St. John of the Cross does not want merely to bring you close to a true understanding of your flawed and broken self. He also is bringing you close to the fire, to the “living flame of love, that tenderly wounds my soul in the deepest center.”

Many people experiencing aridity for the first time may mistakenly think they are somehow failing at prayer. St. John of the Cross tells us that aridity is not a sign of backsliding but of progress; it is exactly that process by which God draws the soul away from childish pleasures to the hard work of purification. 

The hope of a Christian confronts every trial, even death itself. Christian hope does not just raise our spirits; it raises a battle flag against all the troubles of this life.

We must be patient with heaven, and stubborn with hell.

Developing your prayer life can feel like a project to be planned and completed. Consider a different sense of what is happening when we get serious about prayer. When you begin to make prayer a serious focus of your life, you begin to follow a story.

The theology of St John of the Cross is focused on the necessity of self-discipline, but it begins and ends in love. This is not the dull path of obligation. It is an adventure, into a wild freedom.

Rather than the psychological models of the self propounded by Freud and Jung, we should learn from St. John of the Cross how to understand ourselves. Only then can we begin to be at peace with our clamoring appetites.

Progressing in prayer is not like working out at the gym. You don't progress by just doing it. You have to be willing to enter a dry and empty experience of prayer. You have to enter the desert.

Spiritual writers often describe the progress of soul through the use of metaphors. We sometimes need to be reminded that these are representations, not reality, and St. John of the Cross has an image that works in this way. Beginners in prayer are like babies at their mothers' breasts.

The night of sense is the experience of purification of attachments to created things--a difficult task. A further and more difficult purification awaits holy souls determined to continue.

This website went live on March 4, 2024. I chose March 4 for a very particular reason.

The writings of St. John of the Cross are filled with Joy. We are made for it, and it will be ours, God willing. But that is at the end of the story. We’re not there yet. We must first travel the way of sorrow.

There is a difference between beginners in prayer and those who are more advanced. It has to do with where we must focus our efforts.

For St. John of the Cross, Jesus’ admonition is a piece of good advice about how to make progress, in prayer, and in the spiritual life generally. It is about the spiritual nights.

The dark night is perhaps the most well-known expression from the writings of St. John of the Cross. But there also are a lot of misunderstandings about what he meant by this.

Fr. Ripperger covers the topic thoroughly. He starts with a metaphysical definition of attachment: A quality in one of the faculties by which it is fixed on or inclined toward a particular object to a particular degree.

St. John of the Cross is one of those great Catholic writers that most people know about but probably not many people read.

St. John of the Cross began composing his poem, "The Spiritual Canticle," when he was imprisoned by his brother friars in Toledo, Spain. The Carmelite order at that time was at war with itself. During the previous centuries, the disciplines required of the nuns and friars had slowly been relaxed, although they still were austere by modern standards.

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.

St. John of the Cross shows in The Ascent of Mount Carmel that the soul consists of a sensory part and a spiritual part.