Perhaps I’ve prayed sincerely and wholeheartedly for what I think is the experience of God, but God simply refuses to appear. Or worse, after having seemed to be present, God now goes into hiding.

Obviously and rightly, not everyone feels this way. As different as their personalities were, Teresa and John shared a spiritual style that not everyone is drawn to. Both were quick to affirm that other people may well be called to other ways. “God,” Teresa says, “does not lead everyone along the same path.”23

The active night of the spirit is characterized by similar disciplines and restraints applied to the intellect, memory, will, and imagination. John’s primary example here is of practicing the virtues. He says that the three theological virtues (faith, hope, and love) are instrumental in freeing the spirit from its attachments. Faith darkens and emp

Thus the dark night of the soul exists for the sole purpose of furthering love, a love that is partially realized in each experience of the dawn. In the last verse of his final poem, John writes of this awakening: How gently and lovingly you wake in my heart, where in secret you dwell alone; and in your sweet breathing, filled with good and glory,

More than a century before Isaac Newton explained gravity, John said that the soul is attracted to the deepest center of God like the stone is attracted to the deepest center of the earth—and that this attraction is mutual. The force of attraction between the soul and the center of God, however, is not gravity. It is love.10

Though we don’t realize it at the time, when habitual senses of God do disappear in the process of the dark night, it is surely because it is time for us to relinquish our attachment to them. We have made an idol our images and feelings of God, giving them more importance than the true God they represent.

One of the developments that the morning light reveals is growing freedom, experienced as the energy of desire is liberated from the attachments that have kept it restrained. A second change is the classical transition from meditation to contemplation in prayer and the equivalent movement in the rest of life: a metamorphosis of the soul from autono

“To understand this union of which we speak, know that God is present in substance in each soul, even that of the greatest sinner in the world. And this kind of union with God always exists, in all creatures.”5

The significant term is advertencia, for which “awareness” is a rather tepid translation. In modern Spanish usage, advertencia means “Attention!” in the sense of warning or alarm. John himself explains that advertencia is a very dynamic attentiveness. He likens it to the kind of attentiveness one gives to a dearly loved one or the vigilance of stan