St. John of the Cross in the Word Among Us

From the latest Word Among Us here and here:

When people read John of the Cross’ two books, Ascent of Mount Carmel or Dark Night of the Soul, they tend to come away overwhelmed.

John can sound so demanding that we think to ourselves, “How can I possibly live out his words today? Do I really have to suffer as much as he did—or as much as he talks about it?” But I believe that when we understand John’s view of the Christian life, we discover a very human and complete path to God.

So in these next two articles, I want to look at John’s teaching from another angle—an angle that will help us draw closer to God. I want to show how John’s teachings really are encouraging and hopeful, and how he is convinced that all of us can come to the point where we are able to love each other with the very love that God has for us...

He is also clear that this emptying can be painful despite the good work that is going on inside. In other words, for the transformation to occur, we need to surrender.

This is where many people find John to be too harsh or demanding. But while he does talk about the pain involved in dying to our old life, John makes it clear that this is something we begin to desire because of the love we are experiencing:

In that sweet drink of God, in which the soul is imbibed in him, the soul most willingly and with intense delight surrender wholly to him, in the desire to be totally his and never to possess anything other than him… . And since he transforms the soul in himself, he makes it entirely his own and empties it of all it possesses other than him. (The Spiritual Canticle, 27, 6)

There is no doubt that for John of the Cross, God does everything. But this does not mean that we remain passive, merely sitting back and waiting. Rather, God challenges us to enter into the process by actively loving and surrendering to him. In fact, he wants us to become as active as the flames of love by which his Spirit transforms us.
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According to John, it is God who gives us everything that is necessary to put off the old life and put on the new life—to change and focus fully on him. This process is a pure gift, an undeserved grace. It is not something we can accomplish on our own and it does not happen overnight. Rather, the process occurs over a lifetime, within the concrete circumstances and events of our lives