Tags
22, acedia, Dark Night of the Soul, grace, In Speech and in Silence, prayer, silence, speech, St. John of the Cross, theosis
As you may have noticed, there has been a slight lapse in Words for the Way. That was because early last Friday afternoon, a contractor for one of the major cable-phone-internet conglomerates apparently cut the landline leading to our house, leaving us “in the dark” so to speak in terms of our ability to connect to the Internet. And believe you me, in a world of interconnected friends, family, entertainment, and intellectual endeavors, being in the dark can seem scary. This is a very tangible feeling, not being able to communicate or, rather, interact, in our accustomed way. Okay, we still had celluar and data access through cells, but it’s not the same thing, if for no other reason than data limits. We’re back “in the light” now, as it were, thanks to a dispatched technician who diagnosed our trouble and gave us a temporary patch: a surface cable connecting house to the network; with the promise that a crew will come out ‘later’ to rebury the cable.
Something like this happens to us in the spiritual realm, for those who are accustomed to an active contemplative prayer life with God 1 who suddenly find a veil, as it were, descending upon them. This is the “infamous” Dark Night of the Soul of St. John of the Cross. Essentially, it is a way to God through which God teaches us to rely on Him, and on Him alone, and not even on our prayer, by withdrawing His presence from our prayer and causing it to become “dry”, unfruitful, causing doubts in our mind about the sincerity of our prayer. At the same time it takes careful discernment and the aegis of a spiritual director or father confessor to recognize this particular gift of the Father of Lights, and to distinguish it from spiritual acedia -or sloth.
Just as suddenly though, the connection will be returned (through no power of ourselves), and the love of God will flood into our prayer. This is the temporary patch, and later the Spirit will rebury the cable of prayer through the instrumentality of the sacraments and other visible means of grace.
This leads me to my point, God leads us, and directs us, and yes, even teaches us, in saying no as well as in saying yes, or in saying wait; He shows us through failures as much, if not more so than successes ,what it is to serve Him; He allows temptations to befall us as reminders of our need for His Grace as well as our inability to come to Him on our own, as much as He allows moments of theosis –spiritual transformative unification to clarify our relationship with Him- ; and yes, He leads us to His will in silence as well as speech, urging us to keep listening, to strain the ears of our heart, even when that still small voice has grown silent, so that when we do finally hear His voice again, it is as the roar of mighty lions.
Incidentally, the title of this post is also a play on words on a title of Jewish spirituality In Speech and In Silence : The Jewish Quest for God by R. David J Wolpe. I haven’t finished it yet, but I’ve made a start, and what it has to say about the power of words, and of language to bring us closer to God and to lead us astray from Him creates such a resonance in my heart that I want to shout, “Yes, this is it” (But that might worry the neighbors, if they bothered to care in the first place. But that, again, is another post, for later on and further in).
note:
Full Disclosure: I am not (yet) one of those. I can go days without talking to God in prayer and not realize that I’ve been missing out on anything, where “talking to God” is more than blessing food, or offering up ejaculatory prayers during the day but the capacity of just being still and silent before Him. My ever-blushing Saralyn on the other hand is on a constant conference-call with God and has Him on speed dial (her words). Then again, she finds it hard to accept or believe that I don’t talk to God that way every day; to her I’ve done it so long that it’s ingrained and I don’t event think about it I just do it, and whatever doubts I have come from my tendency to over-think. She could be right. On the other hand, it doesn’t stop me from feeling a though my prayer life is not as it should -or could- be. On the other hand, the day when we stop worrying about whether we’re praying as we should is the day we need to start worrying.)
Holy Mary, Our Lady of Walsingham, whose Dark Night won for us countless blessings, and through whose silence the example of Christian prayer was born, pray for us