Mystic Vistas: John of the Cross at the Window of Communion
They say of St. John of the Cross
That he would sit,
Just the way I’m sitting now
In a small dark place,
And through a window
Gaze at a distant landscape—Charles Simic, “The Cure”
In the cell of John of the Cross at Los Mártires, a straw pallet served as a bed. A crucifix, a print of the Madonna, and three books (breviary, bible, and the lives of the saints) rounded out the furnishings. It was the picture of austerity. But while John chose the smallest of the priory’s cells and kept an absolute minimum of possessions, the room still boasted a broad view of Granada’s countryside out his window. Denying himself the ability to see the Sierra Nevada range would have undermined the point of all of that asceticism. The view, far from being a luxury or a distraction from his divine Beloved, actually was an aid to contemplation, as necessary to his life of prayer as the image of Christ crucified and his Blessed Mother. Through the window, God could speak to him in the words of creation, and John could kneel and pray like the prophet Daniel, fenestris apertis in cœnaculo suo, “at the open windows of his room” (Daniel 6:10). According to his fellow monks, John crafted his poetic celebration of “The Living Flame of Love” at this window while in deep, contemplative prayer. We can vividly imagine him kneeling at the casement, swaying rhythmically to a tune he borrowed from a popular ballad: ¡Oh llama de amor viva, / que tiernamente hieres / de mi alma en el más profundo centro! “O living flame of love / that tenderly wounds my soul / in its deepest center!”
Looking out over the mountains, John penned a simile for spiritual transformation in his commentary on the poem: “The effect of this contemplation is like that of the sun on a window. In shining on the window, the sun makes it look bright, and all the stains and smudges previously apparent are lost sight of; yet when the sunlight passes, the stains and smudges reappear.” In other words, even through a spotty window, sunshine can fill a room, and as the sunbeams dazzle our eyes, we can no longer see how badly that window needs cleaning. Absorbed in prayer, John argues, our imperfections no longer obscure our vision—even if just for a passing instant—as the light of the Holy Spirit filters through us.
This cell at Los Mártires is a model for the kinds of places loved by John and by creative types all over the world: compact spaces opening onto wide, distinctive vistas. British Hispanist Gerald Brenan reflects on this pattern when describing the saint’s pastimes in Segovia in St. John of the Cross: His Life and Poetry. Not only would he spend hours before the window in his cell, he sought out other “windows,” including a niche in a cliff face that he would enter by crawling through the underbrush on his hands and knees. There, he could ponder the distant mountains, a hermitage that looked out onto a garden, and the ground under trees where he would lie with his arms extended in the shape of the cross and gaze up through the sky framed by the branches above him.
Pilgrims in Spain still visit these caves and grottos where John prayed—set on high hills and overlooking broad landscapes. Inside the other monasteries in his order, his cells shared something of both the intimacy and vantage of these outdoor hermitages. At Iznatoraf, for example, John slept in a converted cupboard just big enough for him to lie down, but through its loophole he could see miles of farms and the surrounding hillside. Windows allow the “out there” to mingle with the “in here,” suggesting the communication between soul and body, inner self and external world. “A morning-glory at my window,” Walt Whitman declares, “satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.” A window’s viewpoint offers satisfaction that even the best of artifice cannot promise; colorful wallpaper, large landscape paintings, or film projections of waterfalls and natural scenes cannot fool us. If there is no window, the room has no life. God’s creation satisfies us infinitely more than any creation of human ingenuity—a fact the window acknowledges by framing a panorama of God’s masterpiece.
