John lived his life on the move, on a constant pilgrimage. He described life in the world as: “living here below like pilgrims, the poor, the exiled, orphans, the thirsty, without a road and without anything”. [letter 12th October 1589]. In this reflection we will look at three journeys in John’s life; seeing them as life defining journeys.
Pilgrimage of Hunger: John was 4 – 6 years of age, according to best estimates. His father [Gonzalo de Yepes] and older brother Luis have died; his mother Catalina is left with John’s older brother Francisco [12 – 14 years old] and little Juan. They are living in dire poverty, and his mother just cannot make enough for them to live on and pay off the debts from her husband’s time of illness. She decides to turn to her husband’s family for help.
This is a long journey from Fontiveros to the region of Toledo. It would have involved weeks travelling on foot, without shelter and begging for food along the way. Their first destination was Torrijos, where Gonzalo’s brother was a priest. He refuses to help his sister-in-law and nephews. So, they journey on to Galvez, to another of Gonzalo’s brothers [Juan de Yepes] who is a doctor in that town. Here they are made more welcome, and Juan de Yepes and his wife agree to take the older boy Francisco into their care.
Catalina returns to Fontiveros with her younger boy Juan and takes up her trade again as a weaver. A year passes and she has heard nothing from her older son, so she decides to make the journey again. She discovers that Francisco is being treated badly, and she decides immediately to bring him back home with her to Fontiveros – John of course makes this second journey also with his mother.
We can imagine the enormous impact these journeys made on the young, intelligent and very sensitive John. They mark the rest of his life. We see it in his concern for the poor – something spoken about everywhere John lived. The experience of material poverty also forms the foundations of his understanding of spiritual poverty. For example, he describes the person longing for God as “a hungry person craving for food” [spiritual canticle 9:6]. Also: “when these caverns are empty and pure, the thirst, hunger, and yearning of the spiritual feeling is intolerable. Since these caverns have deep stomachs, they suffer profoundly; for the food they lack, which is God, is also profound” [living flame 3:18]. There are many other examples of John using the imagery of hunger.
Pilgrimage of Escape: It is August 1578, John has been in prison for nine months and he takes the very courageous and risky decision to escape. The escape gives him the imagery for the first three stanzas of his poem; Dark Night. “One dark night, fired with love’s urgent longings, ah the sheer grace, I went out unseen, my house being now all stilled. In darkness, and secure, by the secret ladder, disguised, ah, the sheer grace, in darkness and concealment, my house being now all stilled. On that glad night in secret, for no one saw me, nor did I look at anything, with no other light or guide than the one that burned in my heart.”
The experience of imprisonment and escape gave him the inspiration and imagery to speak of the more critical setting free that all human beings need – being set free from ourselves; from our passions, appetites, hurts, sinfulness, etc. Most of John’s poems and writing deal with this subject let us just quote one example: “Her presence in the body makes her feel like a noble lord held in prison. Such a prisoner is subject to a thousand miseries, while his dominions are confiscated and he is prevented from making use of his lordship and wealth…. For the moment God favours the soul with the taste of a morsel of the goods and riches he has prepared for her, a bad servant or appetite, sometimes an inordinate movement, sometimes other sensory rebellions, rises up in the lower part to impede this good.” [spiritual canticle 18:1]
Pilgrimage of Encounter: This is the goal of all that John lived and taught. Let us return to his poem: Dark Night: “This guided me more surely than the light of noon to where he was awaiting me, him I knew so well, there in a place where no one appeared. O guiding night! O night more lovely than the dawn! O night that has united the Lover with his beloved, transforming the beloved in her Lover.” [Dark Night 4,5]
All of life is a pilgrimage to meet the Lover, the one who knows us and whom we know so well – it is the journey home, the journey into the unknown which is really the journey into the known. It is a journey beyond all knowledge, control, boundaries and known paths. Perhaps St. Edith Stein sums up this journey for us best: “John writes for contemplative souls, and at a very particular point along their way he wants to take them by the hand, at a crossroads where most halt, perplexed, not knowing how to proceed. Impassable barriers confront them on the way they have been travelling. But the new path that opens up before them leads through impenetrable darkness. Who has the courage to venture on it?”[Edith Stein: Science of the Cross]
Fr Matt Blake OCD
