Pieces of Formation: Activities and Commitments

I played city softball for three years with my younger sister, and it was pretty much a disastrous experience for me — one around which I felt much shame for many years. In three years of playing, I only hit the ball once. 

Once. 

Part of the reason I kept playing was because of that secret hope, every time I stepped into the batter’s box, that this would be the time my bat would connect with the ball, this would be the time all those admonitions to “keep my eye on the ball” would make a difference, this would be the time everyone on the bench and in the stands would be surprised. 

But another — even bigger — reason I kept playing every year was because of the annual fundraising competition. It turned out that what I lacked in athletic ability, I made up for in salesmanship. In spades. Three years in a row, my sister and I won the grand cash prize for the most candy bar sales in the entire league.

I was so proud of that accomplishment. 

Side by side, these two realities sat: shame and pride. They taught me much about myself, for good and ill. 

What activities and commitments were part of your growing-up life? How did they impact you?

Pieces of Formation: Ethnicity and Extended Heritage

At a retreat I attended this past June with the artist Jan Richardson, we participated in an exercise on the opening night based on a poem by George Ella Lyon called “Where I’m From.” Through the exercise, we spent wrote lines and stanzas to describe the stories and pieces that make up who we are.

One of my stanzas went like this:

I am from Dan and Sue,

Bob and Dorothy,

Daniel and Frances,

from Mexico and the Irish country,

from potato famine to Minnesota farm country,

from O’Sullivan to Saban to Kack,

married to Serrato

to eventually make me. 

When it comes to my ethnicity and heritage, I come from two different worlds.

The large Irish-Catholic family on my mom’s side made for robust gatherings full of stories and laughter that grew louder as the nights wore on. It was a family of grounding — the Irish and the Catholic backgrounds both contributed to this sense of solid grounding — and it was full of people. (That’s what happens when eight Irish-Catholic siblings have several children each!)

My dad’s side was smaller. Quieter. His father didn’t say much, but I was familiar with his smile. His mother was small but fierce, breaking into Spanish whenever she got mad. They lived a simple life on half an acre in a small town known for its horses and dairy farms. We ate tamales on Christmas. And even though the core family unit of my dad’s family was small, the extended network of my Hispanic heritage often made me feel related to half our town.

Where are you “from”? What stories make up your family of origin?

Pieces of Formation: Personality and Temperament

My mom likes to tell the story that I was the kind of infant who waited patiently to be engaged by others. She would approach my crib or bassinet and find me laying there, awake and alert but quiet as could be, just waiting for someone to come get me. 

That quiet personality remains with me today. I choose quiet mornings. I invite others into stillness. I’m called to work in the deep places of the heart. 

Stillness and calm are two pillars of my true self, and they were with me from my earliest days.

What personality traits emerged for you early on? How have they shaped your choices and your path?

Pieces of Formation: Childhood Friendships

Flannery O’Connor famously once said, “Anybody who has survived childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days,” and I find this to be so true, especially when it comes to the work of spiritual formation.

Those are the years we took in so much sensory data about life, and what we took in — without our realizing it was even happening — formed and formed and formed us into the people we eventually became.

And so we’re going to continue peeling back the layers of childhood a bit this week, starting with childhood friendships. 

When I look back at my childhood friendships, I notice two main things. 

First, I tended to form one or two really good friendships rather than a lot of them, and this holds true still today. And second, my experiences with group friendships weren’t very positive. 

As connected as these two observations appear on the surface, and there is certainly some connection, they don’t form a perfect one-to-one correspondence. One reason I formed just a couple close friendships rather than many is simply because I’m a very high introvert. Large social gatherings aren’t my preference when it comes to making connections. I’d rather go deep than wide. 

This reality of who I am holds true today, both in my friendships and in the work I do. My life’s work is helping others go to the deep places, and I am best oriented to do that in one-to-one settings.

Concerning group friendships, I think a lot of my negative experiences had to do with the reality of what happens when you gather 7-10 girls in a room. Chaos happens. Backbiting happens. Jealousy happens. Gossip happens. Allegiances happen.

