In speaking of la noche oscura, the dark night of the soul, John is addressing something mysterious and unknown, but by no means sinister or evil. It is instead profoundly sacred and precious beyond all imagining. John says the dark night of the soul is “happy,” “glad,” “guiding,” and full of “absolute grace.” It is the secret way in which God not

According to John, it takes love to realize this union; it happens in love, and however deep the realization is, it results in more love. In this manner, John says the soul “arrives at perfect union with God through love.”9 This deepening of love is the real purpose of the dark night of the soul. The dark night helps us become who we are created to

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

According to this theology, we are not only born with God at our center, but we are also born with a heart full of desire for God. This yearning is our fundamental motive force; it is the human spirit. It is the energy behind everything we seek and aspire to. And if indeed we are in intimate union with God in the center, then the soul’s desire is

Liberation, whether experienced pleasurably or painfully, always involves relinquishment, some kind of loss. It may be a loss of something we’re glad to be rid of, like a bad habit, or something we cling to for dear life, like a love relationship. Either way it’s still a loss.

At this point, one might reasonably ask, if we’re made of love, filled with love, and meant for love, why do we feel so separate and behave so destructively? According to John and Teresa, there are two fundamental reasons. The first we have already mentioned: we are asleep to the truth; we do not realize who we are and what we are for. The second

We cling to things, people, beliefs, and behaviors not because we love them, but because we are terrified of losing them.

The spiritual life for Teresa and John has nothing to do with actually getting closer to God. It is instead a journey of consciousness. Union with God is neither acquired nor received; it is realized, and in that sense it is something that can be yearned for, sought after, and—with God’s grace—found.

For his part, John had come to believe that the intellect was considerably overrated. In today’s idiom, he had been there and done that. He was convinced that understanding and reason could do no more than point in the general direction of spiritual reality. It was direct spiritual experience that he valued most, and Teresa had a wealth of it.