Hpe in the Darkness

Two Kinds of Darkness
Tuesday, September 5, 2017

Tuesday, September 5, 2017
Darkness is a good and necessary teacher. It is not to be avoided, denied, run from, or explained away. First, like Ezekiel the prophet, we must eat the scroll that is “lamentation, wailing, and moaning” in our belly, and only eventually becomes sweet as honey (see Ezekiel 2:9-10; 3:1-3).
By the time most people reach middle age, they’ve had days where life has lost its meaning, they no longer connect with an inner sense of motivation or joy. Sometimes this manifests as clinical depression and requires a therapist’s skilled care and medication. But even if we don’t experience depression, most of us go through a period of darkness, doubt, and malaise at some point in our lives.
There’s a darkness that we are led into by our own stupidity, sin (the illusion of separation), and selfishness (living out of the false self). We have to work our way out of this kind of darkness by brutal honesty, confession, surrender, forgiveness, apology, and restitution. It may feel simultaneously like dying and being liberated. We resist going through the darkness and facing our shadow, so we usually need help, as the Twelve Steps wisely identify. An accountability partner, spiritual director, or counselor can help us navigate this difficult, ego-humiliating process.
There’s another darkness that we’re led into by God, grace, and the nature of life itself. In many ways, the loss of meaning, motivation, purpose, and direction might feel even greater here. The saints and mystics called it “the dark night of the soul.” But even while we feel alone and that God has abandoned us, we sense that we have been led here intentionally. We know we are in “liminal space,” betwixt and between, on the threshold—and we have to stay here until we have learned something essential. It is still no fun and filled with doubt and “demons” of every sort. But it is the darkness of being held closely by God without our awareness. This is where transformation happens.
The darkness that we get ourselves into by our own “sinful” choices can also become the darkness of God. Regardless of the cause, the dark night is an opportunity to look for and find God—in different forms and ways than we’ve become accustomed. Even if we don’t feel like praying, staying committed to contemplative practice is particularly important.
Sometimes it may be tempting to remain in the darkness—it becomes familiar and we rebel against the light; the paralysis and self-pity has a strange attraction. We may feel an inner restlessness, as if we’re aimlessly pacing back and forth on the same path. Allowing periods of this seemingly fruitless darkness may be part of deconstructing our false self so that we can rebuild on the foundation of our True Self. We must lose our old image of God and our old ways of experiencing God’s presence to discover the absolute reality beneath all of our egoic fantasies and fears.
Gateway to Silence:
The night shines like the day.

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Oswald Chambers

Watching with Jesus

Stay here and watch with Me. —Matthew 26:38

Entering the Dark Wood
Monday, September 4, 2017 Richard Rohr

The mystics of all the great religions, along with classic literature like Homer’s Odyssey, intuited that life was a journey involving completion of a first half and transition to a second half, sometimes called “a further journey.” Yet most of us were given the impression that life was a matter of learning and obeying the rules; and those who obeyed them won. Many of our pastoral problems and the foundational alienation from religion in Europe and North America stem from the lack of initiation and depth. Mainline Christianity does not seem to be giving people access to God, to the soul, or to the joy and freedom promised in the Scriptures. Christianity is not doing its primary job well—moving people from the first to the second half of life.

At some point along the journey, if you’re honest and open, you will realize there’s more to life. This experience is hardly inviting or encouraging, and so many of us turn back. Dante describes the human experience: “In the middle of life, I found myself in a dark wood.” [1] If you’re letting life happen to you, you will be led to the dark wood where you have to ask: “What does it all mean? Why am I doing this? Why don’t I feel fully alive or that my life has meaning? What am I doing wrong?” Most of us have bouts of immense self-doubt and even sometimes self-hatred at this point.

This is why Jesus says, “By faith you will be saved” (Luke 7:50, 18:42). It is only by a foundational trust in the midst of suffering, some ability to bear darkness and uncertainty, and learning to be comfortable with paradox and mystery, that you move from the first half of life to the second half.

Novelist Robertson Davies wrote, “One always learns one’s mystery at the price of one’s innocence.” [2] The word innocent comes from the Latin for unwounded or not harmed. The innocent one hasn’t yet learned from his or her wounds, and therefore doesn’t know his or her full reality yet. Human life only develops in the shadowlands, never inside of pure light or total darkness.

When you’ve stumbled—and the guilt, loneliness, and fear come to assault you—if you don’t have at least one good friend, or if you have not developed a prayer life where you know how to find yourself in God instead of in your own feelings, you will simply retrench and reassert your correctness. You’ll learn nothing and remain in the first half of life, maintaining your container and supposed identity. This explains why most people are stuck in the first half of life. This is especially true for people who are highly successful or have been able to avoid all suffering. If you only move from success to success, or you never live in solidarity with the suffering of others, you normally know very little about your own soul.

Gateway to Silence:
The night shines like the day.

