Celebrate the Darkness, Part 1

The Signature of Jesus, by Brennan Manning
CHAPTER 7

A certain Christian thought it was of vital importance to be poor and austere. It had never dawned on him that the vitally important thing was to drop his ego, that the ego fattens on holiness just as much as on worldliness, on poverty as on riches, on austerity as on luxury. There is nothing the ego will not seize upon to inflate itself.

Death to self is necessary in order to live for God. A crucifixion of the ego is required. That is why mature Christian prayer inevitably leads to the purification of what St. John of the Cross called the dark night of the senses and the spirit which, through loneliness and aridity, buries egoism and leads us out of ourselves to experience God.

The “dark night” is a very real place, as anyone who has been there will tell you. Alan Jones calls it “the second conversion.” While the first conversion was characterized by joy and enthusiasm and filled with felt consolation and a profound sense of God’s presence, the second is marked y dryness, barrenness, desolation, and a profound sense of God’s absence. The dark night is an indispensable stage of spiritual growth both for the individual Christian and the church.

Merton writes:

“There is an absolute need for the solitary, bare, dark, beyond-thought, beyond-feeling type of prayer…Unless that dimension is there in the church somewhere, the whole caboodle lacks life and intelligence. It is a kind of hidden, secret, unknown stabilizer and compass, too. About this I have no hesitation or doubts.”

Though painful, the purification of the ego in the dark night is the high road to Christian freedom and maturity. In fact, it is often an answer to prayer.

Have you ever prayed that you might be more prayerful? Have you ever prayed for a lively and conscious awareness of God’s indwelling presence throughout the day? Have you ever prayed that you might be gentle and humble in heart? Have you ever asked for a spirit of detachment from material things, personal relationships, and creature comforts? Have you ever cried out for an increase in faith?

I know I have, and I suspect that we have all prayed often for these spiritual gifts. But I wonder if we really meant what we said when we asked for these things? Did we really want what we asked for? I think not. Otherwise why did we recoil in shock and sorrow when our prayers were answered? The suffering involved in arriving at the answer made us sorry we ever asked in the first place.

We ask for spiritual growth and Christian maturity, but we really don’t want them—at least not in the way God choose to grant them. For example, if we ask the Lord to make us more prayerful, how does he answer our prayer? By bringing us to our knees in adversity and suffering. Have you ever heard of a Christian complain, “What happened? The week after was I ‘born again,’ all hell broke loose. I lost my job and my car keys, quarreled with my wife, got on the wrong plane, and wound up in Philadelphia instead of San Francisco.”

Through a sequence of human events (divinely inspired), the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ leads us into a state of interior devastation. When we are like this, it is highly probable (though not inevitable) that we become more prayerful. Up to now perhaps we have not been praying in depth. But now we are truly praying. We might not be saying all that many prayers, and we might not be following the set formulas that we presumed were prayer, but we are praying as never before. God is drawing us closer to himself. We ask, “What’s happening?” And the answer comes: “Don’t you remember? This is what you asked for. There is no cheap grace. You wanted to be more prayerful. Now you are.”

Our original petition was to achieve a constant state of prayerfulness. Well, nothing inspires prayer like adversity, sorrow, and humiliation. In these broken times we pray at our best. Our prayer rises in simplicity.

When we pray for the gift of a prayerful heart, the Lord strips away props we might lean on and leads us into spiritual desolation, into the dark night of the soul, in order that we might pray with a pure heart.

We cry to the Lord, “Make me what I should be, change me, whatever the cost.” When we have said these dangerous words, we should be prepared for God to hear them. These words are dangerous because God’s love is remorseless. God wants our salvation with the determination due its importance.

Jesus says, “Learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart” (Matthew 11:29). So we respond, “Jesus, gentle and humble in heart, make my heart like yours.”

Now we are really in for it! We have just opened Pandora’s box. Why? Because we don’t learn humility by reading about it in spiritual books or listening to its praises in sermons. We learn humility directly from the Lord Jesus in whatever way he wishes to teach us. Most often we learn humility through humiliation.

