Darkness II

Indeed, it has been quite a while since I have posted on this site. It is not for lack of time (although I have had relatively little). It is not for lack of subject matter, interest, or awareness that time was passing without posting. No, it was for a very different reason, a first experience for me. It was for lack of a sense of that spirituality that underpins the posts on this blog.

For more than three weeks, until a few days ago, I have been experiencing what St. John of the Cross referred to as the dark night of the soul. Actually, and fortunately, I had a foretaste of this several years ago not long after my conversion. (That story, in detail, I shared earlier in this post: see here.)

The foretaste came when my friend, Tom, went through a dark night, and I ended up in more than 20 hours of prayer with and/or for him. At one point, I made the stupid request to feel what he was feeling in order to understand him better. That request was granted, thankfully, only briefly for part of an evening, during which I begged to be released from my request and the next morning, when all was back to normal, I begged never to go through that experience.

That latter request, I guess, God considered not in my best interest because that is precisely what I have just gone through and not for two weeks, like Tom, but for three weeks. What kept me going was knowing that Mother Theresa had gone through a dark night for YEARS. Why? That is a question that only God can answer.

Until this period, God had been spoiling me, to use the words of one of my Sufi friends. God has never let me down, never failed to answer a prayer, always filled my life with miracles, and always, always let me feel a Divine Presence wherever I happened to be if I just was still a bit and even, often, if I was not. For me, there were two parts to religion: spirituality and faith. A few people live with spirituality; many live with faith. I always thought that if I were required to live by faith alone, I would not be able to do it.

And now, here I was: no sense of God's presence for day after day. It would have been easy to think that all my previous experience with the Presence of God had been imagined. That's the way our human minds work at times. The past is gone, the present is where we live, the future we look forward to if we don't like the present. I realized somewhere in the early part of this experience that I really had a choice. I could choose to believe in spite of the absence of any spiritual sensations. I guess that is what faith is: choosing to believe.

Interestingly, during this period I came back into contact with Fr. Terry, who had been my de facto spiritual advisor but who had been transferred to another town more than an hour away last February. We began an old-fashioned letter-writing correspondence, and since we began with reminiscing, some of the spiritual experiences that I had had earlier but not shared served as the initial content. In writing of these things, I reinforced my choice to believe. I wonder if God handed me this cane for leaning on and for feeling my way through the dark period, for strengthening my walk in darkness, depending on God's support even though I could not sense that Divine Presence that I had come to, well, honestly speaking, take for granted.

I now understand much better what St. John of the Cross meant when he said that the dark night is a positive thing, an opportunity to grow spiritually, a cleansing and purification. Now that the Presence is palpably back in my life, I don't think I will ever again take it for granted. More than that, though, I know that I do have faith, and if it seems weak, I can choose to believe and to ask God to increase my faith, and God will do it.

As much as I do not want to go through another dark night, I am now grateful to God that I was gifted with it. Now, too, I will not fear another dark night should God want to so gift me again.

Darkness

One day my friend, Tom, who works near where I do rushed into my office at the end of the day. With wide eyes and rushed breath, he exclaimed, "Beth, I think the Evil One is after me!"

He went on to explain that he found himself doing things, bad things, that he would never accept from others and had never thought he would even be tempted to do, for example, hitting on women in whom he had no real interest and in spite of the fact that he had a beautiful and loving wife whom he loved and admired. Yet, he was doing these things and could not seem to stop. He also talked about nightmares and feeling alone. To my response as to whether he had prayed for help, he said, "I have not been able to pray for weeks. The words just don't come, and I don't feel like praying, anyway. I guess prayer is simply now something in my past, not in my present or future."

He really was in a lot of trouble! So, although it was difficult for him, I would not let him leave my office until we had prayed together about this problem. Once we started, the words came to him just fine, and we spent nearly a half-hour in heartfelt prayer. When he left, I could see that he was relieved but at the same time still troubled, worried that what he called "the Evil One" was waiting outside my door to pounce on him.

I was a recent convert at the time and had no idea what I was getting into or what to do about it. After Tom left, I asked God to help me understand what was happening to Tom. "Please let me feel what he feels," I begged. "If possible, give me his struggle for I am stronger."

How naive that request was! How arrogant to think I could "handle" it! Immediately, that Presence, which I had begun to take for granted as it had been with me day and night since my conversion, disappeared. If what I had been sensing all around me for months on a 24/7 basis was the Presence of God, then what I was feeling now was the Absence of God. It was a cold, lonely, empty feeling. It was highly disconcerting, and it created incredible yearning. No matter how much I yearned, no matter how much I prayed, no matter how much I begged, the only thing that came to me was Absence. Black, dark, cold, impersonal Absence. Absence in the office. Absence in the hallway. Absence in the parking lot. Absence in the car. Absence at home. Absence!

That night, I fell into bed and immediately nodded off to sleep. Fortunately, I can always fall asleep; that is how I have treated my inability to take painkiller throughout my life: go to sleep in the dentist's chair during no-painkiller root canals, go to sleep during grin-and-bear it biopsies, go to sleep during childbirth. So, in the tormenting presence of the Absence, I fell asleep.

In the morning, I awoke to the Presence again. Yes!

"Where were you last night?" I demanded to know. (Sometimes I wonder why God puts up with me.)

"You asked to feel what Tom was feeling," came the response.

I admitted that I had overestimated my strength. "Please don't ever do that again," I begged. "Don't ever go away. I don't want to be without You." So far, that request has been honored.

A few days later, I happened across a copy of St. John of the Cross's The dark Night of the Soul and read every word eagerly, finding many parallels in this experience but not a complete fit. Nonetheless, I have to wonder if that is what was happening to my friend or if instead he was indeed in the clutches of something evil. I suppose I will never know. I just know two things:

(1) After 20 hours of prayer, together and separately, Tom emerged back into a life dedicated to God; and, most important,

(2) I want the Presence, not the Absence, every day of the rest of my life!