That’s never been my cup of tea. 

We can learn a lot from our childhood friendships. They teach us about ourselves — our preferred way of being in the world and with others — and they teach us how we learned to relate to the world around us, and what we came to believe. 

How did your childhood friendships form you?

Pieces of Formation: Significant Experiences

When I was in first grade, a girl knocked me backward (metaphorically) with her cruelty, and I careened with shock.

When I was in second grade, a boy cornered me in an isolated area of the playing field at recess and ordered some of his friends to hold my arms behind my body and another one to lift up my dress. 

When I was in third grade, two girls a grade higher than me sneered at my family’s dilapidated station wagon the moment I ducked out of the car and stepped onto the curb outside the school office. 

When I was in fourth grade, my parents sat us down at the kitchen table to tell us they were separating.

Each experience took me by surprise.

I didn’t see them coming. 

And so, I learned to be watchful. 

Guarded. Alert. Untrusting. Prepared with extra contingency plans. Convinced that the world was an unsafe, cruel, cold place, and it was my job to protect myself against it.

It’s no surprise to you, I’m sure, for me to say that significant experiences form us. 

What significant experiences formed you?

Pieces of Formation: Your Family Unit at Birth

What sort of family were you born into? 

Some of us were born into happy, healthy, and whole families — a mother and father who loved each other, loved us, and eagerly awaited our arrival.

Others of us were born into families less complete than that — a father nowhere to be found, chaotic living conditions, erratic employment, worries of how to survive. Into these conditions, we came. Our arrival may have compounded the difficulties our families faced. We may have been unwanted.

Still others of us were born into situations falling somewhere in between. Our parents were together, but they struggled. Money was tight, but they did the best they could. The list of worries was long, but they clung to God’s promises as they knew how. We were a “surprise” pregnancy, but we were loved.

What were the conditions of your family unit at birth? How did those conditions form the person you became?

Pieces of Formation: An Introduction

I mentioned in a previous post that when I couldn’t sleep one night, I listened to the first few chapters of an audio version of Richard Rohr’s book Falling Upward. I haven’t finished listening to the whole book yet, but an idea he presents early on has been sticking with me. And I’ve found that it makes for a great series topic for us to explore together here.

The idea Rohr presents centers on the concept of a container — namely, the container each one of us forms to make sense of life, our identity, and our interaction with the world. Rohr says the first half of life centers on building the container, while the second half of life concerns discovering what the container is meant to hold.

Basically, this has to do with formation. 

Or at least, that’s what it got me thinking about. 

The work of formation happens in two major phases.

First, it happens unconsciously. We take in data and experiences from the world, and based on that information, we become certain people over the course of our lives, beginning at our youngest age. We make decisions and agreements with ourselves — again, mostly unconciously, though sometimes consciously — about who we will be and how we will interact with the world and what we ultimately believe about it, ourselves, and other people and their relation to us. 

The second phase of formation is intentional. It’s a process of deconstruction and then reconstruction — of looking at the first phase and evaluating it, analyzing it, learning from it, and making decisions for how we want to move forward. 

Not everyone gets to this second intentional phase of formation.

They may be unaware the opportunity is available for them to live more intentional, examined lives. They may be disinterested in that opportunity. They may be flat-out scared. 

But those who choose to step into the second phase find it immensely rewarding. It isn’t easy, of course. Rewarding doesn’t necessarily mean fun. It’s hard work. It’s a long road. It can, indeed, be scary at times. Sometimes it feels, just like the title of Rohr’s book suggests, that we are falling upward with no sense of the ground’s true place anymore. We may discover that the ground is what we once thought the ceiling.

And inside this second major phase of formation, there are many smaller stages by which to move through it.

Despite the difficulty and courage such a journey requires, most who strike out on its path find it to be a rich and rewarding journey — and couldn’t imagine living any other way. Through this process, our lives become our own. We connect with our concept of God and our concept of self and how we fit into the mix. We discover what has been influencing us without our knowledge, and then can consciously pick up or put down those pieces once we’ve examined them.

As Rohr says, we discover who we are and are meant to be, and we live forward with that knowledge. Our lives become intentional.

