It’s something that I can speak of with a great deal of knowledge, because I’ve had personal experience with it. A lifetime of personal experience with it. And at least in some ways I’ve come to understand it, somewhat. However, it has come to my attention that there may be others of you who are really suffering and don’t get it at all, so I thought I’d put down my thoughts in hopes that it might help some of you out at least in some ways.
IN GOOD COMPANY
First off, remember that you’re not alone when you are feeling as if God is unknowable or simply made up or not listening or anything like it. Everyone goes through times like those, and it is not something that just visits those who are weak in the faith and do not truly love God. Take, for example:
Mother Teresa. We just watched a video about her amazing service in Humanities – you all saw that she was a saintly, pious woman with a deep love for God and serving him through “the poorest of the poor.” But would any of you have guessed that the woman you saw on the video was spiritually dry from the time she left her convent to work with the poor until she died?
In letters she wrote in the 50s and 60s, she said that she felt spiritually dry. [1]
“I am told God lives in me -- and yet the reality of darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul.”
“Where I try to raise my thoughts to heaven, there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives and hurt my very soul. Love -- the word -- it brings nothing.”
“In my soul, I can't tell you how dark it is, how painful, how terrible -- I feel like refusing God.”
Who ever could have guessed that these words came from Bl. Mother Teresa? I believe she would have been the last person I would have guessed, ever.
St. Teresa of Avila. She was a great Christian woman who lived in the 1600s, and was later proclaimed a Doctor of the Church, a great honor held by only three women saints. She also went through an 18 year period of spiritual dryness (along with physical pain caused by an illness).
St. Maria Faustina Kowalska. Another “big name” saint – she’s the reason we have Divine Mercy Sunday. She received revelations from the Lord about the vastness and eternity of God’s mercy for those who turn to him for forgiveness. However, as she records in her diary, she too suffered from times of spiritual dryness. Imagine that – someone who has talked to Jesus in a vision, feeling doubt and fear!
St. Therese of Lisieux. One of the most popular saints of all time, and another Doctor of the Church, and yet she did nothing great in her life except love God! I remember reading her autobiography “Story of a Soul” and being absolutely amazed when she talked about feeling abandoned by God, because she seemed so utterly perfect. I can’t locate my copy at the moment, but here’s what some other people have to say:
“Her celestial Lover, to whom she had offered all, was silent. God did not reply to her prayers, or if He did it was always with a strange kind of "no". Whatever she requested was met with the stone wall, the divine negative, and there is the Cross, her Cross. At times it is ours. But she embraced it in the daily events of a life as her vocation. In illness, spiritual dryness, anguish, she was always doing the small things quietly and well. Here we find the embodied reality that is Therese, the one who never said "no" to the silent God. She has always been a Doctor of the Church for our times as she teaches us her "little way". In this constant fidelity, she never ceased to love this silent God who seemed to say "no".” [2]
“Do not believe I am swimming in consolations; oh, no, my consolation is to have none on earth.” [4]
“From Easter 1896 until her death from tuberculosis on September 30, 1897, at age twenty-four, Thérèse endured a trial of faith of the modern kind, which she described as like being enclosed in a dark tunnel.” [4]
Dame Julian of Norwich. “So he says this: "pray inwardly, even though you find no joy in it. For it does good, even though you feel nothing, see nothing; yes, even though you think you cannot pray. When you are dry and empty, sick and weak, your prayers please me - though there be little enough to please you. All believing prayer is precious to me."” [3]
The Dark Night of the Soul. A “masterpiece in Mystic literature” by St. John of the Cross, a Spanish mystic. The phrase “Dark Night of the Soul” has now become the trademark phrase for spiritual dryness. A sense of emptiness and of being separated from God. And in this work, St. John of the Cross examines the experience as being just another part of a Christian’s journey towards God.
“Later generations of Christian mystics dwelt upon the more desolate kinds of darkness to which the spiritual life can lead: the darkness in which all modes of prayer and spiritual practice become arid, and all consolation in the love of God seems lost. Even in the desolate dark night of the soul, indeed especially there, St. John of the Cross taught, God is present, purifying the soul of all passions and hindrances, and preparing her for the inconceivable blessedness of divine union. Along with dark knowing, there is dark loving, no less ardent for being deprived of all sensible and spiritual vision of the beloved. Therefore St. John can say, “Oh, night more lovely than the dawn, Oh, night that joined Beloved with lover, Lover transformed in the Beloved!”” [4]
I could go on and on with lists of saints who have had extended periods of spiritual dryness. I say extended because everyone has had little times, but some have had it worse than others. So, for my last example:
Jesus Christ, Son of God. “My soul is sorrowful even to death.” (Matthew 26: 38). “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46).
So, we can see that everyone, including the greatest saints and even the Son of God himself, experiences feelings of hopelessness, despair, and doubt.
Part II coming soon.
[1] http://archives.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/asiapcf/south/09/06/teresa.letters/
[2] http://www.ad2000.com.au/articles/1997/oct1997p20_594.html
[3] http://feastofsaints.com/howpray.htm
[4] http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0305/articles/zaleski.html
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