One does not have to be a mystic to experience a dark night of the soul. Sometimes, life's circumstances and hardships can be enough to make us feel a palpable and painful absence of God. This past year, 2020, was a year of hardship for people worldwide because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Millions of people suffered physically, emotionally and economically. To say this in one sentence sounds like an understatement, because we had a year not only filled with sickness, fear, and job loss, but also political turmoil. This blog post is not about what the world experienced at large, and it most certainly isn't about politics. What I seek to address in this article is my own personal experience, to the extent that I'm willing to do so on a public blog, and address concepts about the absence of God and the dark night of the soul.
This past year, I went from being mildly optimistic and reflective about renewal (as you will see from my posts in January and early February of 2020 before the chaos of the pandemic hit the United States), to being almost at the brink of despair spiritually and personally. Basically, I started out the year of 2020 watching a dear friend of the family lose his job, and seeing him and his family go through turmoil and difficulty as an almost twenty-year career ended for him. Then, just after watching my friends go through all that, a member of the choir at the church where I worked died after about a ten-month struggle with cancer. I was supposed to play the organ for her funeral, but my wrist was injured in a physical therapy exercise. I had to hire a substitute organist to play for the funeral, while I still directed the choir. By the time I recovered the ability to play the organ, the pandemic hit and the church where I worked was closed down temporarily because of the shelter-in-place directive.
To make a long and complicated story short, my husband and I lost our jobs because of the economic hardships caused by the Covid crisis. I lost my job in April, and my husband lost his in July. I had a brief interim job as a music director at another church, from July of 2020 until the end of November of that year. Since I had not yet found a permanent job, I was out of work again by the beginning of Advent 2020. I fortunately got some freelance work at another church, playing harp and French horn in Advent and Christmas services that December. That successful start of a freelance business in church music gave me much hope. By the first of the year in January of 2021, however, things were looking bleak again.
On top of all this, my husband's mentally and physically disabled younger brothers, who live with us and for whom he is the main caregiver, developed escalating health problems that rendered them even more disabled. This, in turn, made our situation more desperate since we could not seem to land permanent jobs. My husband could not get a job at all, and as I mentioned, I couldn't get permanent work in my field either. Other options, like teaching music at schools, were not open to me because of issues I had wearing masks and face coverings with my severe asthma. By January, our situation with my husband's brothers was worse than it had ever been. Our Orthodox Christmas on January 7 was one of the hardest Christmases I had experienced since the death of my mother back in 1992. By the beginning of February, exactly a year after my last blog post here, our house was an absolute disaster because of the health problems of the brothers and the caregiving issues, and we had no income at all. We were ineligible for unemployment insurance because of having worked for churches, which are exempt from paying unemployment insurance.
I had been through almost a whole year of questioning whether God was present, whether He still wanted me in His service in church music, and indeed whether or not He wanted me at all. Even though my faith tradition does not believe in the theology of Calvinism, I had somehow gotten Calvinistic ideas embedded in me about some sort of pre-destined calling in God, whereby if I followed His will for my life and strove to fulfill that calling, things would work out for me. The fact that I found myself continually in situations where I would build up hope, and then have it dashed to pieces when things didn't work out for whatever reason, made me in turn think that maybe I had sinned in some way and God had therefore rejected me and my gifts for His service.
Things then shifted after two Orthodox feast days: St. Brigid's Day (Feb. 1) and Candlemas (the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord in the Temple, February 2). I asked the intercession of St. Brigid for the healing of my husband's youngest brother, who was home from a recent stay in a nursing home for rehabilitation, and who had come home without hardly being rehabilitated at all. He was downstairs in our living room, in a hospital bed, almost completely unable to walk. Well, exactly three days later from the day I prayed, this brother WALKED up the stairs to his room and was able to be moved back up there to his bedroom. Yesterday, March 8, 2021, he was discharged from physical therapy by the home health PT who had been coming out to our house. So, that was a definite miracle of God, Who is wondrous in His saints!
