"Dark Night of the Soul" St. John of the Cross

Translated from the Spanish by Mirabai Starr

Riverhead Books, 184 pg., $22.95

As the last rites were read to him on his deathbed at the age of 49, John of the Cross, the 16th century poet, mystic, priest and monk, interrupted. Please, he begged, read me "The Song of Solomon."

That such a sensual, luscious poem to love would be the last words John wished to hear is a bittersweet commentary on his life. He was a member of Teresa of Avila's Discalced Carmelite Order--the Barefoot Carmelites--and Teresa's beloved, passionate friend. His finest and most famous poem, "Songs of the Soul," combines the best of each of his vocations. He and Teresa were committed to the reform of the Carmelites, and both of them were caught in the chaos of the Inquisition in Spain.

At 25, John was captured and imprisoned in a closet in a monastery by a community of monks who upheld a Vatican faction's dim view of Teresa's reforms. He was starved and flogged. After nine months of captivity, he escaped by lowering himself out of his cell with a rope made of strips of cloth. He got himself to a Discalced convent and wept as he heard the nuns reciting the Angelus. He wrote "Songs of the Soul" in a state of gratitude and ecstasy.

The poem is a mere eight verses long. It describes a night in which a soul escapes from her house to join her lover, her creator, in a night of risk, ecstasy and passion. As with the Song of Songs and many mystics' writings, it is not only beautiful, it is remarkably sensual. Consider the seventh verse:

Wind blew down from the tower

Parting the locks of his hair

With his gentle hand

He wounded my neck

And all my senses were suspended.

John's Discalced brethren prevailed on him to write a "commentary" on his poem, and this resulted in what we now know as the "Dark Night of the Soul." The commentary is 25 chapters long, divided into two parts, "Night of Sense" and "Night of the Spirit," an exegesis of the first three verses of the poem (nothing remains, if it ever existed, of the commentary on the last five).

In these pages, John describes how and why the soul must risk entering darkness, become empty and abandoned, to be ready for union, real union, with God. It's partly a step-by-step guide to contemplation and has served as solace for those who suffer from a dry or despairing season in meditation or prayer. It's wise and often witty about spiritual seekers: our love of trinkets and icons, how attached we get to juicy spiritual experiences, how competitive we are about our lives of prayer.

For the last 400 years, "Dark Night of the Soul" has been taken very seriously by contemplatives. Writes Thomas Moore in his introduction, "As I see it, St. John of the Cross is speaking of mysterious developments in the soul, which includes the psychological.... His goal is not health, but union with the divine."

At the same time, however, the commentary flattens and devitalizes the poem. While the poem celebrates sensuality, the commentary argues against it. It attacks the urgency, the moment of the poem. The poem and the commentary are like a war between the imaginary and the literal, the mystical and the dogmatic.

Poems are mysterious. So is mystical experience. We don't know where their inspiration comes from. To write a serious poem or to enter into prayer is to enter into darkness. Because they come from a place "outside the writer," poems, even those written 400 years ago, have the capacity to speak to us, in the now. And mystics, including Julian of Norwich and the 13th century Sufi poet Rumi are presently speaking to large numbers of us.

Most mystics, from Mechthildof Magdeburg to John of the Cross, experience God as a creative, sensual, intimate lover. This version of God makes people, especially those in authority, very nervous: Many mystics, most of them women, who insisted on this God, so different from the remote Father in Heaven, were banned, imprisoned and even killed.

St. Hildegard of Bingen, another early Christian mystic, said in one of her revelations that our sin is not that we are sensuous but that we are not sensuous enough: We do not allow the beauty of the world and the flesh to fully enchant us. It is the poem, not the commentary, that brings us close to John's actual experience of God.

Yet the poem and the commentary are linked forever. As a friend, a former Ursulan nun who studied John of the Cross at Notre Dame, said, "the commentary is like a provenance" to the poem, a place of origin, the place where a thing is made.

John's commentary anchors the metaphysics of his poem in the struggle that led to its creation. It shows us the place where the poem was made, and this, finally, is what gives this work its greatness.

This new translation by Mirabai Starr, a fiction writer and adjunct professor of philosophy, religious studies and Spanish at the University of New Mexico at Taos, is the first translation of John from someone "outside the church," as the publisher puts it, meaning the first translation by someone who is not Roman Catholic.

Her translation is somewhat like Coleman Barks' reading of Rumi: more plain speaking, less ornate and designed to appeal to a secular, or at least nonreligious, audience.

Starr's own spiritual "seeking'' has led her from Hinduism to Buddhism to Native American sweat lodges. "But eventually the juices drained out of my spiritual practices and the fireworks faded. By the time I reached my thirties, nothing remained but a quiet connection to emptiness." "Dark Night of the Soul" is Starr's silent companion.

buy at Amazon.com