And there is a darkness that is in reality light, but in our limited perception, it seems dark to us. This is a darkness that is as necessary for our growth and spiritual health as nighttime darkness is necessary for some plants to bloom.

This we may call a blessed darkness, a holy darkness.

It may be experienced simply as not being able to see or understand, because we are human and the realm of God is the realm of Holy Mystery. While God is closer to us than we are to ourselves, God is also Other.  God is not like us.  “My thoughts are not your thoughts,” God tells us, “nor are your ways my ways” (Isaiah 55:8).   Sometimes we are given the grace to see how God is working in our lives and to experience in our prayer the light of God’s presence.  But often we can’t see.

One form of this darkness is the experience of waiting on God.

We see an important example of this near the end of the Easter season, after the Ascension of Jesus into heaven.   For a time, the disciples and friends of Jesus, along with Mary his mother, must wait in holy darkness.

Jesus has left them.  At least it seems that way.  Luke tells us in the first chapter of Acts that “a cloud took him out of their sight.”  Before leaving, Jesus had cautioned his disciples “not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait there for the promise of the Father.”  So they go to the Upper Room, the Cenacle, and pray together.  They don’t know what they are supposed to do otherwise.  They don’t know what their mission is to be.  They don’t know how they are supposed to deal with the lack of Jesus’ visible presence in their lives.

This is the holy darkness of waiting in prayer. It means waiting in total dependence on God, since they are helpless on their own to bring about that for which they long.  This is the blessed darkness of Mystery, an obscurity that in reality is the Light and presence of Christ in newness, though experienced as absence and as emptiness and as unknowing, because it can’t yet be perceived until the outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost.

There is a necessary waiting that brings us face to face with our own weakness and need and desire for God, and with the fact that we can’t control God or save ourselves.  It is a waiting that removes our conceit, along with any pride in our spiritual experiences.  We then accept the obscurity of this prayer as sacred, for when we are truly waiting on God, the unknowing that feels like darkness is filled with the invisible light of Christ.

God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all.
(1 John 1:5)

Truth walks toward us on the paths of our questions… Wait awhile in the stillness, and do not rush to conclusion, no matter how uncomfortable the unknowing.

Notice that here the truth is actively moving toward us, not elusive or fleeing us, and using our own questions as a means of reaching us.  If this is true, then people who tell us not to ask questions may be hindering our way to God, who is Truth. (Of course, for the questions themselves to become a path for divine Truth, we must make sure they are real questions, and not defiant certainties disguised as questions.)

The image of truth walking toward us is faithful to what we know of our God, who actively pursues us – who seeks us, even when we least deserve to be found.

We can also be confident that in our unknowing, before the questions are answered, we are already in God the All-Knowing.  We can sit quietly even in our darkness and confusion, trusting that we remain in God.

Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk,
I took them up in my arms;
but they did not know that I healed them.
I led them with cords of human kindness,
with bands of love.

Hosea 11:3-4

The internet has made me more aware than ever of our human tendency to judge each other, although I doubt that more judging is going on now than in the pre-cyberspace world. It is rather that no thought, holy or otherwise, seems to remain unpublished these days.

The blatant ugliness of most of the judgments serves as a caution to me when I am tempted to indulge in it myself.

Below are a few examples, most of which will remain anonymous to protect the perpetrators. But first a distinction:

It is one thing to condemn an action that is obviously harmful. This we must do when necessary.

It is another thing altogether to condemn the person who commits the action; or to claim to know that a person’s heart is evil; or to predict the final end of another; or to hold a person in scorn.  All of these fall under the commandment of Jesus not to judge, that we ourselves may not be judged.

Now to the examples drawn from various websites:

An anti-Christian site informs us that it is only the immature who believe in “non-existent beings,” such as Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and Jesus.

You can read elsewhere that most Christians are mean-spirited; and that people who speak out for God are often lunatics.