And so, I’d like to take you through some of that second-phase journey here.

Each day of this series, we’ll look at the different pieces of our formation, a bit like we’re picking up rocks and turning them over in our hands, seeing the colors and shapes and textures. What have been our experiences of life? How have they formed who we’ve become? What do we make of that formation? What questions do we have?

Will you join us for this interior exploration? I hope you will.

A (Near) Month of Thanks: Influences

If you had a glimpse of my interior world in college (and high school, and junior high, and grade school), you’d discover I was a pretty wound-up perfectionist constantly worrying and straining to make things right. If there’s a word to describe the image I hold of my young self in all those days, it would be the word scruples. 

But then God cracked me open, and a whole bunch of messiness ensued.

Confusion. Exploration. Possibility. Hope. Life. Grace. Love. Freedom. Depth. Calm. Solidity. Openness. 

The spiral of life and growth continues along these lines, with each new season bringing its portion of disorientation, exploration, discovery, and life. It leads to increased rootedness but usually requires a bit of freefall first. 

When I look back over the terrain of my spiritual journey and who I’ve become and am continuing to become, I’m incredibly thankful for the many wise influences, mentors, guides, and spiritual parents who have shaped me. 

When it comes to influences, I am thankful for: 

• Clifford Williams, whose book Singleness of Heart began me on my heart journey
• Anne Lamott, who first taught me about grace and the beauty of imperfection
• Don Miller, who put language to some of my experiences and modeled permission to explore
• St. John of the Cross, who first taught me about spiritual formation
• My friend Sara, who gave me space to process the journey
• Jesus, the first model for all I believe and do today
• Henri Nouwen, who opened deeper the world of interiorities and helped clarify my sense of vocation
• Mother Teresa, whose model of love still teaches me
• Gandhi, who was and always will be the father of my nonviolence journey
• Martin Luther King Jr., another father to me in the road marked by love and conviction
• Thomas Merton, my spiritual father in contemplation and peace
• Julian of Norwich, who currently models for me my life of prayer

Who are the influences that have shaped your life, and how would you express thanks for them?

A (Near) Month of Thanks: Growth

Last night, when I was awake in bed for a couple hours and couldn’t sleep, I listened to the first couple chapters of Richard Rohr’s latest book, Falling Upward, on audio. 

The book is very, very good. Its central premise is that the tools we use to build the first half of our lives are not the tools that will work in its second half.

This got me thinking about growth.

To me, our capacity to grow is one of the most interesting things God built into the created order. And so today, I thought we could reflect on the ways we’ve grown over the course of our lives and how that growth causes us to give thanks. 

When it comes to the growth I’ve experienced in my life, I give thanks for the following: 

• I’m thankful for the ways my family upbringing shaped the listener and peacemaker in me.
• I’m thankful for the difficult experiences I sustained in grade school that later shaped my connection to Jesus. 
• I’m thankful for the way pain in my life has made me a more sensitive being.
• I’m thankful for a solid foundation of faith that paved the way for its deepening when I became a young adult.
• I’m thankful God brought me to the end of myself when I was 19, even though it terrified me.
• I’m thankful Jesus sat with me in the dark for two years, growing my trust in his patience and faithfulness toward me.
• I’m thankful God has opened the doors of my heart to greater honesty and tenderness.
• I’m thankful for the way my divorce experience helped me learn to receive grace.
• I’m thankful I’ve become a person accustomed to taking risks. 
• I’m thankful for the relationships in my life that have helped me settle into an identity of being loved.
• I’m thankful for the stripping seasons in my life the grace God has given me to say yes to them.
• I’m thankful for the ways God has given me a greater and greater heart of love.

When you look at the growth in your own life, what makes you thankful?

Prayer Can Be ... Exercise

When I was six years old, my mom took my younger sister and me to join a soccer team. I remember walking toward the group of kids on the field that first day of practice and being truly petrified. I was shy, so meeting a group of strangers filled me with great anxiety. And besides that, I didn’t know the first thing about soccer. 

