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The saints

St. John of the Cross

Locked in a cell by his own brothers for nine months, he came out a master of the spiritual life.

Feast: 14 December · 1542 to 1591 · Reformation and missions · Fontiveros and Segovia, Spain

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The Carmelite friary of Segovia: a pale stone church façade behind tall cypress trees.

Zarateman, 2009. Wikimedia Commons, CC0.

Home / The saints / St. John of the Cross

Toledo, Spain, December 1577

On the night of 3 December 1577, friars of his own order take John prisoner and carry him off to Toledo.1

For more than nine months he is kept in a narrow, stifling cell.1

In August 1578 he escaped. What he had learned in the dark, he spent the rest of his life writing down.

Patron of mystics2

01St. John of the Cross

The dark night

John worked with St. Teresa of Avila to reform the Carmelite friars.1

Soon after his escape he wrote The Ascent of Mount Carmel and The Dark Night of the Soul, which together form a full treatise on mystical theology.1

02St. John of the Cross

Segovia

He died at Úbeda on 14 December 1591, and his body was later taken to Segovia.1

The Carmelite friary of Segovia: a pale stone church façade behind tall cypress trees.
The Carmelite friary at Segovia, where St. John of the Cross is buried. Zarateman, 2009. Wikimedia Commons, CC0.

He wrote about the love of God, not about the men who had imprisoned him.

Live it this week

Keep showing up in the dark

John learned the most about God in a dark cell where he felt nothing. If prayer feels empty right now, don’t quit it. Keep the same short prayer time every day this week anyway, and write one line in a notebook each day about what you noticed, even if it’s “nothing.”

Notes

How we know · 2 sources for this page
  1. Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), “St. John of the Cross”. New Advent edition. newadvent.org
  2. Franciscan Media, Saint of the Day: “Saint John of the Cross”. franciscanmedia.org. franciscanmedia.org

The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913) is in the public domain; we quote the New Advent edition. Texts of the Holy See are quoted briefly from vatican.va. Scripture: World English Bible, Catholic edition (public domain); Verse numbers are modern, with Douay-Rheims numbers in brackets where they differ. Photographs: Wikimedia Commons, credited under each image; full list on the photo credits page.

Lines in the narrator’s voice, without a note, are our reflection, not a historical claim. Stone & Incense restates Church teaching in plain words; our wording is not an official Church text. Report an errorCorrections.