Saint John of the Cross

Juan de Yepes was born in Fontiveros, in Castile, on June 24, 1542. His father, from a converted Jewish family of Toledo, was disinherited for marrying a poor weaver; he died young, and his mother raised the children in real poverty — one of his brothers died of hunger. He worked in a hospital for syphilis patients while he studied with the Jesuits. He joined the Carmelites, and was about to switch to the Carthusians when he met Teresa of Ávila, who was twenty-seven years older than him. She asked him to do for the friars what she was doing for the nuns. He said yes. It cost him dearly. In 1577 the Carmelites opposed to the reform kidnapped him and held him for nine months in Toledo in a cell about ten feet by six, with no light, on reduced rations and with public floggings. It was there, in the dark, that he composed from memory the first stanzas of the Spiritual Canticle. He managed to escape by lowering himself from a window on bedsheets. He is the greatest mystical poet of the Spanish language, and one of the greatest poets, period: the *Noche oscura*, the *Spiritual Canticle*, the *Living Flame of Love*. The expression “dark night of the soul,” used everywhere today, comes from him. He died in Úbeda on December 14, 1591, at forty-nine, mistreated to the very end by his own brothers in religion. He is a Doctor of the Church. If your name is John, today is your name day.