When faith goes dark.
After I stepped down from pastoring in an evangelical church in California, burnt out and aimless, I used to sit every week in the back of an early Catholic mass and witness it. Sometimes my lips would move. Sometimes I would say, “And with your spirit.” But I didn’t sing and seldom prayed. It was one of several times I’d nearly lost my faith completely. If I didn’t, I think, it was because of grace—but also because I placed myself occasionally in the company of faith I didn’t have. I wouldn’t admit my lack of belief or the muteness of my love for God meant the end of my Christian experiment. I told myself more than once then that I was borrowing on the faith I once felt and on the faith I’d find again.
//
Faith can go dark. And by this I don’t mean merely that it’s tested by hardship or by God’s inscrutable movements (or non-movement), when the sun hides and things are hidden in shadow. It’s as though the eyes fail. Though others may point to beams of light, everything appears like dusk. The senses fail, so that St John of the Cross calls some such experiences a “dark night of the senses.” Though the sun is out, one experiences neither warmth nor light. Practices of prayer and Scripture that used to connect me to God can begin to dry up; feelings of love may grow cold and quiet; and it can become difficult to affirm the things I believe. It can seem that God has vanished (“My god, why have you forsaken me?”) or that my faith has (“Have I forsaken you?”). Yet this is not the end of faith anymore than night is the end of the sun.
There are at least two major reasons why faith can go dark: because of God or because of me. But God can bring both to the same end.
The dark night God brings.
As much as any of us, God doesn’t want to be loved for what God does or for the image we project on God or for the way God makes us feel. When we’re early in a relationship, this may be enough for us. We might even desire specifically to be worked into someone’s heart on the basis of how we make them feel when they’re around us; I want the object of my affection to feel flush, to feel butterflies, to swoon when they’re around me so that they continue to want to be near me—but to what purpose? That they’ll eventually come to love me as I am in myself, such that they don’t need to feel those things to choose to me with me, to want to be with me; that they would see me as good and desirable independent of how I make them feel.
Of course, this comes through difficulty and disillusionment. The person I love stops being the person I expected them to be as I find that they’re actually only who they are. I no longer get a rush simply by being near them; I find there are many things that would be more fun and pleasurable than to have a quiet dinner and talking (maybe I can recapture that electricity with someone else). Yet do I enjoy who they are? Do I want to give even when I’m not receiving? Even as the reality of this person emerges from my fantasies or illusions or expectations, will I choose that reality? If we’re the person emerging from others’ illusions, we want the answer to be yes. If God is the reality emerging from illusions, God wants the answer to be yes.
Yet for that to be so, can there be another way than for God to make every gift invisible and every sense insensible and every communication silent, at least for a time? Many writers who have walked with God deep into the wilderness think not. And it is a difficult and painful separation. These are the things we know God by, and the loss and grief are real. But it doesn’t mean that the gifts and the touch and the communication are gone; God doesn’t break contact. John of the Cross sometimes refers to a “ray of darkness,” which is God continuing to connect with us more deeply than our senses or possibly even awareness, continuing actively to love us well and deeply, that we would have love in us even as we feel empty of it.
In this way, it’s a maturing of love and faith. It is both that we would learn to see in the dark, by a light that offers no light, and it is that would learn to love without sensing. It is, in the end, that we might love God “for nothing.”
The dark night we may bring.
Yet every darkening of faith comes because we’re advancing to maturity. I was burnt out and on the verge of giving up my faith because my relationship with God had deteriorated progressively over several years. I no longer knew how to pray, but the problem was, I was struggling to pray long before that and had been giving up the fight. I wasn’t a saint ascending the latter of piety only to find it enter a “cloud of unknowing” and mystically turn and descend; I was young man filled with jealousies and bitterness and lust. One could fairly say I was sailing drunk and ran my faith upon the shore.
To be sure, we can be responsible for our faith going dark when cease to pray, when we fill our hearts with greed and eyes with pornography and our hands with injustice so that there’s no room in our senses to perceive God at all. We can forget God’s voice. We can attune all of our desires in the contrary ways so that God’s love has no appeal to our senses at all, so that darkness seems like light and light seems like darkness.
But this is still a night in which God is at work, invisibly.
Whether we lead ourselves into a darkness of faith or God does, God leads in that night; God speaks, silently; God loves you well and deeply. Where our faith is crippled and neglected, there may be more healing to be brought through the soul’s journey—but the journey is still the same, as it ever is: that we might learn to see in the dark, to love without sensing, to be loved “for nothing.”
//
The recent days of pandemic have felt like a darkening of my faith. I can’t picture Jesus in prayer as I usually can. I have a stronger kinesthetic (tactile) imagination than visual imagination, so it’s common that I can at least “picture” Jesus touching me somehow, embracing me in some way or placing a hand just so—I haven’t been able to in weeks. I realize how relatively little love I’ve been experiencing for Jesus, the love of my life, who has been almost completely silent to me for months, and I remind myself simply how deeply I’ve loved him, and I trust this love and the One it loves, to love him though nothing comes to rouse it.
It is possible to love the One we cannot see, the One we cannot feel, even the One we cannot love—love invites it and will grow in it, to its full height, to its full depth, in its full devotion, when it is without reason.
I’m grateful that there may be more room for doubt in the Church than there ever has been, but let there be more room for darkened faiths. Let our churches be communities where we can sit and witness while others stand and sing words we’ll one day make our own again, as our eyes adjust, as our love does.
And if there isn’t, make room for yourself. The space exists in faith. Don’t disengage. Don’t go it alone; allow someone to remain in the company of those who will believe for you and will pray while you are silent.