserable self. It's not about wafting your intellect out of base matter, to float in airy realms of consciousness. It's about freedom, freeing yourself to be the man or woman, here and now, that God created you to be.
I will have more to say about The Ascent of Mount Carmel in other posts. But the point of this story is to assure you of something important, something I knew intuitively at that time. I was understanding St. John of the Cross because he was helping me, because he wanted me to see.
How can I say such a thing? Well, we know that the saints in Heaven are more alive than we are. Catholics especially believe they can come to our aid. Take it further: we can enter into friendship with them. So I can confidently say that I made friends with St. John of the Cross, and he made friends with me--yes, me, confused, misdirected, full of pride and self-will, but to the glory of God, St. John accepted me as a friend. And he will befriend you too.
Should you start with The Ascent of Mount Carmel? Or maybe some of the other works of St. John of the Cross? Or perhaps a book about Carmelite spirituality? Check out The Book Cellar for a summary of the major Works of St. John of the Cross and some other recommendations
* "AMC I.4.6" refers to The Ascent of Mount Carmel, Book I, chapter 4, section 6.