To help the whole Teresian Carmelite family prepare for and enter into this commemorative year of St John of the Cross, the General Curia of the Discalced Carmelite Order in Rome circulated a themed cycle of spiritual reading devoted to John’s vision of creation. Eight readings went out, one each month from January to August, each pairing a passage from the sixteenth-century mystic with selected passages from Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’, his landmark letter on the environment and ‘our common home’. Each monthly reading came with a short introduction, the Sanjuanist passage itself (often with John’s own commentary), a handful of matching quotations from Laudato Si’ and a set of discussion questions to chew over.
It was, on the face of it, an unlikely pairing. John of the Cross was no environmentalist. He was a poet-mystic consumed by the soul’s journey towards union with God, best known — perhaps notorious — for preaching detachment: strip away every attachment to created things, he insisted, so that nothing stood between the soul and its Creator. Francis, by contrast, wrote an encyclical calling for ecological conversion, structural economic reform and a fierce defence of the earth as a wounded, living thing crying out for care. How did one travel from ‘detach yourself from creatures’ to ‘go and save the planet’? That was precisely the tension this reading cycle set out to resolve and it did so convincingly, showing the two visions to be not opposed but complementary — two movements of the same piece of music, one contemplative and one active, one about learning to see and the other about learning to act on what had been seen.
The introductory text laid out the guiding thread nicely: for John of the Cross, creation was never the destination. It was a ‘trace’ of God, a love letter, a doorway — but it became a spiritual trap the moment one stopped at the door instead of walking through it. Laudato Si’ took that same wonder at creation and gave it hands and feet: social responsibility, ecological urgency and a ‘cry of the earth and cry of the poor’ that demanded more than admiration. As Rome’s introduction put it, the encyclical did not replace John’s teaching, it extended it — pulling Carmelite contemplation into ‘a missionary, fraternal, and solidaristic dynamic, where praise becomes action and love of the Creator becomes care for creation.’
With that frame in place, the eight readings unfolded month by month.
January — The First Reading: Creation as a Palace
The collection opened with an extract from John’s early poem Romances, written in 1577 while he was imprisoned — and, by most accounts, tortured — in a cramped Toledo cell by Carmelite friars opposed to his reforms. It was a startling fact worth sitting with: some of the most tender, cosmic poetry in the Christian mystical tradition was composed in a dungeon. The poem imagined a conversation within the Trinity, in which the Father offered the Son a ‘bride’ to love and creation itself was fashioned as a ‘palace’ for this bride — divided into an upper storey for angels and a humbler lower storey for humanity, yet somehow all one household, united by a shared love for the same Bridegroom.
The imagery was deliberately nuptial and domestic: the world was not cold machinery but a wedding venue, built with tenderness for a marriage that had not yet happened. It was a strikingly generous vision of matter — the physical universe existed, in this telling, because God wanted somewhere beautiful to bring his bride home to.
Laudato Si’ was paired here through its recurring image of the earth as ‘our common home’ — not just a resource but a shared dwelling with its own dignity, one that ‘the Creator does not abandon’. The insight worth drawing out was this: both texts refused to see creation as neutral backdrop.
A palace and a home were both places built for someone, out of love and both demanded to be treated accordingly. If one truly believed the world was built as a wedding gift, would one leave rubbish on the floor?
February — The Second Reading: Creation as an Icon
The second reading moved from Romances to the Spiritual Canticle and specifically to its famous fifth stanza, in which the Bride recalled that her Beloved, in passing through the ‘groves’ of creation, ‘clothed them in beauty’ simply by looking at them. This was where John introduced the idea of two divine ‘movements’: first, creation itself, made in the image of God’s own goodness and beauty; second, the Incarnation, which ‘engraved’ Christ’s face onto creation like a seal pressed into wax.
The theological move was quietly radical. Beauty, for John, was not decoration — it was evidence. Every created thing carried a trace, a fingerprint, of the God who made it. And once the Word became flesh, that fingerprint deepened into something closer to a signature: creation no longer merely resembled God, it had been personally touched by him. This reading drew a lovely connecting thread to Franciscan theology and, unexpectedly, to Dostoevsky’s line ‘beauty will save the world’ — the idea being that if creation truly bore Christ’s face, then caring for its beauty became a moral obligation rather than an aesthetic hobby.
This was arguably where the ecological argument found its firmest mystical footing: if the natural world was an icon of Christ, defacing it was not merely careless — it edged towards a kind of vandalism against a holy image.
March — The Third Reading: Creation as Messenger
Here came one of the most quoted lines in the whole set of readings, from stanza four of the Spiritual Canticle: ‘O woods and thickets, planted by the hand of my Beloved! Tell me, has he passed by you?’ Creation was imagined as a messenger — even, in John’s word for it, as a kind of witness that could be cross-examined for news of the Beloved’s whereabouts. He ran through the four classical elements (earth, water, air and fire) and their creatures and insisted that all of them and indeed ‘nature, culture, science and technology’ too, were in their own way ‘divine words’.