What is humility? It is the stark realization that acceptance of the fact that I am totally dependent upon God’s love and mercy. It grows through a stripping away of all self-sufficiency. Humility is not caught by repeating pious phrases; it is accomplished by the hand of God. It is Job on the dunghill all over again as God reminds us that he is our only true hope.

Biblically, there is nothing more detestable than a self-sufficient person. He is so full of himself, so swollen with pride and conceit that he is insufferable.

The school of humiliation is a great learning experience; there is no other like it. When the gift of a humble heart is granted, we are more accepting of ourselves and less critical of others. Self-knowledge brings a humble and realistic awareness of our limitations. It leads us to be patient and compassionate with others, whereas before we were demanding, insensitive, and stuck-up. Gone are the complacency and narrow-mindedness that made God superfluous. For the humble person there is a constant awareness of his or her own weakness, insufficiency, and desperate need for God.

Of course, the most withering experience of ego-reduction occurs when we pray, “Lord, increase my faith.” We need to tread carefully here, because the life of pure faith is the dark night. In this “night” God allows us to live by faith and faith alone. Mature faith cannot grow when we are surfeited with all kinds of spiritual comforts and consolations. All these must be removed if we are to advance in the pure trust of God. The Lord withdraws all tangible supports to purify our hearts, to discern if we are in love with the gifts of the Giver or the Giver of the gifts.

“The question is, do I worship God or do I worship my experience of God? Do I worship God or do I worship my idea of him? If I am to avoid a narcotic approach to religion that forces me to stagger from experience to experience hoping for bigger and better things, I must know what I believe apart from the nice or nasty feelings that may or may not accompany such a belief. The second conversion (the dark night of the soul) has to do with learning to cope and flourish when the warm feelings, consolations, and props that accompany the first conversion are withdrawn. Does faith evaporate when the initial feelings dissolve? In psychological terms, the ego has to break; and this breaking is like entering into a great darkness. Without such a struggle and affliction, there can be no movement in love.”
Alan Jones Soul Making: The Desert Way of Spirituality

After a long period of dryness, emptiness, and aridity, without any preparation or warning, we find Jesus again. And, then we complain and ask where the Lord was when we were so far down the well. The answer Jesus gives us leads us into a new depth of faith: “During all your temptations and emptiness I have remained with you in the depths of your heart. Otherwise, you could not have overcome them.”

At that critical moment, we surrender forever our old concept of the presence of God. Jesus’ words teach us that his presence in our heart was something deeper and holier than we could imagine or feel. Human feelings cannot touch him and human thoughts cannot measure him. Personal experience cannot heighten the certainly of his presence any more than the absence of experience can lessen it. These words make us realize as never before that nothing but, grave, conscious, deliberate sin could separate us from the Beloved of our soul. Not noise or irritating people, distractions or temptations; not feelings of consolation or desolation, success or failure; nothing but turning back could ever separate us from the love of God made visible of Jesus Christ our Lord. He would always be there in the quiet darkness just as he promised: Be not afraid. I will be with you. We lose the presence of God only to find it again in the “deep and dazzling darkness” of a richer faith. The dark night was an answered prayer. We are free to celebrate the darkness. We tend to believe that when we no longer feel the presence and consolation of God, he is no longer there.

The theology of St. John of the Cross regarding the dark night:

“The first sign of the dark night of the soul is that we no longer have any pleasure or consolation either in God or in creation. Nothing pleases us. Nothing touches us. Everything and everyone seem dull and uninteresting. Life is dust and aches in the mouth. The second sign is an abiding and biting sense of failure, even though the believer conscientiously tried to center her life on God. There is a sense of never having done enough and of needing to atone for something that has no name. The third sign, and the one that is most threatening to us today, is that it is no longer possible to pray or meditate with the imagination. Images, pictures, and metaphors no longer seem to reach us. God (if he is there) no longer communicates with us through the senses. In more modern terms, it is a matter of living from a center other than the ego. Even to begin to do this is to enter a great darkness, a new kind of light or illumination comes; and through it our relationship to God, although more hidden than before, becomes deeper and more direct.”