John of the Cross

The son who survived, Juan, grew up hungry enough that his growth never fully recovered. He was apprenticed out to learn a trade and failed at every one. So a hospital took him in instead — and there he found what his parents had already shown him: love given to someone who has nothing to offer back. For years he nursed the poorest of the poor. He washed wounds no one else would touch. He begged alms for people the world had already written off.

He never stopped tending. The same hands that had washed wounds began holding souls the same way — patiently, without flinching, refusing to leave. Read anything John of the Cross wrote, and underneath the theology you find the same love that once sat with the dying. It's not a metaphor he reached for. It's the boy from the hospital, still at the bedside.

Five centuries later, he is still doing it — meeting people exactly where they hurt, and making them fall in love with God.

2026 marks a rare double jubilee for him: 300 years since his canonisation, 100 since he was named a Doctor of the Church. To mark it, Teresian Press is reprinting John of the Cross by Ross Collings — a Discalced Carmelite scholar whom Dr Edward Howells called one of the finest interpreters of the saint in fifty years, and which Bishop Greg Homeming OCD has warmly welcomed back into print. Clear, pastoral, unflinching — it's the door into John's world for anyone who's ever loved something before they had the words for it.