Shortly after that, however, I experienced another dark night of the soul in which I went through a time when I could not connect with God at all. I wondered, did I sin in some way? Did I pray the wrong way? Was He rejecting me to show me that I had messed up? It was a terrible feeling of being in a dark abyss without His presence. However, at the same time, I came to know that the Holy Spirit was with me down in that abyss and that I also had more help from the intercessions of the saints. I won't go into specifics because those are between me and my spiritual father (the Orthodox Christian term for a spiritual director). But suffice it to say that I discovered that the feeling of God's absence was just that. . .a feeling! So, I posted this on Facebook about when we think God is absent. It is worth reposting here:
At the time that you think most that God is absent, He's actually there. Sometimes, we can't always sense His presence when we pray, especially when we are praying during hard times. But He's never "out to lunch," nor is He ever really cut off from us, though at times it seems like the flow of His grace gets turned off like a water spigot. But that is just a FEELING, and feelings do not necessarily bespeak truth, nor reflect reality. God is always there. He is the God Who neither slumbers nor sleeps, and Who ever keepeth Israel. When we are blessed with the perception of His presence, it is a true blessing not to be taken for granted, and a reminder that He hears us, especially when we most think that He does not.
There was also something else that I had posted shortly after that, about surrendering to God and not giving in to our own personal ideas about how we think our lives should be. That is worth revisiting also, because by February of 2021, I had decided to quit fighting against the whole pattern of hope being built up, being dashed to the ground, and things being stable one minute and unstable the next:
Well, I think it is time to stop fighting against the tide of chaos, difficulty and unraveling of my desires for my life, this tide that has been pummeling me since February of 2020. This does not mean I just give up. It means I need to calm down, go with the flow, and let God work through all of this. Two things are immediately apparent: (1) This is part of a certain level of initiation in my life. (2) My calling in this world is shifting, and I am being asked to live that calling in fullness and truth. Will I continue to serve in church music? I don't know. I might end up getting a grant and going back to school to become something else entirely, such as a music therapist. I might end up doing both. But it is clear that I am being asked to step outside of these difficult situations emotionally and look at them on the spiritual plane. Trying to swim against this tide of everything being turned upside down, prevented and delayed is pointless. I may as well swim with the rapids, and if I get dashed upon the rocks, so be it. Sometimes, things within us have to die so that better things within can be born. Often, we are called upon to let go of the way WE think our lives are supposed to be or the things we most desire. I gave myself to Christ as a musician and singer of healing prayers and hymns! I gave my life to His service, and asked His Mother to be my model. Guess what? That means my life no longer belongs to me: "Behold the handmaid of the Lord. Be it done unto me according to thy word." So! I shouldn't be surprised or dismayed when what I want most in life suddenly doesn't work out anymore, or that I am placed upon a path not of my choosing. I wanted just to serve Him in His Church and have a house out in the woods. But maybe that isn't what HE wants. NOTE TO FRIENDS READING THIS POST: If you don't want to experience this sort of unweaving and unraveling like I have, don't give yourself like that to God. It might feel great when you first do it and you might think yourself oh-so-good for having done so, but it is in fact a sure way to get Divinely knocked down on your arse and getting the stuffing slapped out of you. Run from your calling and you'll end up in the belly of a whale. Embrace it and arrogantly say, "Here I am, I'm ready!" and you'll end up reduced to a grain of wheat fallen to the earth and ground into the dirt. The words of Yoda to Luke Skywalker come to mind: "Ready, are you? What knows you of ready?!".
Not long after I had that horrible dark-night-of-the-soul experience--and recovered from it, I got an e-mail out of the blue from the pastor of a Missouri Synod Lutheran parish who was looking for an interim music minister. I talked with the associate pastor not long after that, as well as a ministry support pastor for the Spanish-speaking branch of that congregation. I ended up in a job interview with all of them by the end of February, and immediately after the interview I signed a contract with them for three months as interim music director. After I signed the contract, I felt great peace of the Holy Spirit within me. It is definitely the place I'm supposed to be right now, at this time in my life.
