“When the soul enters the dark night, it
brings these kinds of love [love of God and love of sensuality] under control.
It strengthens and purifies the one—namely that which is according to God—and
the other it removes and brings to an end.”
—St
John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul
The refining fire of suffering,
the dark night of the soul, brings each of us afflicted to the precipice of
ghastly experience. At such a place where times are dire, and we are anxious
and fearful beyond where we have been before, we desperately clamber into the
arms of God.
Pleasantries of gallant and
mischievous fellowship are no longer any help to us. We implicitly know the old
way is ineffective. What no longer serves any good is therefore despatched.
Change now becomes us.
The dark night experience has
hastened us to truth; it has quickened us to salvation.
The Glorious Reality of Rock Bottom
None of us really wants to
experience the rock bottom depths of the abyss—a slinking of obliteration into
a graceless pit of disbelieving and stark realism.
But it isn’t until we arrive in
such a place that we instinctively run to God.
God is seen to raise us, but only
once we have died. It is impossible to raise the living. There must be death to
self, first.
It is a wonderful reality, then, if
those who reach their rock bottom, their dark night of the soul, surrender to
such powerful overtures of suffering. In such vagrant incapacity and lack of
spiritual agency we might be tempted to end our lives or run to God—sometimes
choices are that dreadfully polar. Further options present in many levels of
spiritual numbing.
Rock bottoms are never pleasant at
the time, but from later aspects they are marvellous because they push us into
spaces of spiritual conformity. That evening of the dark night the Spirit is
felt summoning our will to join the divine will. We feel cornered and unable to
go any other way. But later, we are credited for having the faith at the
weakest of times to make the right choice and go that way.
Two One-Way Streets
The fact is that two loves
mentioned above—love of God and love of sensuality—are totally incompatible
loves running opposite ways on their own one-way streets.
We can’t go both ways at the same
time. We can’t drive up a one-way street the wrong way for long before we have
a crash.
In consideration of such
incompatible roads we make an early choice.
Love of God or love of sensuality?
We cannot go both ways.
The dark night of the soul brings
a fortuitous crossroad; one etched in pain. It strengthens and purifies our
love for God. It renders void the darker, sensual way. God hones our characters
no better than through the agency of loss. So often, only when we become fully
enamoured to grief will we fall headlong into the arms of God.
© 2012 S. J. Wickham.
Graphic Credit: Fosforix.
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