St. John of the Cross

Who they were

Juan de Yepes grew up in genuine destitution. His father was disinherited for marrying a weaver's daughter and died young, and the family begged for work town to town. He became a Carmelite friar and, at twenty five, the first recruit of Teresa of Avila's reform.

The reform had enemies inside the order, and in 1577 friars opposed to it kidnapped John and locked him in a converted closet in Toledo: six feet by ten, minimal light, regular lashings, nine months. In that cell, composing in his head, he began the Spiritual Canticle, some of the greatest poetry in the Spanish language, made in the dark and about love. He escaped through a window with a rope of blanket strips. His later works, above all The Dark Night of the Soul, gave the Church its permanent vocabulary for the experience his own prayer had taught him: the seasons when God feels absent, and what that darkness is actually doing. He died in 1591 at a friary whose prior disliked him, and was declared a Doctor of the Church in 1926.

Why people turn to St. John of the Cross

Anyone praying into silence. His feast lands in Advent's darkest week, days before the solstice, which is exactly right.

How to ask their intercession

Not for the darkness to lift first, which was his own counsel, but for the trust that it is doing something. One decade prayed dry, on his word that dry counts double.