Spiritual Guidance According to John of the Cross
Reinhard Körner, OCD
In a small church in the southern German village of Urschalling, there is an unusual image of the Trinity. Depicted as human figures are not only the Father and the Son but also the Holy Spirit, who is usually represented in western art by the biblical symbol of a dove. However, here he takes on human form. The observer is surprised when looking closely at the figure between the Father and the Son: it is a woman's face and clearly a female figure…
We know nothing about the medieval master, but from the unusual painting we can infer that he experienced God—in this case, the Holy Spirit—as a God who loves in a "feminine" and "motherly" way. Throughout Jewish-Christian history of faith, people have repeatedly seen in God not only "fatherly" but also "motherly" traits—up to Albert Luciani, who, in his first address as newly elected Pope John Paul I, called out to the people gathered in St. Peter's Square on September 10, 1978: "We are the recipients of God’s infinite love. We know that he watches over us with open eyes, even when it seems to us that it is night. He is the Father, but even more so he is the mother..." (A. Luciani, Our Father, Styria 1995, p. 11).
In the writings of St. John of the Cross, we also encounter God in the image of a "loving mother." At the beginning of his work The Dark Night, we read: "When a person resolutely turns to life with God, God usually cares for them spiritually like a loving mother cares for her newborn: she warms him at her breast, nourishes him with her sweet milk, carries him in her arms, and cuddles him. However, in the measure that he grows, she takes away the tenderness, replaces her still sweet breast with bitterness, and lets the child out of her arms so that he learns to stand on his own two feet, to put aside infantile ways, and to seek more substantial food. Grace behaves in the same way, this loving mother, as soon as a person is reborn to a new effort in life with God…” (I 1, 2).
For the painter from Urschalling, as well as for the "thirty-day pope," there is profound experience of faith and life behind the image of God as a "loving mother." The God whom he recognized in the Gospel of Jesus and in the inwardly experienced friendship with Christ has become for him greater than everything that can be expressed by a comparison with human beings, no matter how more fatherly a father may be. How deeply John would have been moved if he had known that Jesus also used a word of the feminine gender when he referred to the Holy Spirit, the spirit of his Father, "ruach"…
But John of the Cross knows that even a comparison with a mother, however motherly, cannot fully encompass God: "God gives himself to a person in the experience of inner union with such deep love that there is no maternal love that caresses its child so affectionately, no sibling love, no friendship that can be compared to it…” (Spiritual Song 27, 1). Therefore, the demand from some voices in contemporary feminism that we should not speak of God as Father, but rather that we must henceforth call Him Mother, is completely foreign to the Spanish Carmelite. For him, God is both Father and Mother simultaneously—and is for him more than both images can express!
In only two places in all of his written works does John of the Cross use the image of God as mother. In contrast, he more frequently returns to the "children" whom the "loving mother" nurtures and raises, who, however, do not really want to submit to her care (as above) or whose upbringing others "interfere with clumsily" (Living Flame of Love 3, 54).
Thus, there are three "themes" that John of the Cross expresses through his comparisons: (1.) the image of God, (2.) the person in God's guidance, and (3.) proper and improper spiritual guidance.
1. God is "Mother" to me
First, let us quote another text in which John also speaks of God as a loving mother. In the commentary on Spiritual Song, he writes: "And thus God here (in the experience of loving union) spoils the person and caresses him with tender care, as a mother does, and nourishes him just as if at her breasts. In this, the person recognizes the truth of Isaiah’s words: 'You shall suck, you shall be carried on the bosom of God, and you shall be huddled on the knees.' (66:12)" (Spiritual Song 27, 1).
God—a loving, caring Mother. How does John of the Cross arrive at this image? Father John belongs to those who did not experience their father. He was only a few months old when Gonzalo de Yepes died. However, the image of his mother, who raised him and his 14-year-older brother Francisco in great economic hardship—and after the death of her husband did so alone—remained deeply etched in his memory throughout his life. Both his physical mother and certainly also Anna, who as his brother’s wife was part of the family of the young John and was a "loving mother" to the eight children, seven of whom died early, became for the later Carmelite and spiritual director the most beautiful image of God that he knew through his inward friendship with Jesus.
To many people who likewise had no father or had rather negative experiences with their fathers, John of the Cross could and can still show the way to joy in God through this image: The most beautiful and deepest thing I have experienced in human relationships, the best person I have had the privilege of knowing—whether they have met me as a father, as a mother, as a brother, as a sister, or as a beloved friend—is indeed good enough to be an image of God! And for those who find it difficult to say to God from the depths of their hearts "Father," they can call him "Mother" or "Sister" or "Brother" or—as John did in his writings—"Beloved"...
2. I am God’s "child"
If John of the Cross compares one who "resolutely turns to life with God" (The Dark Night, as above) with a child whom the mother nurtures and raises, he speaks again from experience. What he describes through his image, he has already lived in his early childhood when his brother Francisco resolutely bid farewell to his youthful wandering and inclined towards a more conscious life with God. Later, as a spiritual director, John could observe many people and how God guides those who turn to him. Lastly, this image is also based on the experience of his own life. In The Ascent of Mount Carmel, he summarizes it as follows: "To bring a person closer and lead him from one extreme, namely from his mercy, to the other extreme, namely to union with himself, God adheres to the natural order, proceeds with patience and in a manner suited to the individual…, leading him from below to the highest, from the external to the most inward… Thus he guides him from stage to stage…” (II 17, 3–5).