But neither are believers always generous toward other believers (or toward God, for that matter):

Mel Gibson says, “My wife is a saint. She’s a much better person than I am…She prays, she believes in God, she knows Jesus, she believes in that stuff.”
No matter, for she’s probably going to hell, we learn. It turns out that she is Episcopalian, not Catholic. (Note that the Catholic Church would NOT take the harsh stand that Gibson takes toward his wife.)

On a blog by a young Catholic we are informed that the souls of those who voted for Barack Obama are also in danger of hell.

We find on YouTube that people who practice centering prayer are deceived by Satan, both in being seduced into adopting this form of prayer in the first place, and also because this kind of prayer makes one open to demonic suggestion.

And let’s not forget the Antichrist: the pope is probably the most popular candidate (any pope, pick one).  Others who have been named are Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, the president of the European Union – and on and on….

Even more radically vicious judgments are on the loose (if it is possible to be more vicious than calling someone the Antichrist) which I will not cite because they are not suited for a family-friendly web page.  These judgments I prefer to chalk up to zealous ignorance.

So let us pause and take a deep breath of fresh air…

To continue on a happier note, here are some quotes about the true judgment:

In the evening of life, we will be judged on love.
(St. John of the Cross)

The Last Judgment will come when Christ returns in glory… Then through his Son Jesus Christ, [God] will pronounce the final word on all history. We shall know the ultimate meaning of the whole work of creation and of the entire economy of salvation and understand the marvelous ways by which his Providence led everything towards its final end. The Last Judgment will reveal that God’s justice triumphs over all the injustices committed by his creatures and that God’s love is stronger than death.
(Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1040)

Let the floods clap their hands;
let the hills sing together for joy
at the presence of the Lord,
for he is coming to judge the earth.
He will judge the world with righteousness,
and the peoples with equity.
(Psalm 98:8-9)

A wise rabbi once asked his students, “How do you know when the night is over and the day has dawned?

One answered, “When you can look at an animal in the distance and tell whether it is a sheep or a dog?”

“No,” said the rabbi.

Another said, “Is it when you can look at a tree and tell whether it is a fig or an olive tree?”

“No,” said the rabbi.

“Please, rabbi, tell us.  How do you know when the night is over and the day has dawned?”

The rabbi answered, “You know that the day has dawned when you can look at any man or woman and discern there the face of your brother or sister.  Until then, you are still in the night.”

Rise up in splendor, Jerusalem!  Your light has come,
the glory of the Lord shines upon you.
See, darkness covers the earth,
and thick clouds cover the peoples;
but upon you the LORD shines,
and over you appears his glory.

Isaiah 60:1-2

“Peace,” she replies. “Or perhaps joy.”

After a moment she asks him, “What about your own word for life?”

“You wouldn’t want to hear it.”

No, she probably wouldn’t.  The word he is thinking of is “futility.”

Josh, you may remember, is the ex-Christian with whom I correspond from time to time. He admits that a certain amount of happiness is found in life, as well as a certain amount of pain and sorrow.  But at the end, he concludes, it all means nothing.

While he has lost the sense of any meaning to life, Josh has found purpose in his current crusade against Christianity. He has become what we might call a dysvangelist (or more etymologically correct, a “dysangelist”), one who proclaims, not Good News, but bad or disordered news. His co-religionists include the band of in-your-face “new atheists” whose books are hot sellers these days. Josh is less eloquent than they, but no less fervent.

Josh’s mission, however, appears to give him no joy. It is one thing to spend a Saturday afternoon in what we consider meaningless activity. It is quite another to live a life of futility. Something deep in us insists that life has meaning, and the refusal of this basic instinct has the effect of throwing our minds and hearts out of kilter – of untuning, so to speak, the strings of life.

Here are two quotations, one reflecting a psychological approach to meaning, and the other a uniquely Christian insight:

As we see, a human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy … through actualizing the potential meaning inherent and dormant in a given situation.
Once an individual’s search for a meaning is successful, it not only renders him happy but also gives him the capability to cope with suffering.

Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy

Every Eucharist is a celebration of our trust that in Christ meaning will triumph in ways that we cannot guess or anticipate. Vaclav Havel, playwright and previous President of the Czech Republic, defined it thus: ‘Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.’”

Timothy Radcliffe, OP, What Is the Point of Being a Christian? (New York: Burns and Oates, 2006), 17.

For the enemy has pursued me,
crushing my life to the ground,
making me sit in darkness like those long dead.

Therefore my spirit faints within me;
my heart within me is appalled.

Answer me quickly, O Lord;
my spirit fails.
Do not hide your face from me,
or I shall be like those who go down to the Pit.

Let me hear of your steadfast love in the morning,
for in you I put my trust.

Teach me the way I should go,
for to you I lift up my soul.

(Psalm 143:3-4, 7-8)

“No, thank you, Sir,” she replied.

He picked it up anyway, and threw it away from her, into the mud. (I imagine he had intended this meanness right from the beginning, whether she had said yes or no.)

Carol was understandably upset. Even though she encounters a lot of scorn from people she meets, she never quite gets used to it. Nor should she.

Darkness in a Forum

The other day I was doing a search on Google – I don’t remember what the topic was, but it was for something I was writing. One link led me unawares to a website for ex-Christians. Once there, out of curiosity I read the webmaster’s story, and after reading it, decided to send him an e-mail. I told him that I was sorry about his journey away from Christianity, but that perhaps it had been a journey away from a childish faith that needed to mature. I urged him to remember that faith and doubt are not mutually exclusive and can coexist in the sincere heart and intellect — and also (for I had noticed some rather hateful postings from visitors who were not ex-believers), to pay no attention to “Christians” who would curse him for his non-belief, as there is no violence in God, who is totally loving and merciful. Since he had mentioned some non-Christian authors he had been reading, I suggested a few who were Christian.

I occasionally do send an e-mail, using a fairly anonymous e-mail address I have, to the person responsible for a website I have visited. Most often there is either a simple reply or no reply at all. I expected this to be no different.

The next day I received two messages from people I did not know. One thanked me for what I had said; the other encouraged me to reply to the responses to my posting. In the first place, I wasn’t aware of having posted anything, but I went back to the ex-Christian site and found that the webmaster had posted my e-mail (along with my e-mail address) to the site’s forum.

There had been 56 responses, and the second time I checked, there were many more. Some struck me as being from sincere seekers. Many, however, were vitriolic: one called me a “biblically illiterate fool”; and some made comments such as how my parents had wasted their money on my education. In other words, these people were not just disagreeing with me, they were in contempt of me.

For a couple of days, I found myself oppressed by a sense of darkness. Since then I have been reflecting on the experience and on why the feeling of darkness was so heavy in that forum. (I have also come to a profound gratitude for the kindness with which I am daily surrounded, and which, in countless lives, is woefully rare.)

I write the following with some hesitation, because I do not want to give the impression that I am judging the people who posted to the forum, as I have no idea what the pain may be that led them to adopt an attitude of such derision. Only God can see into another’s heart. Neither am I judging the young man who threw Carol’s hat into the mud. Even basically good people sometimes perform wicked actions.

A Question About Evil

But I ask myself: could it be that the essence of evil is scorn for what God has made?
This, of course, amounts to scorn for God.

The book of Genesis tells us, “God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (1:27); and, “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good” (1:31).

Two chapters later, we find the serpent casting doubt on the value of the human beings created by God. Tempting the woman, he says to her that after she eats of the tree in the middle of the garden, “you will be like God” (3:5). In other words, he implies that she is not already made in the image and likeness of God. She needs improvement, the snake suggests, that only his superior understanding of life will make possible. He is dismissive of the beauty and stature of what God has done.