The soccer attempt was short-lived. (I don’t recall that I ever went back after that first day’s experience.)

But my sister and I joined a girls’ city softball league shortly after that. And the extent of my native athletic talent should be made plain to you with this fun fact: 

I played girls’ softball for three years and only hit the ball once. 

My freshman year in high school, I tried out for the volleyball team and was surprised to discover I liked it. I was also surprised to discover I made first cuts at tryouts. The coach thought I was quick and disciplined at the conditioning drills. Also, I hit a pretty mean serve, and I could bump the ball with the best of them.

Spiking and setting? Not so much. I was cut from the team in the second round.

I did, however, excel at swimming. My older brother and I went out for the team my sophomore year and were both moved to varsity within a few swim meets. But as much as I loved the conditioning experience of swimming laps and following drills, I hit a plateau and never grew beyond a certain point. Plus, anxiety crippled me at the swim meets. I swam for one year and then quit. 

All this to say, exercise has never really been my friend.

And yet I’m experiencing the way exercise can be a form of prayer these days. 

Earlier this year, due to a couple of events, I began to explore the importance of the body in our lives — especially our spiritual lives — and have been experimenting in different small ways with what I’m learning. I have such a long way to go in truly understanding all this, and especially in integrating it into my daily life and behavior, but there is one thing I’ve noticed.

When I think of my body as part of the whole of who I am, exercise becomes a form of prayer.

I push and pull against resistance with the weights. I expand and contract my muscles with stretches and reps. 

And all along, as it’s hard, I’m thinking, This body is yours, God. You gave it to me to steward. It houses my heart, mind, and soul. I’m doing this for you.

Do you ever experience exercise as prayer? 

Prayer Can Be ... Symbolic

I have this wall next to my desk that I call my prayer wall. Affixed to it are 5 or 6 symbolic items I’ve purchased or received as gifts over the years. 

Each one of these symbols reflects something deep and meaningful to my heart. 

One of the symbols is a cast-iron symbol of a tree. It has small sprouting buds on each branch, and the topmost branches make the form of a cross. It reminds me of resurrection — that life springs out of death. It speaks of my life’s work, which is centered around growth. It reminds me of the tree of life.

Another of the symbols is a tiny golden-bronze cross that has 12 individual stick-figures joining hands in a circle at the center of it. Their joined hands create the image of a heart between each one of them. This symbol reminds me of my heart for cooperation and my prayer for a peaceful world. 

Yet another of the symbols has a large Holy Spirit dove on it, swooning over the word “Pax,” for “peace.” It reminds me of my ongoing journey to understand and embody nonviolence.

It’s my prayer wall. 

Sometimes, when sitting at my desk, I stare at each image, letting my gaze linger on each one.

It’s a time of remembering who I am in my deepest core. It’s a time of asking God to keep cultivating in me the heart he gave me before I was born. 

Do you have any symbols that are prayer to you?

Into This Dark Night: Why This?

Near the beginning of our study of the painful night of the spirit, a friend emailed me and said: 

“I just can’t comprehend why God would allow someone to experience that.”

We had, at that point in the series, talked about Mother Teresa and her 40 years spent suffering in the dark. We had also discussed that the night of the spirit is darker than the night of sense.

Why? she wondered. Why would God do all this?

In the place of such a challenging concept as the dark night of the soul, and especially the night of the spirit, I find two thoughts very helpful. 

The first is that our souls were meant for union with God.

Such intimacy was the intent of creation, and the fall of humanity has made the human journey one that continually seeks re-union. Some mystics throughout history have used the image of a spiral to picture this journey of the soul back toward God througout a lifetime. The labyrinth is another representation of this journey, with the soul advancing ever nearer the center, even as there are turns in the journey that seem to take us away from that point of center. 

John of the Cross uses the image of a ladder — similar to Jacob’s — in which we are continually ascending and descending the rungs but ultimately climbing ever higher toward the perfection of union. 

Even though the journey is complex and the experience sometimes one of consolation and sometimes one of desolation, all of it is meant for the intent of union. 

Such union is our soul’s intended home. 

