Mtr Taylor Devine

Dear friend,

Today the Church commemorates St John of the Cross, a Spanish Mystic famous for "the Dark Night of the Soul" among other writings. In his book Being Disciples, former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams draws on St John of the Cross' writings and meditations about the life of the Christian. Williams writes,

The distinctive and fresh insight that St John of the Cross offers is that if you put together understanding, memory and will with faith, hope and love, you have a perfect picture of where we start and where we finish. In the Christian life (St John of the Cross says), faith is what happens to your understanding; hope is what happens to our remembering; and love is what happens to our wanting (21).

Hope is not simply confidence in the future; it is confidence that past, present and future are held in one relationship so that the confusions about memory - Who were we? Who was I? Who are we? - become bearable because of the witness in heaven, a witness who does not abandon (30).

Hope, like faith, is hope in relation; relation to that which does not go away and abandon, relation to a reality that knows and sees and holds who we are and have been. You have an identity not because you have invented one, or because you have a little core of selfhood that is unchanged, but because you have a witness of who you are. What you don't understand or see, the bits of yourself you can't pull together in a convincing story, are all held in a single gaze of love (29).

Williams writes that this kind of hope is that which St John of the Cross writes about, the hope in God as present and witness to past, present and future. He writes about hope as our calling into relationship that is present and does not abandon, where memory is transformed into hope, as a rediscovery of faith, hope and love.

Can we disciples begin to speak of these things and show these things? Yes, if we are prepared to acknowledge our own denials, our sinful refusals of faith, hope and love; and if we are also prepared to do a bit of diagnosis of the denials of the society we live in, the denials that enslave us and trivialize our understanding and our remembering and our wanting. Yes, if we live consistently, courageously, in an awareness that the power that made us and redeemed us is a power devoted to fullness of life (35-36).


In the hope of Christ,
Mtr. Taylor

Being Disciples: Essentials of the Christian Life by Rowan Williams, Eerdmans Publishing, 2016