The year 2020 has been a Dark Night for so many people in many ways: Material, Spiritual, Mental, Emotional, Social. Since it is coming to an end today, I thought I would reflect on the very first time in my life of faith that I remember encountering a "Dark Night" of faith.
In my early Journey with Christ, I experienced the “second watch” of John of the Cross’ “Dark Night of the Soul” (although I did not know it at the time). As John details, the First watch is the darkness of sense and desire, fasting from what satisfies the senses, and falling into the darkness of hunger and thirst and yearning. The Second watch: The darkness of faith, of leaping from the bright deceptions of the world into the deeper Truth unknown to us. The Third watch: Union with the God who transcends all knowledge and categories, the Ground and Abyss of Reality. The darkness of this third watch comes from the blinding brilliance of the Light of God. Just as our physical eyes are blinded and sight is darkened In my staring directly into the noonday sun, so also our spiritual and mental eyes are blinded and all else is darkened from staring directly at the uncreated Light of God.
In my Journey with Jesus I have experienced each of these watches many times in sickness and dryness and crisis of various types. But this is the first time since my conversion to Christ in 1992 that I can remember experiencing a dark night of the soul. Here is how it came about:
Once on the night shift, as a social worker in the living room of Sheltering Arms youth shelter circa 1994, I was reading a book of simplistic rationalist evangelical apologetics by Josh McDowell or Norm Geisler. The cold logic and simplicity of the "proofs" of Christianity overcame me and I prayed to God: “How can people reject faith? The evidence is overwhelming! Any right thinking person would be convinced by this without doubt. Only the willfully ignorant and truth denying would reject the Christian faith!”
After this prayer, I almost immediately lost the subjective certitude of my faith for the next three days. My belief became intellectually arid. A dry skeleton devoid of muscle and blood and tissue and vitality. I rehearsed and re-rehearsed the proofs and evidence that struck me as so intellectually and spiritually satisfying the day before. No living water seeped into my dry husk of a soul. I could not feel my faith, and the whole of Christianity became a set of dead facts rattling around in my head, like knowledge of dead empires and deceased rulers.
On the third day— I am sure this is no accident— the subjective vitality of faith resurrected again within me and arose within my consciousness to enliven the Way of Christ again. And the unheard, yet still small Voice within, spoke to me in the impressions of my thoughts:
Never forget that faith is a gift of grace, and not the result of the works of intellectual labor or creative genius. These may pave the way for the Spirit to move more effectively and remove barriers to belief, but they do not cause the life giving vitality of the Spirit to work. This is all the Spirit’s activity. The best we can do is clean the conduit for Living Water to flow, but we do not contain or constrain that Water within us. Grace, grace. All is grace.
Remember also that knowledge about Christ and the events of God’s action in History is NOT the same as knowing Christ relationally and personally and passionately and subjectively. Endlessly collecting knowledge about someone without knowing them personally makes you a stalker, not a lover or a friend. To be a lover of God or a friend of Christ, our knowledge— however meager or vast it may be— has to be oriented to loving and living with and in Christ’s Spirit. Without relationship, knowledge is a curse rather than a blessing.
Such is my first experience of the dark night and the resurrection of faith that Christ will eventually work in all of us.
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