Today, we celebrate Saint John of the Cross, a unique figure in the church’s history. He is famously known for one particular writing, “The Dark Knight of the Soul,” which, over time, has taken on what many theologians and historians believe has been mischaracterized. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that when John of the Cross speaks of the dark night of the soul, he is speaking of a purifying passage that an individual undergoes that transforms one kind of life into another. In a simplistic manner of speaking, natural life becomes eschatological life, earthly life becomes eternal life, and the life that draws its support from natural gratification becomes a life that draws its support from the motivation of Christ. In metaphorical terms, what happens in a dark night of the soul is that the grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies so that it can give birth to new life. As articulated by John, this transformation is almost universally understood as something that pertains mainly to prayer. Too infrequently is it understood as something that has to do with our entire lives…relationships, work, and play. However, what John describes in his concept of the dark night of the soul is really the paschal mystery, the movement through death from Good Friday to Easter Sunday. This movement has to do with the transformation of our whole lives. Therefore, John’s outline of this can serve as a paradigm of paschal transformation (“structural” transformation, in the terminology of certain current schools of psychology). The dark night of the soul traces the pattern that love, service, and prayer must move through to come to eternal life. Human life and every dimension within it must, if it is to come to eternal life, fall into the ground and die in order to rise again. Christ illustrated this in his person through the paschal mystery in his journey through Good Friday to Easter Sunday. John of the Cross outlines, descriptively and prescriptively, in his metaphor of the dark night of the soul, how this passage takes place concretely within our lives (beyond its more radical form in our actual physical death).