Bonus Session: The Dark Night

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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James Finley (0:08)

Greetings, I'm Jim Finley. Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.

Greetings, everyone. Welcome to our time here together, turning for guidance to the Christian Mystic, St. John of the Cross. And we're in the midst of his book, The Dark Night, which follows the Ascent of Mount Carmel. And the last time we left off with each other, we were talking about The Dark Night as a poetic metaphor of how we experience God's love in the transformative process of loving and being loved by each other, primarily focusing on marital love, but pointing out how that same process is in parenting or teaching students in a classroom or committed to the healing process, or oneness with nature or solitude, art, poetry. It's just a continuous metaphor, the transformative power of love leading us into ever deeper love. So St. John of the Cross, I think, assumes all of that. He's always assuming that we're experiencing God's love for us in our love for each other and daily life and sharing it. He's just assuming that. But he's also assuming that we also have a personal relationship with God, not experiencing God's love in each other, but experiencing God's love in the presence of God in prayer. And furthermore, he's helping us to understand then, well, how is the Dark Night experienced with God? That is, how is it experienced in the presence of the infinite love of God? And his concern is the point at which we're living the Christian life and our daily quiet time of lexio divina, meditation and prayer. We go forth to share it with others and efficacious unto holiness. He's assuming all of that. So this is experiencing God's love for us in prayer, mediated or incarnate in our consolations, incarnate in our insights into the things of God, incarnate in our aspirations and so on.

But then when we pass through the veil of death, we move beyond these ways of experiencing the presence of God mediated through our thoughts, through our reflections, through our consolations, and we move into an unmediated, infinite union with the infinite love of God in glory, which is our destiny. And so then he's saying what can happen with some people following this path is that God doesn't wait until they're dead to begin infusing into them an unmediated experience of the infinite presence of God infinitely in ways they cannot grasp and starts to introduce them into the celestial state while still on the earth. And he is offering insight to those for whom the experience is happening and how to discern that it's happening. And we were looking at this with the Ascent of Mount Carmel, Book 1 and 2, on the active aspects of attitudes to cultivate, to cooperate with it. And now he's picking up again in The Dark Night on the passive aspects. And it's basically this.

It's basically that we realize as we go to our place of prayer that we're no longer nurtured by prayer, or we're no longer consoled by the felt sense of God's presence in prayer. And also the clarity that we had in our understanding of God through our beliefs, kind of chapter and verse clarity, that clarity is also not nearly so clear to us anymore. Because what's happening here is that God sees that we're attached to these finite ways of experiencing the infinite presence of God, efficacious unto holiness. And therefore to help liberate and free us up to begin to experience an infinite oneness with God, God lovingly takes away the capacity to function in that mediated way. And this is what he means by The Dark Night, that God helps us out by weaning us off our ability to engage in in Lectio Divina, discursive meditation and be nurtured by it, to liberate us from our dependency on those finite ways of experiencing God. And yet at the same time, we don't know how to go forward either. And so this is Chapter 9, Book 1 of The Dark Night. And he says, the first sign, John of the Cross, this is Article 2, is that these souls do not get satisfaction or consolation from the things of God. They do not get any other creatures either. Since God puts a soul in this dark night in order to dry up and purge its sensory appetite, he does not allow it to find sweetness or delight in anything.

And so everything suffers from a lack. It suffers from a lack of being able to experience God's presence in it, but also having tasted something of the love of God. It suffers from being lacking to us because it's finite. And having tasted something of the infinite love of God, we feel the poverty of all created things to fulfill us. And we also feel the poverty of being nurtured by God in prayer. Thomas Merton once called it a hell of mercy. God leaves us in this place of helplessness.