The second thought I find helpful in the face of such a difficult concept is that the soul increasingly desires such union and is willing to endure whatever pain may be required to land upon it. 

John of the Cross says that at this point in the soul’s journey, when the night of the spirit comes, the soul is “so in love with God that she would give a thousand lives for him.” She would willingly die a thousand deaths. 

She is, plainly, heartsick for God. 

“When this love shows up in the soul,” he says, “it finds her ready to be wounded and united with love itself.”

The night of the spirit is one of the most agonizing experiences a soul can endure on earth. But it’s a road the soul, prepared for this journey, is willing to take when it comes. 

Into This Dark Night: Seeing All the Dust Particles

The spiritual blindness that happens in the night of the spirit happens because the divine light of God is brighter than the eyes of our soul can handle. This is one reason the night of the spirit hurts — because our souls, being human, are much weaker than the brightness of the divine light of God. 

John of the Cross says this: 

“The light and wisdom of this contemplation are so pure and bright and the soul it invades is so dark and impure that their meeting is going to be painful. When the eyes are bad — impure and sickly — clear light feels like an ambush and it hurts.”

There’s another reason the night of the spirit is so painful, though, and it’s because what the soul is able to see when the divine light shines upon it are all its imperfections. 

The saint describes it this way: 

“Consider common, natural light: a sunbeam shines through a window. The freer the air is from little specks of dust, the less clearly we see the ray of light. The more motes that are floating in the air, the more clearly the sunbeam appears to our eyes. This is because light itself is invisible. Light is the means by which the things it strikes are perceived.”

The light of God is a sunbeam on the soul, and our native imperfections are dust motes and particles floating through the air, now clearly visible because of that ray of light. The sudden, acute awareness of all these imperfections makes the soul in this place feel quite wretched. 

Remember, the soul that has entered the night of the spirit has already endured the night of the senses. Her love for God has been purified a great deal, and she has come to a place of being wildly in love with God. 

Seeing her impurities through the searing light of God undoes her.

She feels these impurities will separate her from the lover of her soul, God, forever. 

Into This Dark Night: When the Night of the Senses Ends

We’ve spent several weeks venturing into the terrain of the night of the senses, which is the first portion of the dark night of the soul.

What happens when it ends? 

John of the Cross teaches us that a time of consolation and strength sets in. We learned on Friday that, eventually, love is enkindled within us and we become more and more consumed by that love, without really knowing how it got there or how it continues to grow.

God has done it, and we begin living into it.

Once we emerge from this portion of the dark night, John of the Cross also says this: 

“In this phase, the soul is like someone who has escaped from prison. She goes about the things of God with freedom and satisfaction. Now that the faculties are no longer attached to the discursive mind or troubled by the spiritual anxiety that used to bind the soul, her interior delight flows more abundantly than it ever did before she entered that first dark night. Without the labor of the intellect, she now finds within her the most serene and loving contemplation and spiritual sweetness.” 

Freedom. Interior delight. Serenity. Spiritual sweetness. 

I just love that. Don’t you?

The saint also tells us that the soul, upon emerging from this night of sense, begins to cultivate mastery of the spiritual life:

“What joy! The soul has emerged victorious from the tribulations of the night of sensory purification. She has risen above the state of the beginner and entered the state of the adept. God may not immediately move her into the night of the spirit, now. Instead, the soul may spend years cultivating mastery before she is ready to face the impenetrable darkness that leads to union.”

I can just see the soul going along with increasing strength and ease on this other side, firmly and continuously practicing the disciplines of the spiritual life from a new place than she did before — not based on what she does or how she feels, but from a rootedness in her belonging to God and the love and connection to God she received in new doses while enduring the night of sense.

Before we discuss the second phase of the dark night of the soul — the night of the spirit — I want to say a few things to wrap up our learnings about the night of the senses: 

• The night of the senses can last a long or a short time. 
• It can also repeat itself.
• God may choose to apply a light or heavy hand of the darkened senses to a soul enduring such a season. 
• The strength or lightness of the experience is based upon what God deems most fitting and endurable for each individual soul.

