Reading to surprise, inspire and console through Lent

ALBAN McCOY
“John of the Cross speaks to people who feel unable to change.” These arresting words at the very beginning of Fr Iain Matthew OCD’s book The Impact of God: Soundings from St John of the Cross (Hodder & Stoughton, £9.99; Tablet price £8.99), indicate how ­perfectly tuned it is for Lent, when we’re invited, in Seamus Heaney’s words, to allow our hearts to be blown open by God’s love for us. It is informed by lightly-worn scholarship – its author teaches at the Teresianum, the Carmelite Institute of Spirituality in Rome – and wise, if often discomfiting, insight, drawn from his fellow Carmelites, but also personal experience.

Refreshingly free of platitudes and clichés, Christian or otherwise, the book’s “meat” is drawn from the life and writings of the Spanish mystic St John of the Cross. John writes with disarming candour and directness of God’s love suffusing his relatively short life as a friar dedicated to (and suffering for) the sixteenth-century Carmelite reform initiated by his friend and confidante St Teresa of Avila. Their mutual influence – Matthew describes her as “the ­centre of an earthquake” – was critical for the development of both. Teresa said of John, “Even though he is small [chico], I understand him to be huge in the eyes of God.”

Imprisoned (and even tortured) by opponents of the reform among his own brethren, John of the Cross wrote sublime poetry, expressing not only impassioned love, but deeply experienced doubt and perplexity. It is poetry born of his encounter with Christ, whose presence was, for him, felt rather than seen, as in the sense-deprived stillness of a darkened room. La noche oscura is the sub-text of all he writes.