{"id":26197,"date":"2025-12-08T10:09:53","date_gmt":"2025-12-08T15:09:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=26197"},"modified":"2025-12-08T10:31:00","modified_gmt":"2025-12-08T15:31:00","slug":"26197","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=26197","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Trust In You - Lauren Daigle (Lyrics Video)\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/F4dmG9DU_io?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Trusting the&nbsp;Unknown Path<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Father Richard Rohr describes how he came to trust God in times of uncertainty and even apparent darkness:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I came out of the seminary in 1970 thinking that my job was to have an answer for every question. What I\u2019ve learned is that not-knowing and often not even needing to know are\u2014surprise of surprises\u2014deeper ways of knowing and a deeper falling into compassion. This is surely what the mystics mean by \u201cdeath\u201d and why they talk of it with so many metaphors. It is the essential transition. Maybe that is why Jesus praised faith even more than love; maybe that is why St. John of the Cross called faith \u201cluminous darkness.\u201d Yes,<strong> love is the final goal but&nbsp;<em>ever deeper trust inside of darkness<\/em>&nbsp;is the path for getting there. [1]<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>My good friend Gerald May shed fresh light on the meaning of John of the Cross\u2019 phrase \u201cthe dark night of the soul.\u201d He said that <strong>God has to work in the soul<em>&nbsp;in secret<\/em>&nbsp;and\u202f&nbsp;<em>in darkness<\/em>, because if we fully knew what was happening, and what Mystery\/God\/grace will eventually ask of us, we would either try to take charge or to stop the whole process.<\/strong> May writes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\">\n<p>The dark night is a profoundly good thing. It is an <strong>ongoing spiritual process in which we are liberated from attachments and compulsions and empowered to live and love more freely<\/strong>. Sometimes this letting go of old ways is painful, occasionally even devastating. But this is not why the night is called \u201cdark.\u201d The darkness of the night implies nothing sinister, only that the <strong>liberation takes place in hidden ways, beneath our knowledge and understanding. <\/strong>It happens mysteriously, in secret, and beyond our conscious control. [2]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>No one oversees their own demise willingly, even when it is the false self that is dying. God has to undo our illusions secretly, as it were, when we are not watching and not in perfect control, say the mystics. We move forward in ways that we do not even understand and through the quiet workings of time and grace, as \u201cdeep calls unto deep\u201d (Psalm 42:8). In other words, the Spirit initiates deep resonance and intimacy with our spirit, as the endless divine yes evokes an ever-deeper yes in us. [3]<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As James Finley, one of CAC\u2019s core faculty members, says, \u201cThe mystic is not someone who says, \u2018Look what I have done!\u2019 The mystic is <strong>one who says, \u2018Look what love has done to me. There\u2019s nothing left but God\u2019s intimate love giving itself to me as me.\u2019<\/strong> That\u2019s the blessedness in poverty: <strong>when all in us that is not God dissolves, and we finally realize that we are already as beautiful as God is beautiful, because God gave the infinite beauty of God as who we are.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">A Dance of Intimacy<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Richard Rohr reflects on the dance of divine intimacy:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The divine-human love affair really is a reciprocal dance. Sometimes, in order for us to step forward, our partner must step away a bit. The withdrawal lasts only a moment, and <strong>its purpose is to pull us closer\u2014but it doesn\u2019t feel like that in the moment. It feels like our partner is retreating<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>God creates the pullback,&nbsp;<\/em>\u201chiding his face,\u201d as it was called by many mystics and scriptures. <strong>God creates a vacuum that God alone can fill. <\/strong>Then God waits to see if we will trust our God partner to eventually fill that space within us, which now has grown even more spacious and receptive. This is the <strong>central theme of darkness, necessary doubt, or what the mystics call \u201cGod\u2019s withdrawing of love.<\/strong>\u201d What feels like suffering, depression, uselessness\u2014moments when God has withdrawn\u2014are often deep acts of trust and <strong>invitations to intimacy on God\u2019s part. <\/strong>On the soul\u2019s inner journey, we meet a God who interacts with our deepest selves, allowing and forgiving mistakes. <strong>It is precisely this give-and-take, and knowing there will be give-and-take, that makes God so real as a Lover<\/strong>. [1]<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>A translator of Spanish mystic John of the Cross (1542\u00ad\u20131591), Mirabai Starr offers this stirring description of the dark night, in which God moves from dynamic presence to loving absence:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Say when you were very young the veil lifted just enough for you to glimpse the underlying Real behind it and then dropped again. Maybe it never recurred, but you could not forget. And this discovery became the prime mover of the rest of your life in ways you may not have even noticed\u2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Say these [spiritual] practices fill your heart. They make you&nbsp;<em>feel&nbsp;<\/em>holiness like wind through every fiber of your being and&nbsp;<em>think<\/em>&nbsp;rivers of holy thoughts\u2026. The passion of your love for God intensifies\u2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Say prayer starts to dry up on your tongue. Sacred literature becomes fallen leaves, blows away. Meditation brings no serenity anymore. Devotion grows brittle, cracks. The God you bow down to no longer draws you\u2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Say each of the familiar spiritual rooms you go to seeking refuge are dark now, and empty. You sit down anyway. You take off your clothes at the door and enter naked. All agendas have fallen away\u2026. This quietude deepens in proportion to your surrender.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Say what\u2019s secretly going on is that the Beloved is loving you back. That your first glimpse of the Absolute was God\u2019s first great gift to you. That your years of revelation inside his many vessels was his second gift, wherein, like a mother, he was holding you, like a child, close to his breast, tenderly feeding you. <strong>And that this darkness of the soul you have come upon and cannot seem to come out of is his final and greatest gift to you.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Because it is only in this vast emptiness that he can enter, as your Beloved, and fill you. Where the darkness is nothing but unutterable radiance<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Trusting the&nbsp;Unknown Path Father Richard Rohr describes how he came to trust God in times of uncertainty and even apparent darkness: I came out of the seminary in 1970 thinking that my job was to have an answer for every question. What I\u2019ve learned is that not-knowing and often not even needing to know are\u2014surprise [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26197"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26197"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26197\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26201,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26197\/revisions\/26201"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}