We welcome writer Kerri Leigh Power as our guest blogger today.
When the heart goes dark
Recently my husband came home with a stack of movies that he borrowed from the library. “I got one for you,” he said, handing me a DVD case. I looked at the cover and saw nuns in black robes, walking the halls of an oak panelled monastery. I guess he has caught on that I have a soft spot for Catholic sisters.
The movie, called No Greater Love, is a beautiful, meditative documentary about a group of Carmelite nuns living cloistered in the middle of London’s Notting Hill. The filmmaker spent 10 years corresponding with the convent before receiving permission to film their daily lives of prayer, silence, work and community.
In interviews, several sisters talk openly about the challenges of a life of faith and self-sacrifice. They’re touchingly honest about the times when God’s presence seemed to withdraw completely, leaving them in a spiritual desert. For one, this “dark night of the soul” lasted two years, and for another, eighteen years. Though they suffered greatly during these times, they seem to have come out the other side with a simpler and deeper sense of God in their lives. One sister describes the experience as “God’s way of progressively leading a person deeper into a truer relationship with him, which involves letting go of all earlier concepts and constructs about God.”
I don’t think I’m far enough along in my spiritual journey to have faced this kind of loss of faith—I’m still just putting my feet to the path. But the movie made me wonder if the “dark night” is a necessary part of our spiritual growth, whether we seek to know God as members of a religious order or in secular life. If I commit to a more authentic relationship with God, is the dark night awaiting me somewhere down the road?
Have you experienced (or are you now experiencing) a time when the faith that once comforted you seemed to be lost? What did (or does) it mean for you?
Archived Comments
- August 24, 2012 at 11:25 am
-
I suspect that the “dark night” awaits each of us. I don’t think it necessarily means a time of overt suffering and disaster – but if we are to achieve any real depth in our relationship to God, we must travel the way of Christ who emptied himself to become one of us, and suffered a sense of abandonment on the cross as he gave himself for us.
For me it manifested as a long (22 years) time of great spiritual dryness – not a loss of faith, but a sense of having missed to boat entirely in terms of becoming what I was meant to be. I felt that I’d failed to live out the life God had called me to interiorly, although to anyone else’s sight my life probably looked quite normal, rich even. When I reached the other side of that desert, however, the difference was amazing – and it all became worthwhile. I hadn’t really lost anything at all. Instead my inner world had been carved out to become larger than it would have been had I stayed stuck at the level of spiritual life where I’d been.
So I’d say it’s part of the journey, not to be dreaded – but sometimes to be endured – with patience and faith that he who has called us will not abandon us along the way.
- August 24, 2012 at 6:11 pm
-
Thank you for sharing your experience Marsha. It helps to see it as part of the path that Jesus followed himself, and that others like you have followed before us.
- August 24, 2012 at 11:49 am
-
Well-spoken from a deep life experience, Marsha. It is good to have a spiritual guide at these times of ‘inner darkness’ to help one discern the many spirits who are competing for our attention often leading us to confusion and even doubt.
- August 24, 2012 at 1:28 pm
-
Wow! I am so touched by these words. As I am seeking direction from God, I am also seeing that God is not in a hurry, therefore I am being forced to wait for God’s timing. This is difficult for me.
- August 25, 2012 at 7:41 pm
-
i wish i could claim otherwise. i wish i had remained more than days in that place where i believed without reserve. the darkness is overwhelming. too dark for light to penetrate, a black hole. i cannot even glimpse the possibilities anymore. anyone out there neglecting someone in need — family, a friend — hear me: stop. light can come from you. don’t leave anyone in the dark when with a phone call — a lousy call — or a note you might bring light. because once the light stops coming, sometimes the neglected can’t even open their eyes to search any longer.
- August 27, 2012 at 11:35 am
-
My prayers go to you Marla, and thank you for the important reminder to stop, and think of who needs to hear from me right now. Sometimes (often?)in our own moments of darkness we forget this.
- September 3, 2012 at 6:46 am
-
Dear Sister Julie, Marla and all of you, this is amazingly apt. When the light is dimmed through lack of sunshine on this south western coast of Finisterre in Brittany, it affects me hugely. It is a dark struggle inside even whilst I keep telling myself that God and his angels and, especially, the Queen of the Universe, Mary, are all there beyond; as in we know that the sun is behind the clouds but we cannot see it. This really puts a pressure on faith, not because I want proof at all, but because I am in the dark. I find it so hard to lift my spirits in this type of weather that it seems absurd. Try as I might, I can call someone and put on a front of being joyful, but I cannot really achieve inside and I do not know why. It is a dark place to be. The weather in this area this year has been so subdued in this strange light, it really does feel as if the angels are in grief, or as if God is showing the Europeans the error of their ways in handling wars, finances etc. It really does feel quite foreboding and remote. It is a huge struggle for me and I feel quite stuck. Thank you for sharing all of this though, because it really helps to know that I am not alone and that greater spirits than I have walked or are walking this path.
