While studying at the Graduate Theological Union I took a course on John of the Cross. I recently came across my old John of the Cross notes and the papers I had written. The short essay below is one of those papers and it was dated April 16, 1980. I don't know the question I was asked to address. I have revised the original essay somewhat. The essay follows.
The Essay
Several years ago I wrote down an account of my life and began with these words:
When I was ten years old we moved out to Kansas and I used to like the weather there. In the summer time it would get pretty hot, but sometimes the wind would blow and the clouds would come up out of the West. I would feel the wind blowing through my body, like something was breaking up inside, and the land would open up with the trees blowing in the wind. When the sun shone through the blowing clouds the whole sky would be singing, and I would run by with the wind so glad that I would almost cry. Later on in life I would remember the open land, sky, and clouds and think about those days. Sometimes I would get the wide open feelings of the mid-West, something beautiful and empty, but clean. It was the clean I liked the best, and the wind. I guess the wind can blow you clean. When I was in graduate school, by the fifth year anyway, I was pretty depressed all the time, and angry, and I used to get up in the morning and dance to myself, listening to Leadbelly on my record player, and thinking about the water washing up on the Florida beaches where I had been once or twice before. Then, every now and then, faint nostalgic feelings would come across me, feeling of the mid-West and the weather out in Kansas. I would remember the old days, as if something good had happened then. But I really don't know if something good had happened there, or rather, as if the days beneath the Kansas skies expressed the things that had never been, good things, or perhaps the good that always seemed to pass away.
The paragraph was written to suggest the idea that there may be a transcendent reality which can be experienced. Nevertheless, the writer is not certain there is a transcendent reality, and if it does exist, that it might be good as signified by the words, "but I really don't know something good had ever been." What did seem certain was that there had been an experience of power and beauty. That power was rhapsodic, a great melody that emerge spontaneously throughout the world. It was cosmic in scope. It filled the sky, the sun, the world, and could be felt physically and visually as a movement in which each element of existence sounded its notes as part of a universal melody. The melody, when experienced in the body, gave a sense of release "like something was breaking up inside." But the word "like" indicates a reluctance on the part of the writer to certify that something had actually been released, or that some thing had broken up inside. The experience is recalled "later on in life," when the writer is "depressed all the time, and angry." He wondered if something was missing. The vision gave him a hint of that, an emptiness, "something beautiful and empty." This emptiness was emphasized by the geography of Kansas. It spread out forever. The sky was so vast, there was almost nothing there. It was into this vast emptiness that his family had journeyed, "we moved out to Kansas," and the writer, in his depression, reaches out with his heart to embrace all people in their wanderings in this empty world. The experience of emptiness, the prairie vastness, was transformed from a sense of the presence of nothing into the absence of something, something that can make you clean. This impression is strengthened by the statement, "I guess the wind can blow you clean." The word "guess" is an inference, indicating that there may not be something that can make you clean. It was the absence of this something that caused pain and longing, "faint nostalgic feelings" of the "weather out in Kansas." These feelings were "faint," due to the fact that the writer had not sensed the original vision for so long, but even being faint, they had more power than all other things put together. The power of the event was its sense of the pure. "It was the clean I liked the best, and the wind. I guess the wind can blow you clean." The word "you" would indicate that being unclean affected everyone. Without that wind, he was tormented. His only relief was to "get up in the morning and dance to myself, listening to Leadbelly on my record player, and thinking about the water washing up on the Florida beaches ..." His depression was intensified by remembering that perhaps he had once been made new, that something had broken up inside when "the sun shown through the blowing clouds." Since the vision had happened so long ago, and since the writer was no longer clean, but angry and depressed, he wondered if the experience corresponded to a good he may have forgotten, or perhaps was now incapable of perceiving. This was indicated by saying that the experience pointed to things that "had never been, good things, or perhaps the good that always seem to pass away." Even though it was not clear that the experience had pointed to a good that could make the world new and clean, what was remembered was sufficient to give the sense that nothing good had ever occurred since that original day in Kansas. Only emptiness and longing remained. The theme of the whole paragraph is to communicate the possibility that there is a good that can renew the world, and by describing its absence, lead to longing that it be present.
The Rev. Robert J. Sanders, Ph.D.
July 28, 2011