God, therefore, treats a person—figuratively speaking—like a mother treats her child. First, she gives him everything that he finds tasty and nourishing, and that strengthens him: she touches him with the feeling of her closeness and her love. However, like a mother in her upbringing, she strives for her child to become independent and mature, so that she might one day meet him not as a "child," but as a son who has matured and a daughter who measures up to her as a woman and mother; in this way, God "nurtures" individuals toward independence, toward adult friendship—indeed, toward a loving "union" with him, which begins already in this life and will be completed in eternity. He removes the "sweet" touch in order that a person might actively seek that which nourishes the soul; he sets him on the feet of his own conscience, his own reason and his own talents, that he may follow his longing, which leads into the distance, into freedom—and to the goal for which he was born.
However, at first it is displeasing when something "sweet" is taken away; and having to stand on one's own two feet is more difficult and laborious than being carried in protective arms. The corresponding reaction to this is understandable and therefore frequent in spiritual life: "It is regrettable to see so many people to whom God grants all gifts and graces to move forward. They remain in their childish manner of relating to God because they do not want to do otherwise, or cannot, or there is no one who could lead them out of their childish shoes." If they had the courage, they could move forward (The Ascent of Mount Carmel, Prologue 3). But even that is too human and understandable a reaction: when a mother wants to give a young person her loving affection in a new way, she is often met with rejection. Here too, a person resembles "the little child, to whom the mother bends down to take him into her arms: yet the child screams in protest and kicks its legs, wanting to walk on its own; thus, neither does it learn to walk by itself, nor does the mother teach it to walk…" (Living Flame of Love 3, 66).
These comparisons speak for themselves. They need not be explained further. Like all images and parables, they are concrete enough and at the same time distant enough for one to recognize their own path and find help to pursue it more consciously…
3. Consider into whose hands you are surrendering…
Right at the beginning of the first of his four major works, The Ascent of Mount Carmel, John of the Cross speaks about spiritual guidance. A few lines before this, he presents the reader with the image of the behavior of children in maternal upbringing: "There are people who—rather than surrender themselves to God and cooperate with him—by their unreasonable behavior and resistance greatly hinder him. They are like small children: when their mother wants to take them into her arms, they kick their legs and scream because they want to run on their own at all costs, although they cannot do so yet, and even if they could, then only with childish steps" (Prologue 3). What follows is one of those places in the text where Father John passionately criticizes the spiritual guides of his time: "There are soul leaders and confessors who lack the light and experience on these paths. Thus they hinder and harm such people more than they help them move forward. They resemble the builders of Babylon, who—because they do not understand one another—bring inappropriate building materials and thus accomplish nothing. (...) They do not understand that sometimes there is perhaps nothing more appropriate than to leave one solely to the process of purification that God has intended…” (Prologue 4 ff.).
John of the Cross does not reject spiritual guidance. But he certainly relativizes it! One who wants to live spiritually does not necessarily need a "spiritual guide"; rather, they must learn to discern God himself as the "spiritual guide" through the inner and outer experiences of their life and entrust themselves to his guidance. Certainly, it can help and to some extent may even be necessary to seek advice and accompaniment from a spiritual director in certain life situations or sometimes after a longer period of the journey—not to place oneself under his guidance, but to learn through him and alongside him to discern God’s guidance on one’s own life journey!
A spiritual director, who has the gift of helping those seeking advice to recognize the voice of God among the many voices that speak to them from outside and inside, is a rare gift at all times. It is a gift that is not unconditionally attached to the priestly office! Father John must have encountered many people whose confessors and spiritual directors rather hindered than showed them God’s ways; he probably often experienced how the precious things that God—this "loving mother"—implanted in the soul and began to develop were distorted by their "guidance," as he repeatedly lamented in these or similar words: "Many spiritual leaders cause great harm. They understand nothing of God’s ways. And thus they cause people to lose those tender touches of God, with which the Holy Spirit prepares them for himself, and instead teach them to crawl on the ground by their own refined or learned methods, as is—at best— the way of beginners. They know nothing more, and God grant that they at least know that!" (Living Flame of Love 3, 31).
Such words have lost none of their relevance. Then as now, it holds true: "To lead people spiritually requires knowledge and discernment, that is fundamental; but if experience is lacking, what is the true and real Spirit, we cannot explore a person in what they have received from God, for we do not understand them" (there 3, 30). Necessary knowledge, studied sufficiently thoroughly from the rich treasury of the spiritual tradition of the church and from the valuable insights of the humanities, and a healthy capacity for judgment, which one can obtain only to the extent that one is freed from prejudices, belong just as little necessarily to every spiritual director as does the own experience that John demands and that one can only gain when one has sufficiently entrusted themselves to God’s "maternal" guidance and acknowledged one’s own mistakes as an errant child. And on the other hand, there are people without the priestly office in the church—yet they are not as numerous as grains of sand—who fully meet these criteria.
Out of love and respect for the dignity of every human soul and for his maternal-paternal God, John of the Cross therefore urgently impresses upon his readers: "Anyone who wants to walk the path of deepening their life must first weigh into whose hands they surrender themselves. For as the master is, so is the disciple; as the father is, so is the son!" (Living Flame of Love 3, 30).
(Körner, R.: "… Like a Loving Mother"
Spiritual Guidance According to John of the Cross,
Carmel-Impulse 5/1995)
Translated by Dr. Vojtěch Pola
