What Happens Amongst the Lilies: Tentatively Considering St. John of the Cross and the Dark Night of the Soul

The first rule of the Dark Night is that you don’t talk about the Dark Night. Or perhaps put more aptly, can’t. Indeed, St. John of the Cross makes it clear that part of the Dark Night is a failure or perceived failure in understanding – it will seem that one is going nowhere. Conversely, it is probable and possible that those most excited about the Dark Night are romantics and have not really tasted it – they are envious of those who have walked it and remain silent because they could never possibly find the words. Given these factors and my own misgivings, I don’t want to presume the degree to which I have experienced the dark night of the senses, let alone that of the soul; further, the fact that mental illness and the dark night are overlapping but distinct categories makes it even more difficult to tell. It is why, I think, John of the Cross presumes spiritual direction as a sine qua non – without it, we will get lost in the dark. This is why a theology of the dark night flourishes just to the degree it occurs within a strongly hierarchical ecclesial structure and disappears when the priesthood of all believers is interpreted as a mutually exclusive alternative to a magisterial hierarchy. If we are are compelled to undertake the spiritual equivalent of deep sea diving, we had best be sure the vessel connecting us to the surface is sound. But to return to my main point, a claim to personal experiential access to the intimacy that is the dark night would be foolish at best.

What I can do, though, is express appreciation for some of the most explanatory and powerful ideas of St. John. And so I shall begin. What is beautiful about St. John of the Cross is that he discovers space in the body of Christ for the rest of humanity. There are those who seem able to maintain a particularly affective engagement with Christ throughout their lives – their motto is “Taste and see that the Lord is good,” and they do taste and do see – and are often puzzled by those who don’t or can’t. Whether such ongoing affectivity is the result of particular blessing or spiritual immaturity is a matter best left to God, and I imagine it varies on a case-by-case basis. What I do know though is that it very often leaves others enormously confused. Not only those who are not at all Christian, but those who are but find their affective relationship with God difficult if not apparently impossible. An affective theological framework without the possibility of an apophatic counter will end up excluding such persons from the kingdom of God. They will fake it or fall away. And what might have been an opportunity to help someone encounter God in the night is lost – the person is implicitly if not explicitly dismissed as one who just didn’t try hard enough.

This of course is not to say that the rest of humanity are automatic participants in the dark night – indeed, far from it. As developed in my opening caveat, those most eager to embrace the theology of the dark night may be least prepared for it, and may have other things to work out. Indeed, there is a far more common dark night, the dark night of sin, and while there is always the hope of this being transformed into the dark night of the soul, this hope hangs on what must always and ever be the response to sin – repentance. But it must always be kept in mind that the efficacy of repentance cannot be gauged by the affectivity with which God encounters the penitents – for it is possible He may encounter them secretly and unknown in the dark night.

This no doubt all sounds cold and clinical, and indeed it would be were it not for the fact that this apparent non-encounter – this apparent absence – is somehow also supercharged with an unnameable and aching intimacy and love. God feels absent – and it is a dear absence we would not give for the entire world. It is the secret of the lover and beloved too delicate and interior to name. All descriptions of one’s spiritual life during this time sound plain and boring – because who would dare begin to describe it? It would be shameful and enticing and frustrating all at once – better to answer in boring monosyllables that contain some shadow of the semblance of the truth than to break out blushing and stammering. What happens amongst the lilies stays amongst the lilies. But others can sometimes tell – what has gone on in the absence sometimes makes us glow, and we know it not. Sometimes, what we may or may not know, may or may not have – all this blaze we are at the heart of – so bright it is dark – all this contagion, this longing – all this we know not of – kindles the tinder of the hearts around us – even if we know it not. What we know is darkness. But perhaps that is enough.

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For Hwan Modsefa Min Ne Gesweorce: The Single Truly Serious Philosophical Problem and the Sacrament of Christ

We are not Christians because being Christian makes us prosperous, happy, and free of suffering; if we think this, it is because we forget that though God may love us and have a wonderful plan for our lives, his definition of “wonderful” may be a bit more slanted than ours. God loved Job and had a wonderful plan for his life too.

Christians rediscover this from time to time – there was a reason Boethius’s Consolation was a spiritual staple of the Middle Ages – and I take it for granted that such is the case: some people have horrible, miserable lives, and some have glorious lives – and this will be the case whether we are Christian or not.

This though raises the question of why we are Christian at all. On the bald surface of it, Christianity would seem to promise a better life and not deliver. What is the good of speaking of all the riches in Christ if at the end of the day they merely dissipate into some always already deferred hope at the end of time? What is it that keeps us going as Christians? It is certainly not immediate success.