This reading opened up a genuinely interesting philosophical detour, contrasting Aristotle’s theoria (contemplative knowing) with poiesis (making and producing) and bringing in Heidegger’s twentieth-century worry that the modern West had collapsed almost entirely into the mode of ‘fabricating, producing, consuming’ — treating the world as raw material rather than as something to be attended to, wondered at and listened to. John’s stage of ‘meditation’ on creatures, in this reading, was really a training in a lost skill: the discipline of looking at a tree, a river or a data set and asking what it was telling you, rather than immediately asking what it was for.
Laudato Si’ 85–87 dovetailed beautifully here, quoting the Canadian and Japanese bishops on nature as ‘a continuing revelation of the divine’ and each creature ‘singing the hymn of its existence’ — and, memorably, reproducing the Canticle of the Creatures attributed to St Francis, that joyful roll-call of Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Brother Wind and Sister Water. The insight to carry forward was that contemplation was not a luxury bolted onto ecological concern — it might be the precondition for it. One did not protect what one had never learned to listen to.
April — The Fourth Reading: Creation as Quasi-Sacrament
This reading marked a shift in the spiritual journey being traced — from the ‘active’ stage of meditation, where one reached towards God through creatures, to ‘infused contemplation’, where the initiative flipped and God’s action became primary. At this stage, John wrote something startling: the soul discovered that ‘God is all things’. Not that creatures wereGod but that the soul now experienced the connection between a creature’s qualities and God’s own attributes directly, through a kind of spiritual ‘touch’, without needing the middleman of ideas or mental images.
The passage chosen — from stanza fourteen and fifteen of the Canticle, with its litany of ‘mountains… lonely wooded valleys… strange islands… resounding rivers… the tranquil night… the supper that refreshes and deepens love’ — was some of John’s most sensuous, incantatory poetry. It ended on the Eucharist, ‘the supper’, read as evidence that for John, creation reached its highest transfiguration in the Mass: matter itself became ‘a quasi-sacrament’ of God’s presence.
Laudato Si’ 233–236 made the connection explicit — quoting John of the Cross directly, in fact, on mountains being ‘what my Beloved is to me’ — and developed a full theology of the sacraments as nature ‘taken up by God’ through water, oil, fire and bread. The point landed hard: if the whole cosmos was oriented towards the altar, then how one treated rivers and mountains was not separate from how one treated the Eucharist. There was a lovely, slightly provocative idea buried here — that ecological carelessness might be, in its own way, a failure of sacramental imagination.
May — The Fifth Reading: The Awakening of Creation
This fifth reading, drawn from The Living Flame of Love, worked as something like a keystone — the previous four readings’ themes gathered up and lifted to a higher pitch. John drew on the patristic image of Moses and the burning bush: a poor, insignificant thing (a shepherd, a desert shrub) was set ablaze by God without being destroyed but rather transfigured. The Fathers of the Church saw this pattern repeated in Mary (untouched by the fire of the Spirit yet made a mother), in the Eucharist (bread and wine not annihilated but transformed) and in the Risen Christ himself — and, John insisted, in the praying soul, which became fire without ceasing to be itself.
The stanza chosen — ‘how gently and lovingly you wake in my heart’ — described an intimate awakening of the Word within the soul but John’s commentary made an audacious leap: because this awakening was the awakening of the CreatorWord, it was simultaneously ‘the awakening of all creation’. To give oneself to God in prayer, in other words, was in some mysterious way to give the whole created order along with oneself.
Laudato Si’ 80, 220 and 225–226 were brought in to argue that the ecological crisis was, at root, a spiritual crisis — a failure of ‘loving awareness’ and inner peace, drowned out by ‘constant noise, interminable and nerve-racking distractions’. The discussion questions here got pointedly practical, asking how vows of poverty, chastity and obedience — lived under the Spirit’s guidance — might become ‘a prophetic witness in the face of destructive consumerism’. It was a good moment to note the real charge of this whole project: it was not content to leave the John of the Cross–Laudato Si’dialogue at the level of pretty parallels. It wanted to land somewhere concrete, in a community’s actual way of living.
June — The Sixth Reading: Creation Drawn from Nothingness
This reading turned from John’s mystical high points to his ascetical bedrock — the notorious teaching on detachment and ‘nothingness’ from the Ascent of Mount Carmel. This was the John of the Cross people tended to find hardest: ‘all the beauty of creatures compared to the infinite beauty of God is the height of ugliness’; attachment to any creature was ‘pure darkness’. Read out of context, it could sound almost world-hating.
The introductory note did careful, necessary work to head off that misreading. It explained the medieval idea of the ‘analogy of being’: creation genuinely resembled God (an apple really was beautiful and that beauty really did say something true about God) but the distance between that finite beauty and God’s infinite beauty was, well, infinite. The problem was not loving an apple. The problem was loving it as though it could satisfy an infinite longing that only God could satisfy — what John called ‘attachment’. And because creation was made from nothing, clinging to it as an end in itself was, quite literally, clinging to nothingness; the desire in us that was built for the infinite ended up drowned in something incapable of holding it.