Here was the darkness, I thought: it resided less in the unbelief than in the disdain. Is this why, for Jesus, calling someone a fool is such a serious matter (Mt 5:22 )? What about throwing Carol’s hat in the mud? Both of these would appear to show scorn for the creature God has made, and therefore contempt for the Creator.

It is not just ex-Christians who fall into this kind of darkness. Practicing Christians as well can too easily dismiss those who seem odd, those who are not “orthodox,” those who are of a different political persuasion.

All of us — Christian, ex-Christian, non-Christian — we are all made in the image of God. And we all stand in need of mercy.

Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor.

(Romans 12:9-10)

There are indeed forces contrary to God in our world. That becomes evident just by reading the newspaper or watching the evening news on television. I am convinced, however, that most of those forces do not bother to chase either adults or children across the yard, because there is something much more efficacious they can do to.

If the wiles of evil were obvious, we would be likely to run, like Robert, for the safety of grandmother’s arms. On the contrary, evil’s methods tend to work on us so subtly that we may not even be aware that we’ve changed sides. For example, we may find ourselves convinced that God does not have our welfare at heart, and that the will of God is simply a series of arbitrary commands and painful events. Who would want to draw near to such a God?

Evil may also try to persuade us that we are worthless in God’s eyes, and lead us to despair of the love and mercy of God. “What you have done is so heinous that you are unforgivable,” we hear. And in our distress we may forget that it is never the Spirit of God who speaks this word in us.

Evil tries to harden our hearts by specious arguments that may nevertheless sound logical:

- “Look around you,” say spirits opposed to the Spirit of Christ. “It is obvious that money and worldly esteem are more valuable than love and mercy.
- To be happy, seek riches and fame.”
- “Of course the end justifies the means!”
- “Violence is permissible to the followers of the Prince of Peace, as long as it is for a good cause.”
- “If the poor weren’t so lazy, if they just worked harder, there wouldn’t be any poverty.”
- “So what if those people are being ostracized? They deserve it, after all.”
- “God casts off unbelievers and those who don’t believe the way you and I do, so why should you go out of your way to show them kindness?”

These are the spirits of which we should be afraid. Like little Robert’s mad dash for the house, we must flee them as if our very life and soul depended on it. We flee, though, not by scattering the guinea hens, but by taking the time to be still with God and by learning to recognize the deceit of whatever would draw us away from God.

Then we refuse to listen to any voices in our world which suggest that God does not love us (or anyone else). We oppose these forces by allowing the love of God to fill us and by receiving the blessed mercy of God shown to us in Jesus. And we defeat them through the death and resurrection of Jesus, when we allow God to transform us into the merciful and welcoming presence of Christ for the world.

Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? …
If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday.
(Isaiah 58:6, 9b-10)

It was indeed an impressive storm. As you might imagine, once in it, we could barely see the lights of the car ahead of us. At the point when it became almost impossible to tell whether or not we were on the road at all, we pulled over on the shoulder to wait it out with other prudent drivers.

Too often in daily life, it seems all we can see ahead of us is a wall of clouds. The road itself disappears. Even the usual markers become invisible. Wisely we pull off to the side to pray, to ponder, to avoid the most obvious dangers; but we can’t spend our whole lives there. Eventually we have to make decisions, take steps, move along. If we don’t, life moves us along willy-nilly.In fact, no matter how cautious we are, no matter how carefully we plan, the reality is that we never really know what the future holds.

Sometimes God graciously gives us an intuition that we are on the right path. Something happens — perhaps something small and apparently insignificant that we would miss if we weren’t paying attention — that lets us know we are where we were meant to be. It is like being on the highway, fearing we are lost, and finally seeing a sign saying, “Gainesville 25 miles.” Aha (we say to ourselves), I was on the right road all along, although I didn’t know it! And we breathe more easily.