In many ways, I might suggest that my life itself is an experiment dedicated to discovering this. The poem that drew me inevitably into a love affair with Old English poetry, The Wanderer, articulates how I feel well: “Why should my thoughts not grow dark, when I think on this mortal life…” And why indeed should they not? There are darknesses and ruins all about us. Camus put it well when he said that there is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide – by which he meant the problem of knowing why people don’t commit suicide. There is a riddle deeper than the riddle of the Sphinx, and it is this: a man or woman walking – and not stopping – though his or her road is paved with despair. What is this about? What kind of offense is it that leads one to prolong suffering in a world that would rather see him and his suffering buried and out of sight? What kind of scandal leads him – even wishing to die – to live? What kind of monster is he that will remain and inflicts the burden of his life on others? I cannot speak for all humans, but I can speak for one at least. He is this kind of monster: he is a Christian. St. Paul knew this; he wrote the letter to the Ephesians.

Part of the brilliance of this letter is Paul’s recognition that it is not, contrary to popular assumption, desire that leads us to sin, or at least not directly so. It is despair. Christ, he tells us, saves us from the way of the Gentiles, “who despairing have given themselves up to lasciviousness, unto the working of all uncleanness, unto covetousness” (4:19). There are some debates here over what precisely the Greek means; depending on which manuscript one goes with, the Greek can either mean despair or numbness. Jerome opts for despair in the Vulgate. But both meanings are of a piece. For despair is simply spiritual and emotional leprosy. It is the increasing loss of feeling as hope dies – with less and less awareness of things out there to touch, we begin to lose our sense of touch. And so we try to touch harder and more violently. We cut ourselves like the priests of Baal facing off against Elijah. We turn to dark fantasies. No one ever wants sin. Rather, one sins because one wants love and fears he has lost the capacity to feel it. We seek harm – our own and that of others – because we fear it is the only way we will be able to feel touch. There is a world of moral difference between embrace and strangulation. But the desire behind both is the same, to touch and be touched; the difference depends on the choice all desire must make: to hope, or to despair. And so the Gentiles, despairing, have given themselves up to lasciviousness etc.. But Paul notes that we, however, did not come to know Christ this way.

Certainly not, but the question is, how did we, and how does it avoid this position of the Gentiles? For it is indeed a powerful position. The world is a wreck. And we don’t have the energy or time to feel it all – all its pain, all its suffering. And so we begin to cut corners in the way we live – we can’t after all be responsible for it all, and we have to focus on our own survival. We start with things that won’t hurt others – or things we think won’t hurt others. A little bit of selfishness here. A little lust there. A little greediness here. But a little is never enough. Our hunger runs deep – and it will run deep as hell if it will not run to Christ. What feels like a fresh and honest pushing of the boundaries today will be felt as prudish romanticism tomorrow, and so on. What starts as an innocent desire for the other will turn to possession, manipulation, and control. Desire will not be satisfied till it has destroyed its object: “All men kill the thing they love.” And it is all related, this destructive desire. We love our neighbours as we love ourselves. Suicide – whether our own or the assisted suicide of the rest of the world – is the manner of our love. Suicide is the manner of our desire. And unless we Christians realize this – the deep power behind the modern narrative of despair – we will have little to say. We will be naïve romantics in a world gone to hell.

But what then is the Christian response? Too often it has been to deny the deep dissatisfaction and longing behind such despair. Too often it has been the counsel that things are maybe not quite so bad as that – that if we were good perhaps we would not be so unhappy – if we were normal, well adjusted people, perhaps we would not be making such a fuss all the time. Too often, Christians presume to deal with the despair of the pagans by denying its validity – too often, what distinguishes us from those pagans who mourn like there’s no hope is not (as it should be) the fact that there is hope – ontologically so – but that we think there’s no reason to mourn. And that is precisely where Saint Paul understands what the Job’s comforters and Pollyannas of the world do not.

What is brilliant about St. Pauls’s response – and I interpret the entirety of Ephesians to be this response – is that the primary thing he gives us instead of idealism or despair is the mystery of Christ. For modern readers, his precise use of this term may itself seem like a bit of a mystery – trying to imagine the gospel as a great whodunnit – which strictly speaking isn’t wrong, given Chesterton’s perennial observations concerning the overlap of faith and detective fiction. Nonetheless, “mystery” here means something more. It heartens back to Greek mystery religions, with the idea of something that contains the plenitude of something sacred that cannot be fully plummed, but in Christian tradition it comes to mean sacrament – indeed, the Latin of the Vulgate uses sacrament where the Greek has “mystery.” Paul is revealing to the Gentiles the sacrament of Christ.