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His! Oswald Chambers

They were Yours, You gave them to Me… —John 17:6

A missionary is someone in whom the Holy Spirit has brought about this realization: “You are not your own” (1 Corinthians 6:19). To say, “I am not my own,” is to have reached a high point in my spiritual stature. The true nature of that life in actual everyday confusion is evidenced by the deliberate giving up of myself to another Person through a sovereign decision, and that Person is Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit interprets and explains the nature of Jesus to me to make me one with my Lord, not that I might simply become a trophy for His showcase. Our Lord never sent any of His disciples out on the basis of what He had done for them. It was not until after the resurrection, when the disciples had perceived through the power of the Holy Spirit who Jesus really was, that He said, “Go” (Matthew 28:19; also see Luke 24:49 and Acts 1:8).

“If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple” (Luke 14:26). He was not saying that this person cannot be good and upright, but that he cannot be someone over whom Jesus can write the word Mine. Any one of the relationships our Lord mentions in this verse can compete with our relationship with Him. I may prefer to belong to my mother, or to my wife, or to myself, but if that is the case, then, Jesus said, “[You] cannot be My disciple.” This does not mean that I will not be saved, but it does mean that I cannot be entirely His.

Our Lord makes His disciple His very own possession, becoming responsible for him. “…you shall be witnesses to Me…” (Acts 1:8). The desire that comes into a disciple is not one of doing anything for Jesus, but of being a perfect delight to Him. The missionary’s secret is truly being able to say, “I am His, and He is accomplishing His work and His purposes through me.”

Be entirely His!

Cosmic Forgiveness

In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world’s rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned. —Annie Dillard [1]

The Gospel accepts that life is tragic, but it graciously adds that we can survive and will even grow from this tragedy. This is the great turnaround! It all depends on whether we are willing to see down as up and learn to draw upon the Infinite Source.

We should have been prepared for this pattern, given that the whole drama was set in motion by a seeming “transgression” of Adam and Eve, and then the whole world was redeemed, say many Christians, by an act of violent murder! The problem is part of the solution. The genius of the biblical revelation is that it refuses to deny the dark side of things, but forgives failure and integrates falling to achieve wholeness.

Jesus is never upset at “sinners”; he is only upset with people who do not think they are sinners! Jesus was fully at home with a tragic sense of life. He lived, died, and rose inside it. Jesus’ ability to find a higher order inside constant disorder is the very heart of his message—and why true Gospel, as rare as it might be, still heals and renews all that it touches.

Jesus found and named the unified field beneath all the contradictions, which Annie Dillard speaks of. If we do not find that unified field, “our complex and inexplicable caring for each other,” or what Buddhists call the Great Compassion, there is no healing to life’s inconsistencies and contradictions. Paul would call the unified field love: “It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Corinthians 13:7). Mature spirituality is about getting you back and down into the unified field, where you started anyway.

The forgiveness we truly need goes beyond forgiveness for this or that transgression. Ultimately, we each need universal, cosmic forgiveness for being who I am and for reality being what it is. The struggle to forgive this simultaneously broken and unified field of reality breaks us through to nondual consciousness. This is key! And, remember, in that inspired story of Adam and Eve, it is God who “made tunics of skins to clothe them” and take away their shame and sense of separateness (Genesis 3:21). God reminds them of the unified field, or “the house of belonging” as poet David Whyte loves to call it [2], even as they depart the garden of innocence and naivety.

Gateway to Silence:
Create in me a clean heart. —Psalm 51:10

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Destined To Be Holy
…it is written, “Be holy, for I am holy.” —1 Peter 1:16

We must continually remind ourselves of the purpose of life. We are not destined to happiness, nor to health, but to holiness. Today we have far too many desires and interests, and our lives are being consumed and wasted by them. Many of them may be right, noble, and good, and may later be fulfilled, but in the meantime God must cause their importance to us to decrease. The only thing that truly matters is whether a person will accept the God who will make him holy. At all costs, a person must have the right relationship with God.

Do I believe I need to be holy? Do I believe that God can come into me and make me holy? If through your preaching you convince me that I am unholy, I then resent your preaching. The preaching of the gospel awakens an intense resentment because it is designed to reveal my unholiness, but it also awakens an intense yearning and desire within me. God has only one intended destiny for mankind— holiness. His only goal is to produce saints. God is not some eternal blessing-machine for people to use, and He did not come to save us out of pity— He came to save us because He created us to be holy. Atonement through the Cross of Christ means that God can put me back into perfect oneness with Himself through the death of Jesus Christ, without a trace of anything coming between us any longer.

Never tolerate, because of sympathy for yourself or for others, any practice that is not in keeping with a holy God. Holiness means absolute purity of your walk before God, the words coming from your mouth, and every thought in your mind— placing every detail of your life under the scrutiny of God Himself. Holiness is not simply what God gives me, but what God has given me that is being exhibited in my life.