Praying toward an open window, John met the incoming sun as one looking directly into the face of God, the Beloved his poems celebrated. It is an ancient and holy metaphor: “Look, there he stands behind our wall,” sings the Song of Solomon, “gazing in at the windows, looking through the lattice” (2:9). While the bride eagerly awaits his arrival, her bridegroom appears—respiciens per fenestras—peeking in on her. The church father Origen, a popular source for the Christian allegorical reading of this ancient Hebrew erotica, suggests that Solomon’s windows typify our senses through which we can experience either a deathly preoccupation with material sensation or an encounter with God’s living Presence revealed in nature and the sacraments. “So the Word of God, looking through these windows and fixing His regard on the Bride-soul,” says Origen’s commentary, “exhorts her to arise and come to Him, that is to say: to forsake things bodily and visible and to hasten to those that are not of the body and are spiritual.” Through the open window, the bride hears the bridegroom’s invitation to follow, regardless of what else might be outside. The senses of a soul “lovingly disposed towards [God],” Origen maintains, can be directed above the appetites satisfied by sensory creation and into a one-pointed desire for the Creator, “away from the senses to the invisible and incorporeal.” So the body itself is a kind of window, in which passion for creation and desire open out onto the path of spiritual growth. It isn’t that contemplative prayer dissolves material things or demands that we isolate ourselves from God’s creation. Instead, the contemplation forms our desire, orienting it, through creation, toward God alone, who stands outside the windows, peeking in.
Windows appear throughout John of the Cross’s The Ascent of Mount Carmel as symbols for a passive communion, since in contemplative prayer, communications from God fill the soul cleansed of earthly appetites, which “even if it wants to, can no more resist their effect than a window withstand the sunlight shining in it.” John’s windows are like communion rails, sites of direct contact with the Beloved, when the heart prepares for such contact by clearing away the desires for anything other than God. Looking through a window involves a certain openness—the viewer doesn’t determine what she sees but receives what visions the window enables. The window doesn’t move about on the wall to create views according to the whim of the viewer, but it can be prepared—cleared of smudges and dirt—to better reveal the vision on the other side: “As a window is unable to hinder the ray of sunlight shining upon it and is disposed through cleanness to be illumined passively without active effort,” John affirms, “so too, however much individuals may want to reject these visions they cannot.” Appetites and desires for created things are “stains on a window imped[ing] the bright sunlight” of divine Presence, while a clean window does not obscure what lies beyond. The window itself disappears, as it were—it is forgotten entirely.
In John’s life, even the smallest of windows was an aid to see past earthly sufferings to what lay beyond. When abducted by those resisting his reforms and taken to Toledo, his improvised prison cell in the Carmelite monastery was a repurposed six-by-ten-foot privy off a second-story guestroom. Since the space needed little light for its intended purposes, the only exterior opening was a two-inch-wide loophole, high on the wall. The direct sun entered it only around noon, so John—less than five feet tall—stood on his plank bed and stretched an open breviary toward the light to read his midday prayers. He could just make out the bottom of each page. And with the scant light, sounds of flowing water from the nearby Tagus made their way into the dark room. Accompanied by the river’s hum, John could sing, Aquella eterna fonte está escondida, / que bien sé yo do tiene su manida, / aunque es de noche, “That eternal spring is hidden, / for I know well where it has its rise, / although it is night,” as he composed the “Cantar del alma que se huelga de conocer a Dios por fe,” or “Song of the soul that rejoices in knowing God through faith.” And this was not the only song John composed while in prison to feature imagery of the river. In another, he meditates on the exilic Psalm, Super flumina Babylonis, (“Encima de las corrientes / que en Babilonia hallaba, / allí me senté llorando”) in which the Tagus becomes the Euphrates, and Toledo—where he had arrived manacled and hoodwinked—becomes the land of the Israelites’ captivity.
Written a few years after his imprisonment, The Ascent of Mount Carmel likens the embodied soul to “a prisoner in a dark dungeon who knows no more than what he manages to behold through the windows of his prison and has nowhere else to turn if nothing is seen through them.” If the body is the cell, the senses are the windows: John asserts that “the soul possesses no other natural means of perceiving what is communicated to it than the senses, the windows of its prison,” through which one can either see objects of material desire or a revelation of the Beloved. And it is this revelation of the Beloved through the windows of the senses that animates his Spiritual Canticle, his re-singing of the Song of Songs.