Laudato Si’ paired this with the story of Cain and Abel, the warning against ‘misguided anthropocentrism’ and a sharp critique of compulsive consumerism — ‘the emptier a person’s heart is, the more he or she needs things to buy, own and consume.’ Read together, the two texts made an interesting joint diagnosis of the ecological crisis: it was not caused by loving the world too much but by loving it wrongly — trying to fill an infinite hole with finite stuff, which both impoverished the soul and, incidentally, trashed the planet in the attempt.
July — The Seventh Reading: Creation as Gift Rather than Possession
This reading took up John’s famous ‘Nada–Todo’ (Nothing–Everything) formula from the Ascent of Mount Carmel, book three: the one who became attached to ‘nothing’ received ‘everything’ in Christ. The key distinction drawn out here was between judging creatures ‘according to accidents’ (their surface appearances, distorted by craving) versus ‘according to substance’ (their true reality as gifts). Attachment, John argued, did not intensify enjoyment — it actually ruined it, clouding judgement ‘like a mist’ and trapping the heart ‘like a snare’. Detachment, by contrast, was what finally let one enjoy things properly, ‘as though you possessed them all’, precisely because one had stopped grasping at them.
This was, frankly, one of the more counter-intuitive and quietly brilliant ideas across the whole series: John of the Cross reframed not as an enemy of pleasure but as an advocate for better pleasure — the difference between wolfing down a meal out of anxious hunger and savouring it because one trusted there would be more.
Laudato Si’ 67 and 115–116 supplied the ecological application, tackling head-on the old accusation that Genesis’s language of human ‘dominion’ over the earth licensed exploitation. Francis firmly rejected that reading, insisting that ‘tilling and keeping’ the garden implied mutual responsibility rather than ownership — ‘the earth is the Lord’s’, not ours to plunder. The resonance with John was exact: creation was a gift held in trust, never a possession to be hoarded and grasping at it — whether spiritually or economically — destroyed precisely the relationship it was meant to deepen.
August — The Eighth Reading: Creation as the Place of Our Liberation
The series closed with the Prayer of a Soul Enkindled with Love and a striking, almost cheeky image: creation as mere ‘crumbs that fall from the Father’s table’. The introductory note traced this back to the Syrophoenician woman in Mark’s Gospel, who accepted being compared to a dog eating crumbs beneath the table and, in doing so, professed faith in Christ’s divinity. For John, the crumb was not an insult to creation — it was a diagnostic question. Was the created world a disappointing crumb or the whole banquet in miniature? ‘Everything depends,’ the reading said, ‘on our interior liberation.’
The prayer itself was astonishingly bold — ‘Mine are the heavens and mine is the earth… God himself is mine and for me, because Christ is mine and all for me’ — urging the soul not to settle for scraps when the whole feast, Creator included, had already been given in Christ. Laudato Si’ 9, 49 and 64 rounded things off with Patriarch Bartholomew’s call to replace ‘consumption with sacrifice, greed with generosity’ and Francis’s insistence that one had to hear ‘both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor’ together, never separately.
It was a fitting close: the final reading ended not on renunciation but on liberation and abundance — the idea that letting go of a grasping relationship with creation was not a diminishment but the doorway into receiving it and its Creator far more fully than any amount of clutching ever could.
What to make of it all
Stepping back from the eight monthly readings, a few threads ran right through the whole series and were worth holding onto.
First, there was a real and carefully argued case that John of the Cross’s ‘detachment’ had been widely misunderstood as world-denial when it was actually a theory of right relationship. He never told us creation was worthless — quite the opposite, he called it a palace, an icon, a messenger, a sacrament and a gift. What he warned against was mistaking the gift for the Giver, which turned out to spoil one’s enjoyment of the gift itself. That was a genuinely useful reframe for anyone who had only ever encountered John of the Cross through the ‘dark night of the soul’ reputation and assumed he was simply anti-pleasure.
Second, the pairing with Laudato Si’ worked better than one might expect precisely because Francis’s encyclical was not a purely activist document either — it kept circling back to contemplation, wonder, gratitude and ‘sobriety’ as the spiritual roots without which ecological action collapsed into either despair or a joyless, guilt-driven asceticism. Both writers, four centuries apart, landed on the same paradox: one had to stop grasping at the world in order to actually see it and one had to actually see it before one could be bothered to protect it.
Third and perhaps most interesting for anyone reading this outside a specifically Carmelite context, the readings quietly made a case that the ecological crisis was, underneath the policy failures and emissions figures, a crisis of attention — a civilisation too busy, too acquisitive and too distracted to do what John of the Cross’s ‘meditation on creatures’ asked of us, which was simply to stop and ask the woods and thickets whether the Beloved had passed by. Whether or not one shared the theological framework, that was a diagnosis worth taking seriously on its own terms.
The discussion questions scattered through each monthly reading (largely left out of this summary, since they were meant to prompt group conversation rather than be reported on) pushed readers again and again towards the same practical hinge: not ‘is this interesting theology?’ but ‘what does this change about how I actually live, consume and care for the people and places around me?’ That was the real ambition of the project — using sixteenth-century mystical poetry not as a museum piece but as a live spiritual resource for a distinctly twenty-first-century emergency.