Now, at this point in theological history, he is probably not within his own context referring to sacrament in the way we might talk about the Eucharist – though such an interpretation is obviously well within the bounds of retrospective theological exegesis. But there is a sense in which his use of the word here indicates a grace at once both partially veiled and plenitudinous in its abundance. Plenitudinous, since the riches of Christ are unmappable and never exhausted. Yet partially veiled insofar as the metaphysical reality he describes is not necessarily obviously evident from the things immediately seen. Paul tells the Ephesians not to mourn his tribulations, and he describes himself as a prisoner of Christ – here, more than a mere metaphor. To use the transubstantial language of St. Thomas, the accidents of Paul’s life look like anything but the dazzling and freeing mystery he describes. What he sees and describes in his life is the substance of Christ, but it looks no less poor on the outside for all that – the Eucharist still looks like a bit of bread, and the blood still tastes like mere wine. And so it is that this – the mystery of Christ – not even always seen – not even always felt – but substantially and ontologically the content of our faith; so it is that this is what sustains us. It sustains us against the shallowness of idealism, for there really always is more we need; the hunger is real and we can always go further into Christ. Yet it is not an unsatisfied and hopeless hunger like that of the pagans. It does not begin with meaninglessness, turn to self pleasuring, and finally to the destruction of the other and ultimately ourselves. No, it does not do this because with the mystery of Christ there is faith. Even when our senses tell us contrary – when the bread tastes stale and the wine cheap – when we feel we cannot taste and see that the Lord is good – when our lives and experiences look like anything but the mystery of Christ – even then – and maybe even especially then – do we feed on the mystery of Christ by faith and thereby resist the despair of the pagans. For faith is the substance of things hoped for. And it is in this substance – Christ in us, the hope of glory – that we put our faith.

Like a Hart on the Mountains: My Vexing Discovery of the Song of Songs

The details are hazy to me, but there is a story about a Winnipeg priest guilty of pedophilic abuse. Alongside the legal questions was the question of his priesthood – what was his vocation now he was convicted? Those concerned consulted another priest with wisdom in pastoral matters. His response? Chain him to the organ – keep him away from kids – and let him learn to sing the gospel in his chains. It is the answer they generally don’t teach you in pastoral care 101. But there is some blunt truth in it.

I am not in the same position, but I know enough – I am a sinner. And though the chains I feel are more psychological and subtly psychosocial than material in this way, they keep me fast nonetheless. I’m not going anywhere. In the words of Hopkins, “Birds build, but not I build.” Nonetheless, there is something I can do. However alienated and lonely and unChristian I feel, I can sing what I don’t fully understand. I can sing the gospel out of my chains.

But I’m going to begin at a rather odd Scriptural place. The gospel is not found in the gospels alone, and I suspect there are many “little gospels” strewn throughout the Bible and awaiting discovery through Christ who is the key of interpretation. For me, the gospel I return to again and again is the triad of Solomonic books, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Canticle. Not that this is in any way a different gospel than those we find in the gospels proper, but rather that we find in these books the body of Christ proclaimed in those gospels.

But what is the gospel in this triad? Traditionally, these books have been considered in terms of a mystical ascent. Proverbs holds social day-to-day morality, Ecclesiastes is the ascetic confrontation with the vanity of the world, and the Song is the mad love story that is our erotic life with Christ. And all this must of course be understood as something different than a merely secular Platonic ascent – it all takes place in, with, and through the body of Christ.

For the longest time, my “place” in this gospel has been Ecclesiastes – the stubborn and dogged attempt to map the hollow footprints God has left upon the earth to frustrate us. And it has been good – the next best thing to approaching the presence of God is approaching His absence and touching the indentation his body left in the bed while he was lying beside you and you knew it not. Yet recently, I have seen something else. I have begun to discover what it means to move from the via negativa of Ecclesiastes toward the more kataphatic. – though no less frustrating therefore – Song of Solomon.

I have always trusted that the Song is something I would eventually understand, but till now I think I had neither a full enough grasp of Christology and ecclesiology, nor had I inclination on account of the juvenile fantasies that have grown up among Christians and tried to present the Song as a Christian Kama Sutra. Nonetheless, something unlocked in me as we approached Easter this year, and I began realizing that the Song is best understood contextually within the Passion narrative – for there too we have not only longing and love and pain and pleasure, but the very definitions of these things in Christ. And this answered one of my reasons for deferring engagement with the Song: a fear that it would gloss the difficulties and frustrations of life with a flip romanticism proclaiming ” You think you have problems, but really all you need is to get laid.”

But what I was happy to find is that the Song is honest. It is not a dissolution of frustration through sexuality, but rather a translation. Life for those in the Song isn’t any less vexing than life for those in Ecclesiastes. But they are in love – confusing, complicated, inscrutable love – and this is the key. The dead end of Ecclesiastean vanity is translated into the purgatorial love longing of the song. Things are not easier. But I am my beloved’s, and he is mine – even though there’s no end to the ways he drives me nuts.

Most recently, I have been trying to capture this shift in poetry. And though the entirety of the poem is probably, as they say nowadays, NSFW, I would like to share a conclusion of one of these poems reflecting on the frustrating tension in the Song between individuated, jealous love for Christ and the seemingly mutually exclusive fact that Solomon has concubines and Christ has the rest of His church – their loves are not exclusive at all. I know it may sound like a rather frustrating conclusion to some. But please be patient with me – to begin finding Christ and the conclusion of His Song annoying rather than not finding him at all is a significant thing for me:

But though I warned him I would forget,
It is he who has now forgotten.
When I learned of his litter
Lathered with love
For the daughters of Israel
– harlots without number –
It was not enough to tell me
I was the only jewel of my mother –
I would be His alone.
“I will be to you like a hart on the mountains,”
He said in reply –
And indeed he has been
As inscrutable as that.