The poem’s main drama centers on a bride’s anxious longing for a bridegroom who keeps coming and going:
¿Adónde te escondiste,
Amado, y me dejaste con gemido?
Como el ciervo huiste,
habiéndome herido;
salí tras ti, clamando, y eras ido….Where have you hidden,
Beloved, and left me moaning?
You fled like the stag
after wounding me;
I went out calling you, but you were gone.Apaga mis enojos,
pues que ninguno basta a deshacellos;
Y véante mis ojos,
pues eres lumbre dellos
y sólo para ti quiero tenellos.Extinguish these miseries,
since no one else can stamp them out;
and may my eyes behold you,
because you are their light
and I would open them to you alone.
Here, the senses are the window. The forlorn bride restates the Shulamite’s lovesickness as she gazes out of her window in the second and third chapters of the Song of Solomon. Following Origen, John activates the senses we use to interact with the Canticle—our eyes to read it, our ears to hear it sung—as “windows” through which we readers catch a glimpse of the Beloved.
Solomon’s temple featured what the Vulgate translates as fenestras obliquas (1 Kings 6:4), oblique windows allowing light into the sanctum of divine Presence but not designed for looking out. It was against the privy loophole, as John later recalled, that the Holy Mother appeared on the Feast of the Assumption and promised that his imprisonment was coming to an end. That night, his cell in Toledo recalled the temple in Jerusalem, complete with its slanted window and filled with the blessed Presence. Our Lady then pointed out a large window in the adjoining bedroom—overlooking not only the Tagus, but the monastery’s exterior wall—through which he could escape per funem de fenestra like the Israelite spies in Jericho climbing “by a rope through the window” (Joshua 2:15). Tearing his bedcovers and tying them to a lamp hook, John attached this makeshift grapnel to the railing of the balcony and slid down to the top of the wall. After nine months of captivity, the saint was free, clasping a notebook of the poems and songs he composed while in prison.
This notebook forms the nucleus of John’s writings. Over the next decade, John revised the Spiritual Canticle and wrote two redactions of its commentary. Given the saint’s gift for words, it seems likely that he composed poetry and songs prior to his imprisonment in Toledo. None of these survive, however. The treasury of John’s writing—including his celebrated poetic masterpiece, “Noche Oscura,” the “Dark Night”—was born in captivity and refined in freedom. Translator Kieran Kavanaugh’s introduction to the newly released Study Edition of The Living Flame of Love notes how this progression anticipates William Wordsworth’s definition of poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquility,” as the refinement of John’s verses and their accompanying commentaries were created in the relative calm following his escape from Toledo. Truly John’s immediate response to God’s Presence was the poetically generative “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” Wordsworth indicates, and John’s ability to sing while confined in Toledo demonstrates that powerful feelings, not tranquility, were constant.
Tranquility is neither guaranteed nor constant in life. Concluding the book of Ecclesiastes, the Preacher enjoins readers, Memento Creatoris tui: “Remember your creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come.” A prolonged metaphor follows, comparing the aging body to a derelict house, in which—among other signs of decay—the windows (eyes) are darkened. Contemplate, the Preacher urges, while the body still possesses its full faculties, before “the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the breath returns to God who gave it.” The darkness of diminished eyes, John would remind us, cannot compare to the darkness within a soul whose attachments to material things block out the sunlight of God’s Presence. “The extent of illumination,” he writes in The Ascent of Mount Carmel, “is not dependent on the ray of sunlight but on the window. If the window is totally clean and pure, the sunlight will so transform and illuminate it that to all appearances the window will be identical with the ray of sunlight and shine just as the sun’s ray.” John of the Cross’s spiritual direction—his program for spiritual advancement illustrated in his poems and expounded in their commentaries—culminates in the soul’s participation with the Divine, in the mystical oneness of sunlight and window, of lover and beloved, God and man.