In Praise of Various St. Johns

Today is the birthday of St. John of the Cross, born in 1542.  We celebrate his feast day on the day that he died, December 14.  I wrote a blog post about St. John of the Cross and dark nights of the soul over at my creativity blog.  You may think you don't know the work of St. John of the Cross, but he coined the phrase "the dark night of the soul," and he explored this concept over several works.

It's the feast day of John the Baptist.  I wrote a blog post for the Living Lutheran site which will likely post tomorrow.

Here are some quotes from that blog post to whet your appetite:

John warns us again and again of the dangers of letting our attention wander. In our time of increasingly fragmented attention spans, the central message remains: John tells us to keep the focus on the Messiah not the messenger.  If John appeared in our modern wildernesses, he’d tell us to concentrate on Christ, not on our computers, our smart phones, our e-mail accounts, our televisions, all the screens which rule our lives.

It’s comforting to say, “I am not the Messiah,” as John the Baptist does. In our daily lives, we’re confronted with scores of problems that we can’t solve, from the disastrous choices made by friends and families, to the work issues, to the larger state and national issues which bedevil us. We can only do so much. We are not the Christ for whom the world waits.