John completed the sermon-meditations on the Song of Songs which had been begun by Bernard of Clairvaux and continued by Gilbert of Hoyland. In one-hundred twenty sermons, he brings the task to its conclusion, in the process demonstrating the persistence of the patristic-monastic exegetical tradition and the influence of the early thirteenth-century intellectual tradition.
A master of language and exegesis, and apparently oblivious of the rising scholasticism of his day John had an avowedly practical purpose in completing the Cistercian commentary. He sought to lead souls to the love of God which enflamed him. He wanted to persuade others to seek to imitate and to contemplate Christ, the one perfect Image of God. For, he believed, by allowing itself to be re-formed into that Image, the human creature will gradually and gloriously itself be transformed into God's clear image.
Never before translated into the vernacular, John of Ford's sermons on the Song of Songs have survived in a single extant manuscript. Hidden for eight hundred years, the abbot of Ford emerges as a spiritual father who speaks from his own profound experience of the transforming love of God.