The Soul's Dark Nights

 

I responded to a friend about God's apparent silence sometimes when things are at their lowest, and thought I’d share for encouragement.

I was struck by this passage while re-reading C.S. Lewis' A Grief Observed: 

"You can't see anything properly while your eyes are blurred with tears. You can't, in most things, get what you want if you want it too desperately: anyway, you can't get the best out of it. "Now! Let's have a good talk," reduces everyone to silence, "I must get a good sleep tonight" ushers in hours of wakefulness. Delicious drinks are wasted on a really ravenous thirst. Is it similarly the very intensity of the longing that draws the iron curtain. And so, perhaps, with God. I have gradually come to feel that the door is no longer shut and bolted. Was it my own frantic need that slammed it in my face? The time when there is nothing at all in your soul except a cry for help may be just the time when God can't give it: you are like the drowning man who can't be helped because he clutches and grabs. Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear. On the other hand, 'Knock and it shall be opened.' But does knocking mean hammering and kicking the door like a maniac? And there's also 'To him that hath shall be given.' After all, you must have a capacity to receive, or even Omnipotence can't give."

This perhaps taps into John of the Cross and his "Dark Night of the Soul", where we've sometimes felt that God has been silent throughout the ordeal. With my own sufferings, I have never felt He's been silent or absent, or not speaking into the situation - it may simply be that, as Lewis suggests above, the time to hear Him most clearly comes after the soul's journey towards deeper communion with God, where He knows He has to step back and allow the temporary detachment for surrender, humility, faith and perseverance.

And then, as I was editing recently I came across this passage in my book The Genius of the Invisible God, which I'd not read for a while, but it really spoke to me again:

"I remember reading a profound insight from John of the cross in his Dark Night of the Soul. He says that when God occupies the core of our being with the intention of purifying us, the cleansing process thrusts all the impurities to the surface - where those bad elements of our heart and mind that lie undisturbed in the subductions of our innermost being are lifted to the surface, as God begins to help us expunge them from our being. In order to see light, we have to expunge darkness; in order to be Christ-like, we have to be less viscerally human - and this transformation process, much like how detox removes impurities from our blood, is going to provide us with an honest appraisal of the worst that is in us as well as the best. We'll see ignoble elements to the self that we had grossly underestimated or overlooked altogether, and it will make us feel ashamed. And yet it is at this point that we can feel God working in us with the highest intensity, like precious metal that's put in the fire to be refined, when the detritus burns off, what's left is the radiant presence of Christ. As St. Peter says in his first epistle:

"Do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that has come on you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice inasmuch as you participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may be overjoyed when His glory is revealed."

To truly understand ourselves, we have to truly know ourselves, and that involves facing up to the demons in us as well as the Divine. In other words, part of our spiritual wisdom is in understanding that the painful and hideous processes we endure are opportunities to embrace the work that God is doing in us - and that we wouldn't notice many of these ugly elements of our humanity so intensely if God wasn't doing great things in us. Imagine having the wisdom to know ourselves well enough to consider our suffering, insecurity, shame and regret to be 'pure joy' because we understand what God is inviting us into if we are brave enough to accept. As the 'belly of the whale' reminds us, we have to identify the true essence of an unhelpful thing before we can work on its eradication. It is through allowing God in, in this way, that our pain becomes joy, that our falsehoods become truth, that our ignorance becomes understanding. Just as God saved us by enduring the horror and desolation of being a tortured human, we cannot attain real earthly blessedness without being courageous enough to detoxify the impurities within us. Imagine being so close to God that you begin to understand that He is doing the necessary purification to make you more like Him.