Antonio Maria Sicari, OCD
(chapter from the book: The Message of John of the Cross)
John was imprisoned at the beginning of Advent in the year 1577. From various testimonies, we know that he had a habit of intensely participating in the preparation for the celebration of Christmas at both personal and community levels, and he did not shy away from a dramatic presentation of this mystery.
One of the testimonies – although it comes from a later time, it suggests a certain “habitual”1 sensitivity – describes him as follows:
“I noticed that his face adapted to the celebrated feasts, and I realized that according to the circumstances and the liturgical season, the state of his soul changed. During the feasts of the Passion of our Lord, one could perceive the pain he experienced; on Christmas, there radiated from him a certain tenderness. The same happened during other feasts.”2
From these fleeting hints, we can rightly infer what the prisoner must have experienced: in the first weeks – the psychologically most difficult – the deprivation of any comfort (including spiritual) temporally overlapped with the liturgical season that filled him most with tenderness.
When we mention this, we are not talking about fleeting sentimentalism, which can easily sway many before Christmas, but we mean the tenderness of a truly “contemplative” person, in whom the fullness of faith resonates, permeating almost every fiber of his being.
For the first time in his life, John is forced to rely entirely on a stripped faith during the experience of Advent, devoid of almost all sensory and sacramental mediation.
What remains for him in experiencing Advent is the contemplation of God's word from the breviary, which they left him as the only one: the festive, joyful message of the Prologue of John's Gospel (“In the beginning was the Word... and the Word became flesh”) and the accounts of the incarnation from the gospels of Jesus' childhood.
And it is here that the miracle of death and resurrection begins to unfold, affecting not only the inner and spiritual “I” of John of the Cross but also – if we may express it this way – his “poetic I”: the Holy Spirit draws forth from the “body” of the suffering saint a tone that is an echo of the biblical Word.
In this “death,” the true miracle of “resurrection” thus begins to unfold: not merely a miracle of “psychological and spiritual resilience” of the prisoner (culminating in a “night escape”), nor a miracle of faith that rises pure and glowing from this abyss, but the resurrection of the Word.
God’s Word – as the Church Fathers taught – is even in Scripture “shortened” and “crucified,” and therefore still needs to be allowed by believers to come alive again in their hearts (a patristic theme of the conception and birth of the Word in the heart and soul of the believer).
There are difficult moments in history where God's word must be protected and embodied not only through the obedient being of the disciple but also by the disciple offering his body to actual death so that the written Word can resound again in all its beauty, as a living and resurrected word.
In this case, it is a process so intense that even those who cannot consider themselves “listeners of the Word” (or do not wish to be) are attracted to listen at least by its artistically perfect form, which truly appears to them as “a miracle”.
In summary, the supreme revelation of Scripture (“the Word became flesh”) now corresponds in the time of the Church to the experience that “the body becomes the Word”: the disciple gives the Word his body so that it may resound again, in a living and current way.
In this sense, something of this miracle is made present in every truly believing person, to the extent that he is a “listener of the Word.” In the case of John of the Cross, however, it must be stated that he was required to surrender himself to such an extent that he could give the biblical word a voice again, and that also in a poetic and aesthetic manner.
Chapter “The Event” from the book,
published by the Carmelite Publishing House.
Translation and drawing by Fr. Vojtěch Kohut, OCD.
