In the summer of 2000, I was newly unemployed and seeking direction for the days ahead. My spiritual director suggested an 8-day retreat to help me see more clearly where I was standing, and how I might step into the coming days. So I went off for an 8-day directed retreat (after the fact I learned it was a retreat with the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola), during which I met daily with my spiritual director. She provided me with scripture and material for reflection (from the Spiritual Exercises). I spent the days praying and meditating, then talking with her about my experience of prayer.
It must have been obvious to her that I had my life-plan mapped out. Though jobless, I had already decided there was a certain kind of person I wanted to be and a certain kind of work I wanted to do in order to be that person.
Early in the week, she handed me this parable, instructing me to pray with it for the next 24 hours.
Jesus also said, “This is what the kingdom of God is like. A man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself the soil produces grain—first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. As soon as the grain is ripe, he puts the sickle to it, because the harvest has come.”
(Mark 4:26 - 29)
Of course, I had read the parable before, in fact many times through the years. But its meaning had never been so clear. I was reading these words from a different place, and hearing them as if for the first time. The seed grows, whether the farmer is asleep or awake. The seed grows, not dependent on the farmer to know how it happens or to control the outcome. The seed grows, and the end result is out of the farmer's control.
Perhaps I could have reacted to this new revelation with dismay, but I did not. Rather, a flood of relief fell over me, a lightness of being I had never experienced. My life is not about how well I control it, how well I manage my surroundings and my situation, how well I manipulate the environment in order to get the outcomes I prefer.
Most humans are controllers. If there is a scale, I probably rate higher than average on the control-meter. I cannot say I was forever changed by this moment in the summer of 2000. It was a beginning point, but these 18 years later I'm still working out what this means for me, how to enter each day without squeezing the life out of it, how to go with the flow, how to surrender my tendency to manage people and things toward my desired wishes.
The spiritual life is, by definition, an endeavor of God's Spirit. Human knowledge and understanding are not the cornerstones of the spiritual journey. To be sure, you and I are invited into this life of connection with God which makes a difference in who we are with God, self, others, and the world. We are participants, and our intention to set ourselves to the journey is crucial. But according to the parable, we are not the final determiners of the harvest.
In fact, much of the growth of God's kingdom within us happens when we are in the darkness, when we are asleep, unconscious, unaware. I've come to believe this is so because for many of us, literal sleep is the only time we have our hands off the remote control, the only time we are not managing our world. We lay our defenses down and go to sleep . . . for a few hours giving God's Spirit an opening into our well-defended life.
[I've heard entrepreneurs and other people considered "highly successful" by society talk about how little they sleep at night because they are driven to be successful. Society at large applauds that ambitious drive. I wonder, though, if some of their sleeplessness is simply the fear of taking their hand off life's remote control, even to sleep . . . the anxiety that something may happen while they are asleep that they cannot manage or manipulate . . . so their fear masquerades as the drive to succeed!)
Through the years, some people have said to me this is why they will not participate in a silent retreat . . . because they would have to lay aside their newspaper, put away their cell phone, and be out of touch for a few hours. One person actually said to me, "What if something happened in the world while I was on retreat, and I knew nothing about it?!" It was impossible for her to imagine being out of control and out of "the know", even for a few hours.
In the landscape of the parable, Jesus describes a farmer who scattered and tended the seed, but who both slept and stayed awake, and who experienced that the growth of the seed did not depend on his efforts, nor on her understanding. It is a wonderful little parable, and a marvelously clear image of how spiritual growth and fruitfulness, are not functions of my planning, my manipulation, my management, my control, my expertise. Other forces are at work and other designs shape how the seed grows.
For today, listen to the parable for yourself.
What does it say to you about your spiritual journey?
What invitation do you hear in it?
Is there some action which would help you step more fully into God's invitation as you hear it in these words?
Showing posts with label dark night of the soul. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dark night of the soul. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 19, 2018
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
A Rilke Poem for Advent Darkness
This poem found me a few days ago. For me it matches the mood of Advent, the darkness and waiting to which we are each called. It calls me to a rootedness that doesn't fight the darkness, but rather allows the darkness to make me more fully and completely human.
There is a contradiction in darkness and waiting that makes us terribly uncomfortable, especially as persons who want our pain wrapped up in a tidy bow. But the task of becoming fully human is never clean. Seldom does it draw in straight lines and in perfectly square corners. Growing up is messy work. Maturity, including spiritual maturity, comes at a cost. Every experience of life has within it the capacity to be our teacher.
Rilke was familiar with darkness. As with most artists, his creativity emerged from this seedbed which was very much underground, cold, dank, still and in some ways seemed to be without life.
So this is an expression of Rilke's stance toward darkness.
Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,
what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.
In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.
And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.
[Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29, trans. by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows]
There is a contradiction in darkness and waiting that makes us terribly uncomfortable, especially as persons who want our pain wrapped up in a tidy bow. But the task of becoming fully human is never clean. Seldom does it draw in straight lines and in perfectly square corners. Growing up is messy work. Maturity, including spiritual maturity, comes at a cost. Every experience of life has within it the capacity to be our teacher.
Rilke was familiar with darkness. As with most artists, his creativity emerged from this seedbed which was very much underground, cold, dank, still and in some ways seemed to be without life.
So this is an expression of Rilke's stance toward darkness.
Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,
what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.
In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.
And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.
[Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29, trans. by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows]
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Dark Night of the Soul
This summer a number of folks connected with The Center for Christian Spirituality read Gerald May's Dark Night of the Soul for our Summer Reading Series. We discussed the book last week, sharing stories of our own interaction with the book.
In the book May interprets and clarifies the work of 16th century Spanish mystic John of the Cross. For many people John's writing is difficult to grasp, full of theological language foreign to modern readers. May cuts through much of the difficulty and provides a very accessible and helpful interpretation of the dark night of the soul. This was my fourth reading of his book and again I found it extremely beneficial.
In the aftermath of this most recent reading, I find myself grateful that my own experience has broadened enough to make some sense of the dark night of the soul. For years I tried to read John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, knowing they were important spiritual guides, but really clueless about what they were telling me.
Over the years, though, as my own experience has grown, as I've explored wider and wider interior terrain, I've come to have personal, inner confirmation of the truths they speak of. It is not that my own experience validates John of the Cross or Gerald May . . . they don't need my validation. The validation happens within me and for me, in order to help me make some sense of my own spiritual journey.
There have been moments over the last fifteen years when I've felt crazy. (It's likely that I was crazy!) It's the feeling that I'm out there at the end of the limb all by myself, that I've finally drifted too far off center, I've crossed over a line beyond orthodoxy. Then I read a John of the Cross, a Gerald May, a Teresa of Avila, a Richard Rohr . . . someone speaking a truth with which my own experience lines up. And within me rises up an internal validation of my own life-experience, a validation of the life-path I walk.
I sometimes read what someone else writes or speaks and within my deepest being -- the soul of me that is most alive and attentive -- something shouts out, "I KNOW this is true because I've been there . . . my experience has confirmed this reality for me!"
The bottom line is that spirituality is not about concepts and ideas and understanding. Spirituality is about a lived experience, about life in all its rawness. So it is not enough to sit idly on the sidelines, thinking lofty thoughts, or imagining what the spiritual life is all about. Spirituality is encounter, authentic engagement with God, self, others, and the world.
So when my own experience aligns with what I believe to be true about life and God and journey and relationship and transformation and illusion, then there is a validation and an integration of that truth woven into the fabric of who I am. That kind of thing has happened to me with the material on the dark night of the soul. My experience has said to me, "At least for you, sojourner, this is truth."
In the book May interprets and clarifies the work of 16th century Spanish mystic John of the Cross. For many people John's writing is difficult to grasp, full of theological language foreign to modern readers. May cuts through much of the difficulty and provides a very accessible and helpful interpretation of the dark night of the soul. This was my fourth reading of his book and again I found it extremely beneficial.
In the aftermath of this most recent reading, I find myself grateful that my own experience has broadened enough to make some sense of the dark night of the soul. For years I tried to read John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, knowing they were important spiritual guides, but really clueless about what they were telling me.
Over the years, though, as my own experience has grown, as I've explored wider and wider interior terrain, I've come to have personal, inner confirmation of the truths they speak of. It is not that my own experience validates John of the Cross or Gerald May . . . they don't need my validation. The validation happens within me and for me, in order to help me make some sense of my own spiritual journey.
There have been moments over the last fifteen years when I've felt crazy. (It's likely that I was crazy!) It's the feeling that I'm out there at the end of the limb all by myself, that I've finally drifted too far off center, I've crossed over a line beyond orthodoxy. Then I read a John of the Cross, a Gerald May, a Teresa of Avila, a Richard Rohr . . . someone speaking a truth with which my own experience lines up. And within me rises up an internal validation of my own life-experience, a validation of the life-path I walk.
I sometimes read what someone else writes or speaks and within my deepest being -- the soul of me that is most alive and attentive -- something shouts out, "I KNOW this is true because I've been there . . . my experience has confirmed this reality for me!"
The bottom line is that spirituality is not about concepts and ideas and understanding. Spirituality is about a lived experience, about life in all its rawness. So it is not enough to sit idly on the sidelines, thinking lofty thoughts, or imagining what the spiritual life is all about. Spirituality is encounter, authentic engagement with God, self, others, and the world.
So when my own experience aligns with what I believe to be true about life and God and journey and relationship and transformation and illusion, then there is a validation and an integration of that truth woven into the fabric of who I am. That kind of thing has happened to me with the material on the dark night of the soul. My experience has said to me, "At least for you, sojourner, this is truth."
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