In other words, there is no formula. 

But as we have seen through our exploration these past few weeks, it is a worthy trial. God has deemed the soul ready for such a journey. And while it is confusing and painful and sometimes disillusioning, it is meant to be so. 

God is doing good work in the soul, and it is work we cannot do for ourselves. 

It is wholly grace.

Into This Dark Night: What's Also Happening Here

In a previous post in this series, we talked about what’s happening in the night of the senses: God is growing us at the level of the spirit in our connection to him.

But there’s something else happening here too: 

We are growing in virtue and love.

Early in his description of the night of the senses, John of the Cross names seven “imperfections” that plague a beginner’s soul without her knowledge of them being imperfections. These include spiritual pride, spirtual greed, spiritual lust, spiritual anger, spiritual gluttony, and spiritual envy and laziness. 

And he says of the beginner’s journey:

“Remember when she used to seek God through those feeble, limited, and ineffectual manipulations? At every step she stumbled into a thousand ignorances and imperfections! Once the night quenches all and darkens the discursive mind, it liberates her, bestowing innumerable blessings. The soul grows vastly in virtue.” 

Before the night descends, we are inclined to think the things we do and the consolation we experience in our spiritual lives has something to do with us. We love God, yes. But we also love ourselves. And we tend to love ourselves more than we love God or our neighbors. 

The night of the senses is meant to purify us — to make our love more pure and our actions more full of true virtue. 

And so we lose sight of ourselves. And we lose sight of God.

We come face to face with our cravings for good feelings and experiences. We notice how much we want distraction. We see how much we based our self-concept and sense of okay-ness in how we were feeling and how our experiences and activities compared to those of others. 

In short, in the night of senses, stripped of all those other fetters, we begin gaining accurate self-knowledge. We start to see the truth about ourselves. 

And it’s humbling.

This affects the way we begin to relate to God.

We become more humble and respectful. Less demanding and presumptuous. Less familiar and more awe-filled. 

We begin to love God more for who he is and less for ourselves. 

And through it all, as we remain faithful to God and receptive to the truths of ourselves being revealed, we also grow in virtue. John of the Cross says that we grow in patience toward God and ourselves. We become more generous toward others, no longer looking to them as a point of comparison but as people from whom we might learn something. We become more enduring and strong as we cope with the hardships of being surrounded by darkened senses but keep persevering. 

The night of the senses accomplishes many good things, even though it doesn’t feel good — and even though we can’t perceive these good things are happening when they are.

How do you respond to this?

Into This Dark Night: Another Way Contemplation Can Look

For a long time, before I ever experienced contemplation as St. John of the Cross really meant it — as a “loving attentiveness to God” — I had heard contemplation described that way and never really understood it. It seemed strange to me. What did it mean to “just be” before God? What did it mean to put ourselves before God without any thought or image at all? 

Truthfully, it sounded odd. 

And then when I learned of the two Greek words used to describe two diverging ways to experience God in prayer — kataphatic and apophatic — the type of contemplation described by St. John of the Cross seemed even more foreign to me. 

Kataphatic prayer makes use of words and images.

The kind of imaginative prayer described by St. Ignatius of Loyola that I mentioned in a previous post is this kind of prayer. In this kind of prayer, we hold images in our minds and experience ongoing conversations with God. We’re conscious of our thoughts in prayer, and we’re able to “hear” God’s words in response to us interiorly. 

Apophatic prayer, in contrast, is wordless and formless.

It’s an experience of prayer in which the soul acknowledges that God cannot ever be fully held in the mind and actually transcends all images — and therefore the soul lets go of any impulse to relate to God in these ways. This kind of prayer is often connected to relating to God in “a cloud of unknowing” or “darkness” or “nakedness of being.” 

The first time I heard these two terms used to describe the two major categories of prayer, I had an immediate aversion to the description of apophatic prayer. I had been living in a long season of consolation where the imaginative life of prayer had become my regular means of connecting to God, and especially Jesus. My prayer life, experienced in this way, was very active and incredibly dear to me. And this way of prayer had born much fruit in my life. Love for Jesus had erupted in me, and I was irrevocably changed. 

