There had been so many interpretations of the DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL that I deemed it an accountability to post what ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS wrote about it with utmost sincerity of heart in the light of the purest Grace that had been made available to man to understand heaven’s mysteries.
His writings had been quoted and misquoted a great number of times, perverted to infuse some truth into some subtle lies that seek only to deceive people. Let none be fooled or misguided.
- The dark night of the soul is a journey of the spirit, a journey of love towards her greatest LOVE, who is GOD, a personal God that helps us along the difficult path of learning what it really means and what it really takes to be able to love fully.
- The dark night of the soul is not about the eradication of the personality, but the transformation of the soul into a living likeness with Christ. This likeness is unto a perfection of the capacity to give and receive love, and not to become mindless zombies with no personality of its own.
- The dark night of the soul is not a meaningless state of confusion and depression because of sin or of rebelliousness, but of submitting one’s soul upon God’s hands, as a clay is submitted unto the hands of the Master Potter. The soul is thus like the clay and becomes a master work of art, but it remains to be a creation of the Potter.
- The dark night of the soul is a not a void or an empty place we are thrust into whenever we reach a spiritual depression after self-seeking spiritual ecstasies that leave us addicted from one encounter to another.
- The purpose of the dark night is not the “spiritual high” of awareness or knowledge after we have been purged of our impurities, but a deeper loving intimacy with God. In this way, the dark night became a test of one’s faithfulness to that love even if the soul in no way receives the usual joys it experiences when one is in the presence of her greatest Love.
Having said the above points, we may now proceed to an excerpt of what St. John of the Cross wrote:
Begins to explain the ten steps [231] of the mystic ladder of Divine
love, according to Saint Bernard and Saint Thomas. The first five
are here treated.
WE observe, then, that the steps of this ladder of love by which the
soul mounts, one by one, to God, are ten. The first step of love causes
the soul to languish, and this to its advantage. The Bride is speaking
from this step of love when she says: `I adjure you, daughters of
Jerusalem, that, if ye find my Beloved, ye tell Him that I am sick with
love.’ [232] This sickness, however, is not unto death, but for the
glory of God, for in this sickness the soul swoons as to sin and as to
all things that are not God, for the sake of God Himself, even as David
testifies, saying: `My soul hath swooned away’ [233] –that is, with
respect to all things, for Thy salvation. For just as a sick man first
of all loses his appetite and taste for all food, and his colour
changes, so likewise in this degree of love the soul loses its taste
and desire for all things and changes its colour and the other
accidentals of its past life, like one in love. The soul falls not into
this sickness if excess of heat be not communicated to it from above,
even as is expressed in that verse of David which says: Pluviam
voluntariam segregabis, Deus, haereditati tuae, et infirmata est, [234]
etc. This sickness and swooning to all things, which is the beginning
and the first step on the road to God, we clearly described above, when
we were speaking of the annihilation wherein the soul finds itself when
it begins to climb [235] this ladder of contemplative purgation, when
it can find no pleasure, support, consolation or abiding-place in
anything soever. Wherefore from this step it begins at once to climb to
the second.
CONTINUE
