Canonization – 300 years
Doctorate – 100 years
For St John of the Cross, the great undertaking of union with God is his sole aim. In this there are two involved: God and man. John was a mystic and for the mystic, God is a personal, living being, powerfully at work in the world and calling us into relationship with Him.
The soul that loves God, seeks and looks for no other reward of its services than to love God perfectly.
God has a plan for humanity…He wants us to live in His intimacy, share His table. God’s plan is not yet accomplished, it is in process. Between the call of God and the sealing of the friendship in union there lies the way of union which is the Dark Night, a way of becoming truly human. To become divinised is to become humanised.
It is an arduous journey of what we must actively do to become new men and women, recreated in God’s image and likeness. We are first enamoured by God, driven by love, responding to Him. This enables us to begin the journey. God reveals Himself as active, He alone can place us in the dark night, which is the way to union. It is only by God’s grace that the soul can enter this way. All we ourselves can do is to allow God to do His work of purifying us and see in all events of our life that God is at work.
Faith is our light in darkness, and Our light is god the everlasting day.
Faith alone can see God at work and to see something happening in our life that God is doing adds a new dimension to it. To allow Him to do it, to accept persons in our life and situations we do not like, requires the spirit of faith.
We are wounded by our self-love and need to be liberated and healed, and God does not bring this about by constantly consoling us, but allowing us to suffer in the circumstances of our life.
To us this work of God is obscure, everything appears rather to be going wrong. By faith alone, in the darkness, we can accept it.
The image of God John presents to us is of a God very much in our midst, powerfully at work, exercising on us an existential attraction. He is immanent to the human being but He is hidden. We cannot grasp Him with our understanding, but there is a process of interiorisation constantly in progress. The nearer a person comes to his inner centre, the nearer he comes to God, and the greater also is his radiation outward.