quote:

Originally posted by Phil:
[qb]It might be helpful at some point to re-visit the opening posts, which attempt to explain what Dark Nights mean in terms of the emergence of contemplative spirituality. That was how John of the Cross (who coined the term) explained Dark Nights. It's come to have other meanings -- like almost anyone going through depression or feeling God's absence tends to think they're in a Dark Night of the Soul. That's not necessarily true; sometimes negative experiences aren't in the service of spiritual emergence at all.[/qb]

Ack! Sorry about that Phil. I should've just directed my response back to page 1 and my posts there. I got carried away here. It's easy to do!

Blessings,
Terri

I got carried away here. It's easy to do!

I always see creative wandering in threads as a virtue, although I�ll grant that I�ve taken many liberties with the concept of the Dark Night. But that�s what I call exploration. I think it�s good. Very good.

The Stanzas of the Soul comes from the Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross, translated and edited, with an Introduction, by E. Allison Peers. This translation has superseded all previous ones-Catholic Herald.

Stanzas of the Soul

1. On a dark night, Kindled in love with yearnings-oh, happy chance!-
I went forth without being observed, My house being now at rest.

2. In darkness and secure, By the secret ladder, disguised-oh happy chance!-
In darkness and in concealment, My house being now at rest.

3. In the happy night, In secret, when none saw me, nor I beheld aught, Without light or guide, save that which burned in my heart.

4. This light guided me More surely than the light of noonday
To the place where he (well I knew who) was awaiting me-
A place where none appeared.

5. Oh, night that guided me, Oh night more lovely than the dawn,
Oh night that joined Beloved with lover, Lover transformed in the Beloved!

6. Upon my flowery breast, Kept wholly for himself alone,
There he stayed sleeping, and I caressed him, And the fanning of the cedars made a breeze.

7. The breeze blew from the turret As I parted his locks;
With his gentle hand he wounded my neck And caused all my senses to be suspended.

8. I remained lost in oblivion; My face I reclined on the Beloved.
All ceased and I abandoned myself, Leaving my cares forgotten among the lillies.

Once you have gone through the Dark Night of the Soul, you know that you are home with God, the Beloved. You are in the world, but not of it.

I agree with what Phil states in his above definitions of this journey, but I also know that we are all God's beloved and that God can
draw into this union with Him anyone, even someone who may be unaware of this journey in the yearnings and longing of the Soul's merger with God. The Lord our God does have secrets with the Soul which are unbeknown to us and the devil. This is a great mystery between the Lover God and the Beloved, Soul. Satan who is the robber of our Souls has no knowledge of these communications between God and His beloved the Soul.

Hi All,

Before reading recent posts, I read the intro to this thread and all of page one == what a rich discussion!

What I'm finding interesting about St. John of the Cross is the way he goes back and forth between, on one hand, the sort of specific ecstatic moments expressed in that amazing poem, and on the other hand, patterns that persist over time in everyday life, as many have shared on this thread.

Mother Theresa and The Dark Night of the Soul

http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/2...teresascrisisoffaith


cut
The letters, many of them preserved against her wishes (she had requested that they be destroyed but was overruled by her church), reveal that for the last nearly half-century of her life she felt no presence of God whatsoever - or, as the book's compiler and editor, the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, writes, "neither in her heart or in the eucharist."


That absence seems to have started at almost precisely the time she began tending the poor and dying in Calcutta, and - except for a five-week break in 1959 - never abated. Although perpetually cheery in public, the Teresa of the letters lived in a state of deep and abiding spiritual pain. In more than 40 communications, many of which have never before been published, she bemoans the "dryness," "darkness," "loneliness" and "torture" she is undergoing. She compares the experience to hell and at one point says it has driven her to doubt the existence of heaven and even of God. She is acutely aware of the discrepancy between her inner state and her public demeanor. "The smile," she writes, is "a mask" or "a cloak that covers everything." Similarly, she wonders whether she is engaged in verbal deception. "I spoke as if my very heart was in love with God - tender, personal love," she remarks to an adviser. "If you were [there], you would have said, 'What hypocrisy.'" Says the Rev. James Martin, an editor at the Jesuit magazine America and the author of My Life with the Saints, a book that dealt with far briefer reports in 2003 of Teresa's doubts: "I've never read a saint's life where the saint has such an intense spiritual darkness. No one knew she was that tormented." Recalls Kolodiejchuk, Come Be My Light's editor: "I read one letter to the Sisters [of Teresa's Missionaries of Charity], and their mouths just dropped open. It will give a whole new dimension to the way people understand her."
cut

It's really difficult to know whether the experience Mother Teresa describes is of the Dark Night or something else. Certainly, the description of absence and emptiness sounds like D.N., and there's no doubting that faith and love were at work in her life. But how much can be attributed to other causes of a psychological nature is hard to say. E.g., a life so focused on service might have been starved for fun, play, close friendships, and other factors that help to bring a sense of energy and aliveness to the heart.

