December 14th.  St. John of the Cross.

Born in 1542 at Fontiveros, a wind-swept Spanish village in Old Castile, he joined the Carmelite Order in 1563, but was persuaded by St. Teresa of Avila, who discerned his spiritual gifts, to join her reform (the ‘Discalced’ or barefoot Carmelites) as a chaplain.  Externally his life then consisted of hastening from one impoverished new foundation to another, punctuated by an interlude when he was ‘captured’ by the unreformed Carmelites in 1575 and imprisoned at Toledo (where allegedly he was placed under the table during meetings of the friars’ Chapter in order to be kicked by all the members).  After St. Teresa’s death in 1582 he met with almost as much hostile treatment from the superior of the reform, and died in virtual exile in Úbeda (northern Andalusia) in 1591.   His body was taken to Segovia, where it is enshrined; in “Don Quixote” there is an incident where the spindly knight and his fat squire Sancho Panza are frightened by witnessing a ghostly procession passing them in the night, and it is believed that this is a description of the translation of St. John’s remains.  St. John is above all a mystic poet, seeking God in the nada, the ‘nothing’.  In his ‘Spiritual Canticle’, ‘Ascent of Mount Carmel’, and ‘Dark Night of the Soul’, he seeks to find God beyond the outer limits of human experience; it is a quest which can seem morbid or frighteningly lonely until we realise that it is the ultimate search for the companionship of God.  ‘In order to arrive at having pleasure in everything, desire to have pleasure in nothing’.  St. John, diminutive in stature and vast in spirit, was canonised in 1726 and declared a Doctor of the Church in 1926.