Easter 2026 - Reading #17 - Knowledge
Reading
Saint John of the Cross, in The Ascent of Mount Carmel, describes the knowledge that comes when the soul learns to see beyond the surface of created things: "In order to arrive at having pleasure in everything, desire to have pleasure in nothing. In order to arrive at possessing everything, desire to possess nothing. In order to arrive at being everything, desire to be nothing. In order to arrive at knowing everything, desire to know nothing."
John continues: "When you turn toward something, you cease to cast yourself upon the all. For to go from the all to the all, you must leave the all in all. And when you come to have the all, you must have it without wanting anything. Because if you desire to have something in the all, your treasure in God is not purely your all."
John of the Cross may seem severe, but his teaching is not about destruction of desire, it is about the purification of desire. The gift of knowledge, in his vision, shows us that every created thing is a pointer toward the uncreated. When we grasp the pointer, we miss what it points to. When we receive it as a sign, it leads us to the reality. Knowledge is the gift that teaches us to see through the sign to the Signified.
Reflection
Eighteen days into Easter, John of the Cross takes us into the deepest waters of the gift of knowledge: the paradox that in desiring nothing, we receive everything. This is challenging language, and it can sound like a call to emotional suicide. But John is not asking us to stop feeling. He is asking us to stop clutching, to hold every good thing with the open hand of a person who knows that the greatest Good cannot be held at all, only received, moment by moment, as gift.
John of the Cross was a poet and a mystic who loved beauty, friendship, and the natural world. His austerity was not hatred of creation but love of the Creator so intense that it could not tolerate anything that stood between the soul and God. The gift of knowledge, as John experienced it, was like a light so bright that it revealed the insubstantiality of everything that pretended to be ultimate. Pleasure, success, reputation, comfort, none of them evil, but all of them dangerous when they become substitutes for the living God.
This is the deepest lesson of both Lent and Easter. Lent taught us to let go through discipline; Easter teaches us to let go through love. The gift of knowledge shows us why both are necessary: because we cannot receive the fullness of God while our hands are full of lesser things. As you continue through this week, notice what you are clutching, what good thing has become an ultimate thing in your life. You need not destroy it. Simply open your hand. The gift of knowledge promises that what you receive in exchange will be infinitely greater than what you release.