I'm sure there will be some who will read into these glimpses into Mother Teresa's inner life all sorts of cynical implications, but I'm not too surprised by it. She was, after all, human, and her relationship with God was based on faith, just as ours. Faith without doubt is suspect, imo, and faith without dryiness and emptiness hasn't really been tested. We evaluate a life based on its fruits, and hers was rich in that respect beyond measure.

Phil,
is there any way of knowing if Mother
Thersa was encouraged to live a
more balance life. From a little more i
have read it didn't sound like it. It almost
sounded like she was being told that this darkness was a good thing that was happening to her.

Ajoy, I honestly don't know the answer to that. There are a number of biographies of her, but I've not read any of them.

August 27 (last Monday) was the birthday of Mother Teresa. Remembering her on The Writer's Almanac, Garrison Keillor wrote: "...born in the city of Skopje, Macedonia (1910). Her father was murdered when she was seven years old, and her family fell into poverty. She was educated by Irish missionary nuns, and she decided to follow in their footsteps. She went to Dublin to train for missionary work when she was 18, and for her first missionary assignment she was sent to Calcutta, India. She taught high school for several years and worked her way up to school principal. Then, one day, she found a woman dying in the street and sat with the woman, stroking her head until she died. That experience inspired her to found a new religious order, called the Order of the Missionaries of Charity, devoted to anyone "unwanted, unloved, and uncared for." When she began her project, Mother Teresa's Order of the Missionaries of Charity members included a dozen nuns. By the time she died, the order consisted of more than 5,000 nuns and brothers, operating more than 2,500 orphanages, schools, clinics, and hospices in 120 countries, including the United States."

quote:

Originally posted by Ajoy:
It almost sounded like she was being told that this darkness was a good thing that was happening to her. [/QB]

Yes, Ajoy, based on the article you shared, I see what you mean. She was told that there was no human remedy for her sense of divine absence and inner darkness. And even told that her darkness was a gift. Maybe she was also advised to take a vacation and get more rest or something like that too, the article does not say.

Sorry about the length of the following quotation from the article, but I found the whole thing quite telling:

"The Rev. Joseph Neuner, whom she met in the late 1950s and confided in somewhat later, was already a well-known theologian, and when she turned to him with her 'darkness,' he seems to have told her the three things she needed to hear: that there was no human remedy for it (that is, she should not feel responsible for affecting it); that feeling Jesus is not the only proof of his being there, and her very craving for God was a 'sure sign' of his 'hidden presence' in her life; and that the absence was in fact part of the 'spiritual side' of her work for Jesus.

This counsel clearly granted Teresa a tremendous sense of release. For all that she had expected and even craved to share in Christ's Passion, she had not anticipated that she might recapitulate the particular moment on the Cross when he asks, 'My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?' The idea that rather than a nihilistic vacuum, his felt absence might be the ordeal she had prayed for, that her perseverance in its face might echo his faith unto death on the Cross, that it might indeed be a grace, enhancing the efficacy of her calling, made sense of her pain. Neuner would later write, 'It was the redeeming experience of her life when she realized that the night of her heart was the special share she had in Jesus' passion.' And she thanked Neuner profusely: 'I can't express in words - the gratitude I owe you for your kindness to me - for the first time in ... years - I have come to love the darkness.'"

I'm reminded of Jesus' words that have come to be my companion of late. Words as told by Matthew, "...if your eye is not sound, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness." And in Lukes, variation: "There fore be careful lest the light in you be darkness."

These words seem to go against such a positive interpretation of inner darkness. I'm still in process on it's meaning.

Hi Ryan:

Thank you for the article you shared about Mother
Theresa. I had not known about her early child hood. The article that i shared earlier has now
been altered and it looks expanded.