Why would I ever want to give that up? 

Weren’t the experiences I had with Jesus in prayer more beloved and preferable — even to God — than an experience of darkness and nothingness? 

Who would want to experience that?

(I mean, really.)

So I continued on my merry way, relishing the images and word-filled conversations I had with Jesus on a regular basis, continuing to fall more and more in love with God.

Until a little over three years ago. 

One day I sat at my desk, opened the Scriptures before me, and couldn’t taste words. They didn’t seem enough. They couldn’t hold God.

I went to pray and felt an immediate aversion to the images I’d been holding in my life of prayer with God. God was so much more than any image. God was. 

On that first day, I sat at my desk with my eyes closed and just let myself be in the presence of God. God was this massive greatness, creating everything and upholding everything, far beyond what I could imagine or understand … and I was grateful for that.

I just wanted to be with God without having to understand God.

And so each day in that season, I came and sat with the “cloud of unknowing” that was God beyond my concepts of God. And it was truly enough — more than enough, really.

Into This Dark Night: The Invitation to You Here

This may be hard to believe, but when you are in a dark night of the senses, you don’t need to do anything. 

In fact, any activity you might do to help things along hinders the progress of this dark night. 

The temptation in this place is to stir up spiritual activity in the hopes of bringing back that feeling or confirmation we used to have that God is here and things are right with our soul. These efforts are in vain. Since the dark night is, in essence, a darkening of the senses, any effort to stir up those feelings in order to gain reassurance will prove fruitless. The senses are turned off for this season.

Another misdirected belief that can crop up in this place is that we need to cling to the spiritual disciplines so our faith won’t run aground here. There’s a belief that doing things will keep us grounded — that we need to keep our faith afloat during this dark time.

Spiritual activity isn’t the need of this season. 

The need is rest … quiet … stillness … inactivity. 

Does that strike you as odd? We’ve been talking about moving from milk to solid foods, from the mother’s breast to our own two feet. Oughtn’t that mean doing things to strengthen our limbs — like a bunch of activity to grow strong? 

No. 

Here’s how John of the Cross puts it:

“If only souls that this happens to could just be quiet, setting aside all concern about accomplishing any task — interior or exterior — and quit troubling themselves about doing anything! Soon, within that very stillness and release, they would begin to taste subtly of that inner nourishment, a nourishment so delicate that if they were purposely to try they could never taste it. This work only happens when the soul is at ease and free from care.”

The invitation to you in this place is rest. You are growing up — taking on solids and growing to stand and walk on your own two feet — but this happens at the level of the spirit, not the senses. It’s something God infuses in you. 

In short, he’s the one who grows you up. Your task is to let him. 

Let go. Rest. Be still here in this place.

Is that something you can allow yourself to do?

Into This Dark Night: What's Happening Here

When God shuts the door to the senses in the first portion of the dark night, he’s leading you into a purer union with himself — one not dependent upon what you do or how you feel, but spirit to spirit.

He’s seeking to give you pure encounter with himself.

John of the Cross identifies two levels of the soul: sense and spirit.

The senses are those faculties that help us understand and experience the world. They’re tied to feelings, to experiences, to understanding, to imagination, and to analysis. The saint calls it “the discursive mind.” At the level of the senses, we take in information — felt or cognitive — and make sense of it all. 

But this is a lower plane of connection to God than that of the spirit. The spirit exists beyond the senses. It is beyond “discursive thought” and even imagination. In the spirit, there are no words or images to translate for us. The spirit simply is, pure being, with God. 

We don’t know how to live in pure spirit before God, and so God must take us there. This is why the night of the senses happens: so we grow at the level of the spirit in our connection to God. 

Here’s how John of the Cross describes what’s happening in the night of the senses: 

“God has transferred goodness and power from the senses to the spirit. Unable to make use of these precious gifts, the senses are left fallow, dessicated, void. While the spirit is feasting, the sensory part of the soul is starving; it grows too weak to act. But the spirit thrives on this banquet, growing stronger and more alert.”

