The Carrying of the Cross: The Path of Nothing

This meditation is part of a series reflecting on each of the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Passion of Jesus Christ through the lens of the Dark Night as described by the great mystic, Carmelite monk, and poet St. John of the Cross. Each mystery illuminates a different dimension of the soul's purification as it journeys toward union with God.

A Meditation on the Fourth Sorrowful Mystery and the Dark Night

Have you ever been on a road where every step felt heavier than the last?

Maybe it wasn't a physical road. Maybe it was a season of life where you kept putting one foot in front of the other, not because you could see where you were going, but because stopping felt even more terrifying than continuing. The marriage that required years of patience with no visible improvement. The illness that dragged on month after month, stripping away your independence, your plans, your sense of self. The spiritual dryness that settled in like fog and refused to lift, no matter how faithfully you prayed, no matter how sincerely you asked God to show up.

You kept walking. But you couldn't tell anyone why.

There is a moment in the Passion of Christ that captures this experience. I'm sure you know where I'm going with this (not just because it's in the subject line above, either).

It comes after the scourging, after the crowning with thorns, after Pilate's verdict. The crossbeam is laid across the torn shoulders of Jesus, who has already lost more blood than most people could survive. And then he is told to walk.

No chariot. No shortcut. The road to Golgotha must be traversed step by step, under the weight of the instrument of his own execution, through streets lined with spectators.

Think about that for a moment. To be forced to carry the very thing that's supposed to be your death, to labor, to strain, to fall repeatedly on the way, all toward what's only more agony, more suffering... and ultimately... death.

"And carrying the cross by himself, he went out to what is called The Place of the Skull, which in Hebrew is called Golgotha" (John 19:17, NRSV).

Matthew, Mark, and Luke each add that at some point along the way, the soldiers conscripted a man named Simon of Cyrene to help carry the cross (see Matthew 27:32; Mark 15:21; Luke 23:26). But even with help, the road remained. The destination did not change. The weight did not vanish. It was only shared.

This is the image I want us to sit with today: the long road, the crushing weight, and the strange, unwanted help that arrives not to remove the suffering but to make it barely survivable.

 

The Way of Nothing

St. John of the Cross had a word for what happens on this kind of road. The word was nada. Nothing.

In his famous sketch of Mount Carmel, John drew a map of the soul's ascent to God. On either side of the mountain, he placed paths that represented the pursuit of earthly goods and even spiritual goods. Both paths dead-ended before reaching the summit. Only the narrow center path led to the top, and along that path he inscribed his uncompromising refrain: Nada, nada, nada, nada, nada. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. And at the summit: "y aun en el monte nada" — and even on the mountain, nothing.

This is not nihilism. It is not despair dressed in religious language. It is the most radical claim the spiritual life can make: that God cannot be reached by accumulation but only by surrender.

Not by adding more to ourselves but by allowing everything to be taken away until only God remains.

John distinguished between what he called the Active Night and the Passive Night. In the Active Night, the soul cooperates with God by voluntarily detaching from disordered desires. You choose to fast. You choose to simplify. You choose to let go of the need for recognition or comfort. This is difficult, but it is at least under your control. You are the one doing the stripping.

The Passive Night is different. In the Passive Night, God does the stripping, and you have no say in it. The consolations you once felt in prayer vanish. The sense of God's presence that once sustained you goes silent. Your own spiritual accomplishments, the very progress you thought you had made, begin to feel like dust in your hands. You cannot manufacture your way out of it. You cannot pray harder or read more or serve more and make it stop. The night descends on its own terms, at its own pace, for its own purposes.

The Carrying of the Cross is the place where the Active and the Passive converge.

Jesus actively chooses to carry the wood. He does not resist. He does not call down legions of angels. He walks. But the weight is also imposed on him. The soldiers did not ask his permission. The road was not his design. The suffering exceeds anything a human will could sustain on its own, which is precisely why his body begins to fail, why the soldiers must pull a stranger from the crowd to shoulder what the condemned man can no longer bear.

This convergence is where the deepest transformation happens, and it is the place most of us try desperately to avoid.

 

The Burden That Saves

Consider Simon of Cyrene. He is one of the most mysterious figures in the Passion narratives. Mark tells us he was "the father of Alexander and Rufus," a detail so specific it suggests these sons were known to the early Christian community (Mark 15:21).

Luke says the soldiers "seized" Simon and "laid the cross on him, and made him carry it behind Jesus" (Luke 23:26).

He did not volunteer. He was compelled.

There is something important here for anyone walking through a dark night. Simon represents the passive help of God, and it almost never arrives in the form we expect or desire. Simon did not heal Jesus. He did not take away the suffering. He did not reroute the procession to safety. He picked up wood and walked toward an execution site. From the outside, his assistance looked like participation in a catastrophe, not a rescue.

