‘They say love is blind.’
I first heard those words at a wedding. There is something familiar and even humorous about the saying within this context. In fact, the church echoed with spontaneous laughter when the minister spoke. Perhaps there is also a little truth in it. Maybe it can help us gain some insight to John of the Cross too?
At the beginning of any relationship, we often see what attracts us most: the beauty of another person, their gifts, their kindness, the hope and promise of what might be. When we fall in love, we can sometimes see the best in another person before we fully see everything else. We may notice their strengths more easily than their weaknesses. Yet anyone who has shared life with another person for many years — whether in marriage, friendship, or family — discovers something deeper.
Love does not make us blind. Love opens our eyes!
The longer we walk with someone, the more deeply we come to know them. We begin to recognise not only what they do, but who they are. We discover their joys and their struggles, their hopes and their fears, their strengths and their vulnerabilities. We begin to understand something of their heart. In a beautiful way, we begin to see life through their eyes. This helps us understand something important about our relationship with God.
For St John of the Cross, to know God is not simply to learn things about God. It is to enter into friendship with God. Christian faith is not about standing at a distance, looking at God as an idea or a mystery to be studied. It is about being drawn into a relationship with the One who loves us.
This is why St John Paul II often reminded the Church that Christianity begins with an encounter — with falling in love with Christ. The Christian journey is not simply about knowing about Jesus; it is about coming to know Jesus personally. It is a relationship of love.
Jesus reveals this when he says to his disciples:
‘I no longer call you servants … I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.’ (John 15:15)
Notice Jesus does not call his disciples servants who simply follow instructions. He calls them friends. Friendship means sharing life. The deepest friendships are not built merely on common interests, but on a sharing of the heart. Over time, friends begin to influence one another. Their joys become our joys. Their concerns become our concerns. Their way of seeing the world begins to shape our own.
St John of the Cross teaches that friendship with Christ gradually transforms us. He writes:
‘Have a habitual desire to imitate Christ in all your deeds by bringing your life into conformity with his. You must then study his life in order to know how to imitate him and behave in all events as he would.’[1]
For John of the Cross, transformation means allowing the heart of Christ to shape our own hearts. To know Jesus is to learn how Jesus sees, how Jesus loves, and how Jesus responds. The more deeply we love someone, the more we become like them. The opposite is also true; the more we do not love, the more we put distance between ourselves and another. While this is true of human friendship, it is especially true of our friendship with Christ.
This is why St John of the Cross insists that Christ is the complete and final revelation of the Father. Reflecting on the opening of the Letter to the Hebrews — that God has spoken definitively through his Son — John writes as if with the voice of the Father:
‘If I have already told you all things in my Word, which is my Son, and if I have no other word, what answer or revelation can I now make that would surpass this?’[2]
In Jesus, the Father has given us everything. He has no more to say and reveal. Therefore, the Christian life is a journey of looking to Christ, learning from Christ, befriending Christ, and allowing Christ to transform us … about falling in love with Christ.
For John of the Cross, friendship with Christ leads somewhere even greater: ‘union with God’. To share in the very life of God through grace is the meaning of God’s plan. The God who created us, invites us into communion with him — with a friendship anchored in Christ that begins now and reaches its fullness in eternity.[3]
Perhaps, then, the old saying deserves a gentle correction. It is not that love is blind, but that love does open our eyes. As love matures, we begin to see with the eyes of the heart, discovering that the deepest truth of our lives is God—the One who is Love itself, and whom we come to know, not merely as an idea, but as the living Reality of Love in our world. When we don’t love, we remain blind.
[1] John of the Cross, The Ascent of Mount Carmel, I.13.3, in Kieran Kavanaugh, OCD and Otilio Rodriguez, OCD (trans.), The Collected Works of St John of the Cross, Revised Edition (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1991), p. 206.
[2] John of the Cross, The Ascent of Mount Carmel, II.22.3–5.
[3] John of the Cross, The Spiritual Canticle, especially Stanzas 1–22, in The Collected Works of St John of the Cross, ICS Publications. See also, John of the Cross, The Living Flame of Love, Stanza 3, on the transformation of the soul through the loving knowledge of God.