Something important is happening here, and it’s something our conscious mind cannot understand and our felt experience cannot access.

And that is as it should be. 

Tomorrow we’ll talk about how to live inside this place — what response helps this process along, and what response hinders its progress.

Into This Dark Night: When the Time for Weaning Draws Nigh

I used to think the passage in Hebrews 12 was really cruel — you know, the one that says God disciplines his children and chastens those he loves. I would read that and think, “What?” It sounded more mean than a good thing. 

But then I read the Message version of that passage about a year ago, and it adjusted my perspective a great deal. Here’s a small portion of how it goes: 

“God is educating you; that’s why you must never drop out. He’s treating you as dear children. This trouble you’re in isn’t punishment; it’s training, the normal experience of children. Only irresponsible parents leave children to fend for themselves.”

— Hebrews 12:7-8

The whole passage (vv. 4-11) is worth a read, but it was that word training that changed my understanding of that passage and the analogy of God as parent. Training implies a way to go. A way to be directed that’s for our good. A way we’re meant to be. And God is seeking to direct us there. 

It made such a difference for me to hear it in the context of an irresponsible parent, too: someone who leaves their child to fend for herself. What’s loving about that? A child doesn’t know the world, doesn’t have knowledge or experience or wisdom to navigate her way through. And an unloving parent is one who doesn’t care, who leaves her to figure it out on her own, who opens the door to the big, wide world and says, “Have at it.”

The loving parent is the one who takes an active role in teaching, guiding, sharing, correcting, interpreting, and being with. The loving parent is the one who knows where the child needs to go — sees ahead of her to the necessary steps of her development — and walks her through those steps when the time is right. A loving parent helps a child through her growth with the wisdom and knowledge she doesn’t yet have for herself.

That’s similar to what’s happening when the night of sense descends. 

John of the Cross describes it this way: 

As the baby grows, the mother gradually caresses it less. She begins to hide her tender love. She sets the child down on its own two feet. This is to help the baby let go of its childish ways and experience more significant things.

As we discussed in yesterday’s post, the sweet time spent at the mother’s breast is right for a time. Its sweetness is as it should be, and the mother feels such delight in giving and sharing that time with her child.

But we’re not meant to be infants at the breast all our lives.

There comes a time when, for our own best interest, we must be set down on the ground in order to discover our limbs and muscles. There comes a time when we, for our own best good, must learn to eat more than our mother’s sweet milk. There comes a time when it’s right and good for us to learn to motor ourselves around. 

It isn’t a lack of love on the mother’s part that brings that separation. It’s her love and maturity to move us along in our next necessary growth.

That’s what the night of the senses is about: a new period of our necessary growth.

Into This Dark Night: It's Not You

The first thing I want to say about the dark night of the soul is this: It’s not you. 

As mentioned in both posts written in this series so far, our life with God is comprised of our ongoing formation — meaning, we are meant to grow.

Think of it like a baby.

At some point, that little one begins to push herself over from her belly to her back, or from her back to her belly. At some point, those two tiny front teeth begin to push their way through her gums, and then the rest follow. At some point, she starts to take those wobbly first steps. 

It’s awkward. Some of it is painful. But it’s meant to happen. She’s meant to grow.

Or think of it like an adolescent.

Those growing pains in the leg that begin around age 8 and happen again at age 12. Long, lanky legs, growing even longer. Feeling achy, like bones and muscles stretching themselves from the inside — which they are.

It’s painful. It’s awkward. But it’s supposed to happen. Those legs are meant to grow, even though it hurts.

The dark night of the soul is awkward, confusing, painful, lonely.

And yet there can be comfort in knowing this is an intended course of events. We’re growing. It’s happening as it’s meant to happen, at the time it’s meant to happen — just like our physical bodies. 

It’s not you.

If God seems absent or your spiritual life has grown dry and crusty — almost lifeless — that doesn’t mean you’ve done anything wrong. That doesn’t mean it’s time to self-flagellate or shame yourself into being better or doing more right. 

It’s a time to open yourself to invitation and possibility — the invitation and possibility of what God is doing in you and what God is growing you to be.