On the Eve, He: A Story for Saint John of the Cross

That night, the shadow was nothing more than an overflow of the inner flame. Friar Juan de la Cruz, wrapped in a sackcloth that barely mitigated the cold of the convent, lay with his eyes open like deep wells in his shadowy cell. Sleep, that mercy for weary bodies, had spurned him with an almost liturgical aloofness. The walls, white as bone, offered no comfort other than their sepulchral silence, and not even the creaking of moth-eaten wood or the distant whisper of a brother keeping vigil could dispel the intensity of that seemingly purposeless vigil. It was as if his soul, yearning for a Word that would make it spill over, refused to rest under the rule of the senses.

In that suspended moment, when the flesh makes no demands and the world seems to forget itself, the friar pondered—or perhaps listened within himself, like someone who cannot remember whether they are dreaming or praying—that night is more than the absence of sun: it is the active presence of the Beloved. And that musing was enough of a prelude for a gentle breeze to slip through the crack in the window, suggesting to him with eloquent subtlety that perhaps it was not insomnia that kept him awake, that perhaps that kind of trembling, too sublime to be called immodest, was one of those that arise from the depths of the soul when it knows it is being watched by God. There, in the nakedness of his small cell, with no light other than that which burned in his chest, he understood that the soul does not sleep because it does not want to cease loving, and that any rest that does not come from the Beloved is nothing but a false rest.

The roosters had not yet broken the stillness of the air when the sky began to tear apart into strips of indigo. It was then that Friar Juan sat up and sat on the mattress as if waiting for someone. He did not pray with words, or even with thoughts: it was his vigil that became prayer. The cold of the stone pierced his feet, but his face showed a serenity that was not of this world. And as the night drew to a close, with the timidity of those who have confessed a secret, he whispered—in a voice that he did not want to be heard by any soul in the convent, but which must have been thunder and joy in the throne room of the Lamb—“I will call this night beauty, because in it my soul has become heaven.”.