No, we can’t see the future. What we can be confident of is that we are headed for glory, but what glory will actually look like, once we get there, again we don’t know. We do know that in moving toward glory, glory is already in our midst, and that when we arrive at our final destination, a place will have been prepared for us and — wonder of wonders — we will know that we are expected, and that we are home.

Lead, kindly Light, amid th’encircling gloom, lead Thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home; lead Thou me on!
Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene; one step enough for me.

(John Henry Cardinal Newman, 1833)

Perhaps it was because I was in the back of the four-seater, which along with the engine noise and my earplugs made conversation difficult. Perhaps it was because we flew higher than I am accustomed to in a little airplane. Whatever the reason, I became very conscious of our smallness and our fragility in the vast expanse of the sky.

We were supported only by air. Anything solid was 7500 feet below us, but even the Florida coastline seemed to be more marshland than firm earth. Before long the clouds thickened and nothing of earth was visible. I was not frightened, but awed by our weakness combined with our audacity to venture into the sky in this little fabric-covered Maule aircraft.

So it is with our spiritual journey, which can be much more spine-tingling than flight. A humble audacity is required, as it is when taking off in a single-engine plane. While all may seem clear at first when we are feeling our feet solidly planted on what we think we know, there comes a time when we have to trust God entirely even though we can see nothing and perhaps feel nothing.

Here is what Saint Gregory of Nyssa says in his Life of Moses:

Leaving behind everything that is observed, not only what sense comprehends but also what the intelligence thinks it sees, it keeps on penetrating deeper until . . . it gains access to the invisible and incomprehensible, and there it sees God. This is the true knowledge of what is sought; this is the seeing that consists in not seeing, because that which is sought transcends all knowledge, being separated on all sides by incomprehensibility as by a kind of darkness [163].

Dwelling in Mystery beyond our comprehension, we have no choice but to rely on God-with-us — Emmanuel — who is more present to us than the air and a support infinitely more firm. Upheld by what we cannot see, God is teaching us to see by not seeing and to know “the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge” (Eph 3:19).

I will lead the blind
by a road they do not know,
by paths they have not known I will guide them.
I will turn the darkness before them into light,
the rough places into level ground.
These are the things I will do,
and I will not forsake them.

Isaiah 42:16

One day he asked Sister Elizabeth, “Am I going to get better?”

She doesn’t know where the answer came from, but she found herself saying, “Yes, you are going to get better — if not here, then in heaven.”

The next day when she went into his room, she found him still in pain, but totally at peace. “I’m glad I’m going to get better,” he said. “It doesn’t matter where — here or in heaven.” A few days later he died.

In The Impact of God, (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1995), Iain Matthew reflects on the experience of darkness as described by Saint John of the Cross. Matthew says that although not all pain is a healing darkness — that “night more lovely than the dawn” where God works to bring us to union with Christ — it is still true that any suffering can become this blessed night.

One of the qualities of this grace-filled night is that there is an “inflow of God”:

“The admission that we cannot heal ourselves, while it may take some tension out of the air, fails of itself to hold out hope. What makes ‘night’ blessed is the added assurance that the one who can heal does intend to heal. Where God finds space, he enters….That is what makes night something other than disastrous.”

“The one who can heal does intend to heal.”

Whether our suffering is physical or on some other level, God wants to heal us. What matters most in the long run, may not be whether the medical or psychic “cure” takes place now or later. To accept God’s loving desire to enter into our pain, to allow in ourselves the space where God can enter, to respond with faith to the “inflow of God” — this may in itself be a deeper healing than any cure would be.

Sister Elizabeth’s patient placed his trust in the healing intention of God, and his darkness became a blessed night filled with peace as it led him to that ultimate healing of heaven.

Where can I go from your spirit?
Or where can I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there;
if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.

If I take the wings of the morning
and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me fast.

If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me,
and the light around me become night,”
even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night is as bright as the day,
for darkness is as light to you.
(Psalm 139:7-12)