Will it end up being where I'm supposed to be long-term? I don't know. With the positive experiences I have had there so far, it well may be, but this is entirely up to God.
What I have learned from all of this are the following things:
(1) God gives us gifts and callings, but the way in which those callings are fulfilled and gifts are used is not a path set in stone; it is greatly affected by man's free will and the fallenness of the world, and that includes our own choices. As I reflect upon the past year, I am able to look back and see choices I made that could have been better. I am using what I learned to make wiser choices now, as I and my family enter a period of hopefully positive change, healing and restoration.
(2) We may be called to this, that or the other at various points in our lives, and the ways in which we serve God will go through times of ebb and flow. But one thing we are always called to do, no matter what, is die to ourselves and our notions of how our lives should be. We are called upon to let go of expectations, which is deuced difficult to do. I quote John 12:24: Most assuredly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much grain. (NKJV)
(3) The Dark Night of the Soul, while very real, is also quite often based on our feelings and perceptions. Guess what? We are fallen, imperfect beings and those feelings and perceptions are flawed. God is omnipresent, which means that He is there even if we don't think He is. Why do we sometimes feel He's absent? Well, sometimes, like myself in the past year, we have expectations that don't work out, so we conclude He's absent. That feeling is caused by an erroneous idea about Him being some sort of big Santa Claus in the sky Who always blesses us and keeps us from suffering. Um. . .no. To be sure, all good things come from Him. But following Him does not mean we will be somehow protected from suffering. Even though we intellectually know this, often our hearts can fall back into the Santa mode when dealing with God.
Other reasons for the Dark Night of the Soul can be acting or thinking in ways that cause our spiritual water faucet to get turned off. Our access to God's grace is free, but within our hearts and souls it operates like a water faucet that we can turn on or off by our own free will and responses to situations in our lives. God's grace might be trying to get through our garden hose, so to speak, but we have turned off the spigot in our ignorance, heedlessness, self-absorption, whatever. So, maybe I turned my spigot off. But it's a simple matter to turn it back on by crying out to God. Psalm 130 (129 LXX) comes to mind, verses 1-7:
1 Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord.
2 Lord, hear my voice: let thine ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications.
3 If thou, Lord, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand?
4 But there is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest be feared.
5 I wait for the Lord, my soul doth wait, and in his word do I hope.
6 My soul waiteth for the Lord more than they that watch for the morning: I say, more than they that watch for the morning.
7 Let Israel hope in the Lord: for with the Lord there is mercy, and with him is plenteous redemption.
Whatever reason we may have for going through a dark night of the soul, that dark night remains a mere perception of reality. Just because we feel like we're in the abyss and cut off doesn't mean we really are. The other thing about the abyss is that sometimes we have to venture into the womb, so to speak, in order to be reborn. The Gospel passage comes to mind, where Jesus tells Nicodemus about the need to be born again. There is also this passage from Isaiah, chapter 42, verses 14 through 16:I have kept still and restrained myself;
now I will cry out like a woman in travail,
I will gasp and pant.
15 I will lay waste mountains and hills,
and dry up all their herbage;
I will turn the rivers into islands,
and dry up the pools.
16 And I will lead the blind
in a way that they know not,
in paths that 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.
I could go on about these matters for many more paragraphs, but to sum up what I've learned in this past year of 2020, a single verse of Scripture suffices: Psalm 139 (LXX 138) verse 12.
Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee.
And one last image is worth considering as well: the wise men following the Star of Bethlehem to find Jesus.
9 When they had heard the king, they departed; and, lo, the star, which they saw in the east, went before them, till it came and stood over where the young child was.
10 When they saw the star, they rejoiced with exceeding great joy.
May God help us to find the Star of Bethlehem within ourselves, leading us to His Son as He led the Magi, especially in times of hardship and darkness.In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