This is how God's help often feels in the darkest seasons of the soul.

You pray for deliverance, and instead you receive endurance. You ask for the cup to be removed, and instead someone hands you a shoulder to lean on so you can keep drinking it. The help is real, but it does not look like help.

It looks like more suffering, shared.

John of the Cross understood this truth at the deepest level. For him, the Passive Night of the Spirit is not a sign that God has abandoned the soul. It is a sign that God is doing the most intimate and essential work: burning away every attachment, every false image, every subtle form of spiritual self-reliance, so that the soul can finally receive God as God truly is rather than as the soul has imagined God to be.

The weight of the cross, then, is not merely punitive. It is purgative.

Every step Jesus takes toward Calvary is a step deeper into the complete self-emptying that will become, on the other side of death, the doorway to resurrection. And every step we take under the weight of our own crosses, when we can see no purpose and feel no consolation, is a step deeper into the same mystery.

 

The Night Is Not a Detour

Here is the insight that changes everything if we can receive it: the night is not a detour. The night is the path.

We live in a culture that treats suffering as a problem to be solved, darkness as a malfunction to be repaired.

The primary ethos of American religions has been described famously as "Therapeutic Moral Deism." People seek God, not necessarily as He is, but insofar as He's useful in giving them a few moral principles to live by, and insofar as he makes life a little easier, helps them "feel better" about themselves.

But that's not what we witness in the Gospels. It's definitely not what we see happen during Christ's Passion.

When the spiritual life grows difficult, when it feels less "therapeutic" than we hoped for, our first instinct is to assume we have done something wrong. We search for the sin we have not confessed, the discipline we have neglected, the error in our theology that must be causing God to withdraw. And sometimes, yes, there are corrections to be made.

But John of the Cross insists that there comes a point in the journey where the darkness is not evidence of failure. It is evidence of advancement.

The soul that has never entered the dark night may feel warm and consoled, but it is still, in a sense, feeding on its own experience of God rather than on God himself.

It is the difference between loving the feeling of being in love and loving the actual person.

The dark night strips away the feeling so that only the person remains. And because God is infinite, because God transcends every concept and every experience, the encounter with God-as-God-truly-is will always feel, at first, like an encounter with nothing. Nada.

The road to Calvary did not look like the road to victory. It looked like the road to a dead end, literally. A skull-shaped hill. A place of execution. The end of everything. And yet that road, that specific road, with its dust and its blood and its jeering crowds and the cross's unbearable weight, was the only road that led to Easter morning.

Your dark road may feel the same way. The season of prayer that produces nothing. The relationship that demands everything and returns so little. The loss that hollowed you out and left you wondering if God is even real. The "bad experience" you had with church people that left you feeling jaded. These are not detours from the spiritual life. While many "step off the path" at these moments, sadly, it's actually the very place of invitation where God asks us to embrace the Cross, to follow more fervently, because we're closer to the light of dawn in the dark night than we are when we're glowing under the "artificial light" we've settled for in the past.

For many of us, these crosses, these seasons of challenge, doubt, and even rejection, are the spiritual life at its most essential.

 

Walking Forward

So what do we do with this?

First, stop interpreting darkness as abandonment. If you are in a season where God feels absent, where prayer feels empty, where the weight on your shoulders makes every step a battle, or if you are holding onto a resentment connected to the church, consider the possibility that you are not lost. Consider that you are on the road, the narrow one John of the Cross drew on his map, and that the emptiness you feel is the nada that precedes the todo, the "everything" of God that waits at the summit.

Second, accept the Simons. The help that God sends in the dark night rarely looks the way we want it to look. It may come as a friend who cannot fix your problem but sits with you in it. It may come as a spiritual director who offers no easy answers but refuses to let you walk alone. It may come as a single verse of Scripture that sustains you for months, not because it explains your suffering, but because it reminds you that someone else has walked this road before you. Let the help come, even when it feels inadequate. Even when it feels like just another form of the cross.

Third, keep walking. This is the simplest and hardest counsel there is. The Carrying of the Cross is not a moment of mystical ecstasy. It is a putting of one foot in front of the other under impossible weight. Some days, faithfulness looks like nothing more than not stopping. It's taking the next right step. That is enough. That is the whole journey compressed into a single step.

The cross is heavy. The road is long. The destination looks, from here, like death.

But you have been on this road with Someone who knows where it ends. And where it ends is not where it appears to end. Keep walking. The morning is closer than you think, even if, especially if, you cannot see it yet.

Nada, nada, nada. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

And then: everything.