I recommend this short text. I'm not sure that gentleness is the abiding focus of the writings of John of the Cross (and Thomas Kane does not claim it to be so) - but by placing a spirit of gentleness at the very centre of our encounter with John, Kane at one stroke subverts the tendency to which many of us have sometimes been tempted to find in these extraordinary mystical texts the fuel to inflame a kind of other-worldly intensity which is, in fact, far from John's own. The single word which Kane uses to encapsulate the world as John perceives it is 'violence'; and we can interpret our own dark nights and distortions of ascetic fervour as a kind of spiritual and bodily punishment which internalise this violence within ourselves: possibly a great deal of our religious heritage has one way or another done this. But John's preoccupation - it is striking how easy this is to forget, or disregard - is love. Allowing ourselves to be touched by the gentleness of the Spirit is what Kane thinks is the central purpose of John's quest, that violence be overcome, and that love win. There is, of course, a great deal more than this in the poetry and in the treatises left to us by John - but in the face of all the traps into which we can fall as we allow ourselves to be beguiled by the intensity of his words, I am hugely grateful for this short book with its simple plea that without gentleness all of our understanding of love and of darkness is distortion. Before you read John again, read this first. ( )