Dec. 14, 2018: St. John of the Cross
Dec. 14, 2018: St. John of the Cross
Aging and the Dark Night of Faith
By Susan Muto and Fr. Adrian van Kamp
The dark night that seems endless often comes when a person is middle-aged and already experiencing stress in life. What will help me to remain faithful when I feel like giving up?
As we move into winter, it’s obvious that nature has changed her scene. Autumn has stripped the trees, and their colorful foliage is a thing of the past. The change of seasons is an integral part of nature’s year. Although we often wish to hasten the dismal winter days toward spring, we realize that one season has to pass to bring about the other. So we wait patiently.
Human nature affords us the same possibility of changing the seasons that seem to be interwoven in our life cycle. In the “summers” of life, we experience exhilaration, openness, and the freedom to meet new challenges. In the “autumns” we suffer a loss or a stripping of vitality. In the “springs” we know the wholeness and growth of peace and joy. Before this time of newness and growth, there was the “winter” —a period of death and dying, or a time of struggle and suffering.
To most of us, winter seems bleak and all but dead. In actuality growth continues in hiddenness, below the soil. During the winter months, plant life withdraws to recoup its forces and to prepare for the new thrust of spring.
With adequate reflection, we can see the same cycle of nature exemplified in our own lives. There are stages throughout life when we must withdraw into our inner center and let the darkness come upon us. During middle age, life seems to lose its meaning, and obligations become oppressive. At this time weariness often overtakes us.
Just as we don’t see what’s happening below the surface during nature’s winter months, so in faith we must believe that although he’s presently unseen, God is effecting an interior growth in us. Being at home with this mystery can help us to wait patiently and live through the dark night that seems endless.
If we believe that this darkness is from God, we might find that he’s calling us to a deeper commitment: to shed the bleakness of what we feel for the blessedness of who we are.
In our solitude we might discover that we’re extinguishing the light ourselves by our overly active life, by our doing in preference to our being, by interior noise rather than silence.
If we honestly evaluate ourselves in this season of our life, we might see that the darkness is in reality a light to see what must be changed. Then, in God’s time, he may once again bring forth within us a new spring and a realization that “. . . lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth, the time of singing has come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land” (Song of Sol. 2: 11-12).
As we seek to open ourselves to deeper experiences of God’s presence, we might have to endure prolonged periods when we feel abandoned by the one who promised to be with us always. In the past we might have felt joy and a sense of peace when we prayed.
This experience of God’s presence seemed to permeate our whole life. We knew that God was always with us, that he truly was our rock of refuge, our loving Father. We felt as secure and content as a child who slips his hand into his parent’s grasp. Consolations come because God knows that our faith isn’t yet strong enough to do without them.
The time arrives when we find few, if any, “good feelings” in prayer. It feels as if God has withdrawn to a place far away from us. This is when we need “pure faith” and deep trust to believe in God’s constant loving presence when there are no consolations, no sensible signs of his nearness.
In the midst of this crisis of transcendence, we might find it difficult to pray. We might feel little or no consolation from spiritual exercises such as scripture reading and meditation. The truth that God is faithful to us is the only consolation to which we can cling (cf. 1 Cor. 10: 13).
Spiritual masters such as St. John of the Cross assure us that through such a “dark night of the soul” God is preparing us to experience deeper, more contemplative forms of prayer. In fact, the dark night seems to be a necessary period of purification, preceding our entrance into the adulthood of the spiritual life. In a comparable manner, physical separation from our mother prepares us for a more mature relationship with her and with our whole family.
Our loving Father asks us to trust him despite this dearth of consolation. He invites us to identify with his Son on the Cross, who in his dark night of suffering prayed, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matt. 27: 46). If we can echo these words of faith, we can be sure that Jesus will help us to surrender as he did while praying, “Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit” (Luke 23: 46).
The bedrock of our belief is that the Father, whose Son conquered death, will raise us from our death-like dark nights and bring us to the dawn of Easter morning. In this radiant light we’re illumined and transformed in God, as St. John of the Cross explains in this poetic affirmation:
O night that has united
The Lover with his beloved,
Transforming the beloved in her Lover.
Our inability to understand what’s happening to us is a contributing factor to every dark-night experience. We don’t choose it. It falls upon us with its seemingly endless bouts of aridity. We don’t see anymore; we don’t know anymore. We’re no longer in charge of our destiny, but we do have a choice: either to let God be God or to become more frustrated by our lack of understanding.
In a dark-night experience there’s no way out; there’s only a way through, and that’s the way of letting our intellect be purified by faith, our memory by hope, our will by love.
We find it difficult to be this detached, to feel so defenseless and alone before God in the nakedness of our small and limited being. If we respond in trust to these experiences, sobering as they are, we might be able to sing with St. John:
O guiding night!
O night more lovely than the dawn!
To grow in wisdom, age, and grace before God and others is to face the truth of who we are. When we lose our illusions of unlimited strength, we grow in humility. Self-knowledge of this intensity is always painful.
As in a mid-life crisis, we have to face the reality of all that we will never be, of all that we haven’t done. Our choice is to dwell either on what we’ve lost (our ego-self) or on what we’ve gained (our Christ-self) and the gifts of trust and patient endurance that accompany this call to discipleship.
-“Am I Living a Spiritual Life? Questions and Answers for Those Who Pray” by Susan Muto and Fr. Adrian van Kaam
