The Prisoner Who Wrote Poetry in the Dark

In 1577, Spanish friar John of the Cross was seized by his own religious brothers and dragged to a windowless cell in Toledo. For nine months he sat in a space barely large enough to stand, fed scraps of bread and sardines. His captors beat him weekly. They stripped him of his books, his companions, his ministry — everything that had once made God feel near.

Yet in that suffocating darkness, something extraordinary happened. John began composing verses in his head, memorizing them line by line, poems of such aching desire for the Almighty that they would become some of the most treasured spiritual writings in Christian history. "Where have You hidden, Beloved?" he wrote, his soul reaching toward God the way a man dying of thirst crawls toward water he cannot yet see.

John called this season his "dark night of the soul" — not a loss of faith, but a stripping away of every comfort until nothing remained but raw, desperate longing for the Living God.

This is the cry of Psalm 42. "As the deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for You, O God." The psalmist is not writing from a place of easy worship. He is writing from exile, from tears, from the taunt of enemies asking, "Where is your God?" And yet the thirst itself becomes proof of what the soul knows — that the One it longs for is real, and worth every moment of waiting.