In his canticle, St. John of the Cross explains the process of a soul reaching union with God through an allegory of a wife searching for her husband. The wife feels wounded by love and begins her search for the Beloved. The wife (soul) searches everywhere for Him in despair until they finally meet in the solitude of the garden of paradise.

St. John of the Cross was a Carmelite friar and priest during the Counter-Reformation and he was arrested and jailed by the Calced Carmelites in 1577 at the Carmelite Monastery of Toledo because of his close association with Saint Teresa of Avila. While imprisoned for nine months, he memorized a thirty-one-stanza version of the Canticle. Some years later, after 1582, he wrote down the last stanzas after a conversation with sister Francisca de la Madre de Dios. (taken from Wikipedia)

In this poetry, he captured a deeply feminine perspective and seemed to serve as a mouthpiece for things that the women of the time dared not say.

The Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross (translated by A.Z. Foreman)

Once in the dark of night,

Inflamed with love and yearning, I arose

(O coming of delight!)

And went, as no one knows,

When all my house lay long in deep repose



All in the dark went right,

Down secret steps, disguised in other clothes,

(O coming of delight!)

In dark when no one knows,

When all my house lay long in deep repose.



And in the luck of night

In secret places where no other spied

I went without my sight

Without a light to guide

Except the heart that lit me from inside.



It guided me and shone

Surer than noonday sunlight over me,

And led me to the one

Whom only I could see

Deep in a place where only we could be.



O guiding dark of night!

O dark of night more darling than the dawn!

O night that can unite

A lover and loved one,

Lover and loved one moved in unison.



And on my flowering breast

Which I had kept for him and him alone

He slept as I caressed

And loved him for my own,

Breathing an air from redolent cedars blown.



And from the castle wall

The wind came down to winnow through his hair

Bidding his fingers fall,

Searing my throat with air

And all my senses were suspended there.



I stayed there to forget.

There on my lover, face to face, I lay.

All ended, and I let

My cares all fall away

Forgotten in the lilies on that day.

It seems that St. Teresa and her ecstacies had made quite an impression on St. John.

The words she used to describe her relationship with God were not terribly subtle.

I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it… St. Teresa of Avila (1559)

A religious sonnet written by John Donne in 1600 has a similarly conflicted relationship with sex and faith.

Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you

As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend

Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

I, like an usurp'd town to another due,

Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;

Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,

But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.

Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov'd fain,

But am betroth'd unto your enemy;

Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,

Take me to you, imprison me, for I,

Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,

Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

A hundred years later, Moravians’ sexy ideas about Jesus were less conflicted and even less subtle. Instead of sublimating a figurative husband and wife relationship, they sublimated the literal wound in Jesus’s side as he hung on the cross.

What does a Bird in Cross's Air

When it flies up to the Lamb near,

When round the Lamb it moves and sings,

And claps the Ave with its Wings?

Dear Hearts. Look, look and see:

The little Bird finds presently

Its Nest int he dear Cavity,

From Whence the Church was dug,

Within the Hole where Blood cast Rays,

The Bird itself entangled has;

And round the Castle of the Side

Are Wound-Swans in the canal wide;

There learns the little Piper

In the Hole to be a Dipper.



So side-wound looking constantly,

So Side-hole homesick feelingly

Lamb's Heart to creep thro' so intent,

So smelling for the Lamb's Sweat Scent,

On the Magnetick Side.

So like a Drop of Jesus' Sweat,

So quivering with Love's Ague sweet,

Like th' Infant leaping

So drawing Breath in Corpse's Air,

So sprouting forth Wounds Moisture clear,

So from Grave's Vapours in a Dew,

So panting the Son's Sing to view

So fashion'd to the slain Lamb's Heart,

Like the Child Jesusin each Part,

So like dear Mary Magdalene,

Child, Virgin, Marriage-like in one,

The Lamb shall keep his Bride's Soul

Til she can kiss his Side's Hole.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/41179848

Verses like this were printed on cards and given to married couples to recite while they were consumating their relationship. Just like King Solomon and his Song of Songs, these guys understood something about marketing a religion: sex sells.

I have yet to crack the code of how to sell a book.

I put a little bit of sexy stuff in my fiction, but am not brave enough to write like the Moravians.

In modern cinema, these themes have been explored in films like Black Narcissus. But in comparison to the poems posted above, this work is extremely repressed.