John’s teaching is uncompromising and tender. He maps the purgation through which the contemplative’s supports fall away — what he called the Dark Night of the Soul — and insists that this stripping is love’s deeper approach, not its absence.
His poetry — Spiritual Canticle, Living Flame of Love — reads as some of the finest in Spanish literature, erotic in a strictly mystical register.
He taught the way of nada: nothing, nothing, nothing — and on the mountain, nothing. Only what one has stopped grasping can receive what is given.