Also if you
go to the Time (i believe) article on the same
page it gives the full 6 page article. I'm finding i need some time to be with what is being said in this article. As i glanced through it, it does sound like she was forced to take at least some vacations as she was working herself to death
according to the full article.

Hi, the thread's been inactive for 2 years, but I'd like to share with you two poems I wrote during the gravest dark night I experienced at the end of 2006. There are things Zen and Christian mixed in it, so I find it interesting from the time perspective. I forgot the intensity of pain and I can read it with a distance:

"Shine of dazzling brightness"

Oh, Light, You are a destruction of everything,
You are death of �me� and �mine�.
Killing me, you take me into ineffable and mysterious infinity,
Where I cannot find myself anymore.
I don�t exist and I�ve never existed in the way I thought I have.
But there�s absolute poverty and kenosis,
Nakedness and vanity of all.
In this night and deathly shine
Love became Non-Love.

Faith: only this. But what I thought to be faith
Is merely a play of light on snow,
While true faith is emptiness and darkness,
In which my intellect and consciousness are immersed, killed, annihilated.
Only from it a true trust and conviction can flow,
They are like a mist, but only they can testify to the existence of faith.
Does dream and mist can testify about Truth?

This death is wonderful, light and relentless,
Everything is dancing within it, devoid of its substantiality,
Experiences are just experiences, phenomena are just phenomena,
Light is real, but ungraspable, it shines through all.
It is the bottomless Ground of Being, boundless Being above Being.
But in this shine, taking reason away from me,
How can I humanely love, trust, pray...?
Everything was taken from me, my �me� was taken from me,
And there�s nothing anymore, and everything is just as it is...
Absolute freedom of Existence, but a pain of an existing one...
It is a terminal struggle...


"Why have you forsaken me?"

God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
But why in the bliss of liberation, in the truth as obvious as a hit in a face?
Why in a light so transparent, so bright?
Why in this lightness, this radiance?
Why can�t you be grasped, related to?
Why there�s no-one who could despair about it?

Oh Truth, be God to me! God, be Existence to me!
Oh Nothingness, be Love!
because there�s no way outside, nor inside,
there's no entrance, no gate...
I had so much love, I had so much desire, and suddenly I�m in a midst of a boundless desert,
Bathed in a shine which has stolen my Beloved from me,
And made my soul, once so real, only an unreal shadow...
Faithfulness... Promises... Trust... Hope...
Let them be manifest in this dream-world
And give a meaning to this dream-shadow I�ve become!

My Beloved, if He is Reality, if He is the All,
Why has he disappeared, taking away everything that was important?
Important to whom? And why?
From a complete emptiness I bring my prayers to the Unknowable Nothingness.
Her will be done, not mine, and be I a decent man,
Whatever will happen.

Those poems are amazing! Did it ever get better? I'm surely not looking forward to that part of my spiritual voyage.

Hi, Buttercup.

It did get better. The horrible part of the experience lasted about a month or two, than I started to adjust to it. After few months I could relate to God once more, and the subtle sense of sense came back. But until this December for two years I've been in a relatively dry period. Now the feeling of His presence came back, stronger than ever.
As you can see, in these poems, there are Zen things mixed with Christian contemplative things, and I, myself, couldn't tell them apart until now.
E.g. I wouldn't say now that phenomena are "illusory" - I think it's a Buddhist interpretation. Teresa of Avila wrote at the end of her autobiography that she sees everything AS IF in a dream. That's more Christian than "illusory" or "non-existing". And in these poems I see an attempt to get to God through by-passing concepts, feelings, forms and so on, which is not traditionally Christian. Maybe God wanted to show me that God without concepts and feelings is not really the God I want to know, because there can be no relationship when you are in this Light-Existence.
The Christian part was feelings of being abandoned, cheated, rejected, lonely and a great pain of loss.

thank you for your post
W.C. on this forum thinks that if you had a really good childhood experience you don't have to be afraid of dark nights.
Anyway, this experience was very enriching for me, a lot of spiritual pride diminished through this.

Those truly are wonderful poems, mateusz! One certainly does get a sense of your experience and struggle in reading them. Your reflection above on how you see them now is also interesting. It seems that, for awhile, you were given to suffer a Christian-Zen dark night, but that you are now coming to experience a fruitful emergence from it.