Faith and the Dark Night of the Soul

In “Abandonment to Divine Providence” (a book I highly, highly recommend!) Jean-Pierre de Caussade writes, “The life of faith is the untiring pursuit of God through all that disguises and disfigures him and, as it were, destroys and annihilates him.”  An amazingly powerful quote and yet at the same time not something we want to hear.  If were honest we’d probably admit that we’d like faith to be easy, to sail through pain and hardship with ease, solid in our faith like  a rock.

Of course life’s not like that.  As much as we may grow in our faith during good times, it never quite fully prepares us for the hard times.  No matter how strongly we believed before, doubt creeps in during those dark nights of the soul, as St. John of the Cross referred to them.  But of course that’s why faith is so hard sometimes.  It takes work to find God in the darkness; to force yourself to turn to Him in prayer when you don’t want to; to have faith when life’s experiences are screaming at us that God is either a fairytale or imaginably cruel.

Though we may not like it, tough times test our mettle (there’s a reason faith is a virtue!). They provide the most opportunity for us to grow in our relationship with God and they also provide opportunity for us to demonstrate our faith to others.  Your friends may not think much of you going to Church every week (or more often, for our Catholic friends out there), but they’ll notice the amazing calm you have before your wife’s surgery, or the hope and strength you display through the pain of your mother’s funeral.

And while knowing all this certainly doesn’t make me ask for these dark nights of the soul to come upon me, it does give me great solace when they do.

Does Suffering and Pain have Meaning, Purpose?

Suffering.  I know it’s kind of a depressing way to begin my foray into the blogosphere, but it’s been weighing heavily on me lately.  How can we make sense of pain?  How can we find meaning in tragedies and disasters that seem completely pointless and devastating?  How can we move past all the platitudes of well-intentioned loved ones who just don’t know what to say and instead find relief, healing, purpose?

God knows I don’t have the answer, but I’m comforted by the knowledge that He does.  Though in a particular moment it may not make me “feel” better, knowing that in His omniscience and omnipotence He can imbue everything with significance and purpose is an immense lightening of my burden.  How do I know that He can (and perhaps more importantly, will) do that?  Because He already has.  In fact, He took the worst of all possible suffering and turned it into the greatest of victories.  He turned the greatest of all injustices, the cruelest of all tortures, the worst crime in all humanity…deicide, the murder of God, the Crucifixion of Jesus…and turned in into humanity’s chance at Salvation.  While this boggles my mind a bit, it also gives me immense hope.  If He can turn the greatest suffering into the greatest purpose, how much more easily He can do it with my hurts and struggles!

When I’m in pain I sometimes wonder what Mary or John thought as Jesus’ body was taken down from the Cross.  Surely in their pain they wondered why God would let such a thing happen.  Surely they wondered if God was going to be true to His promises, if there could possibly be any reason whatsoever for Jesus meeting such a cruel and unfair end.  And for three days I imagine all they wondered was, “why?!”  In this struggle God wanted them to have faith.  Even though they couldn’t see that He had orchestrated the most beautiful avenue for our redemption, God wanted them to trust Him.

And that’s what He asks of all us during times of trial and strife.  Easier said than done of course.  Like so much of life, it is simple but not easy.  But the first step is to turn to Him.  During this past week I’ve often thought to myself, “Jesus, I believe, help my unbelief.”  I know better than anyone that I don’t have the faith to see myself through, but I do believe that if I ask Him for it, He will provide it.  That if I give Him my grief, sorrow, anger and everything else I’m feeling, it will help me to trust Him more.  To believe that even if I can’t see how, He will make sense of everything.  That it won’t be in vain.  That eventually I’ll start to understand (even if complete understanding has to wait until Heaven).  And even if it still hurts right now, that knowledge is enough to get me through the day, and that’s enough.  Glory to God in the highest!