Now that we are so close to Christmas, we remember so many texts of Luke where the characters that in themselves do not have much to exult … but finding the child Jesus -God-with-us- was filled with great joy. The Magi also experienced great joy, the shepherds were still the first … the joy of having God with us, in our midst fills our hearts.
Our Father Saint John of the Cross, also he deals with this in his «Spiritual Canticle», of joy, freedom and beauty on the road to God. Joy, because it is a primordial human emotion, as necessary as the daily bread, to give the best of ourselves. Then, freedom, because as Don Quixote de La Mancha said to Sancho: «The freedom is one of the most precious gifts that God has given to men». On the other hand, without it, it will not be possible to do something from ourselves, giving our personal touch. Finally, beauty as that contemplative look that allows us to adorn all that God has put in his universe, inside and outside of us, all for us, expression of his creative love, in our hands, at our service … All offered for the joy of the creature.
Even if John of the Cross not say it clearly, Juan Antonio Marcos assumes, in one of his lectures this year in the CITES Congress about the Saint:
«The poems are a confirmation of his lived experience. We could almost say that the poetry of San John of the Cross is like an implicit biography. When we read: “Where did you hide … Beloved …” … speaks in the first person that he lived. He is much more discreet than Santa Teresa, so he does not speak of his privacy voluntarily, but he does through his poems ».
In fact, God instills joy, joy and beauty in the soul. The explanation of couplet 36 («Let us rejoice, Beloved and let us go forth to behold ourselves in your beauty, to the mountain and to the hill, to where the pure water flows …» etc.) It is almost an anthology of this complicity between God and man full of joy and of beauty where the look, the presence, the entanglement of the wills … creates an almost paradisiacal setting where God fills the creature with his love, his divine condition.
