December 13, 2015
Dark Night of the Soul
- Rev Ruth Chadwick Moore
When Teri suggested back in October that we use Barbara Brown Taylor’s latest book, for our Advent theme I was excited. I love her sermons and I’ve used many of them to form my sermons for Northminster. I have read many of her other books and I feel like we are similar when it comes to our theology and beliefs. But Barbara Brown Taylor’s newest book, Learning to Walk in the Dark is a whole different kind of writing. This book has frustrated me, haunted me, depressed me, and then when I stopped fighting it, it has challenged me, nourished me and even encouraged me. So even if you are having a hard time with this advent journey in the dark, we ask you to bear with us – because our lives do not work only when everything is fully lit. If we are honest, we can’t always see the light – it waxes and wanes or can go out altogether. And what this advent journey is all about is trying to find is a faith that works even in the dark.
The sermon title this week is “The Dark Night of the Soul. “What do those words mean to you? Like darkness itself, the dark night of the soul means different things to different people. Many of us feel like our country and our world are in a dark night of the soul right now. Some of us use that phrase to describe a time following a great loss, or a time leading up to a difficult decision. It is always a time when the soul is severely tested often to the point of breaking or even losing our faith. No one chooses the dark night; the dark night descends. And when it does, the reality that troubles the soul the most can be the apparent absence of God.
When the dark night first falls, it is natural to spend some time wondering if it is a test or a punishment for something you have done wrong. But this is just a sly way of staying in control of the situation, since the possibility that you caused it comes with the hope that you can also put an end to it, either by passing the test or by enduring the punishment. The darker possibility – that this night is beyond our control – is often too frightening to even consider because it means your usual strategies for lightening up won’t work. One of the hardest things to decide during a dark night is whether to surrender or resist. The choice often comes down to what you believe about God and how God acts, which means that every dark night of the soul involves wrestling with belief.
Do you remember the story of Jacob in Genesis when he wrestles a man in the dark? Out of the deep dark night a stranger leaps and hurls himself at Jacob and they wrestle with each other all night long. Jacob cannot see his attacker’s face in the dark, but we all think he is wrestling with God. And then just before dawn the man touches Jacob’s thigh and Jacob is left crippled and helpless. The sense I get from this struggle, and the sense I think Jacob must have had, is that the whole battle was fated from the beginning to end this way. The stranger had simply held back until the end, letting Jacob think he might win, so that when he was defeated, he would know that he was truly defeated – so that he would know that not all the shrewdness, will, and brute force he could muster were enough to win this. The bible story tells us that Jacob is struck by the stranger in a vulnerable place in the hollow of his thigh, and he leaves the place of the wrestling with a limp. This is the blessing, the gift, God gives him. Jacob, who would go on to be the father of the 12 tribes of Israel, has known success and cheated his brother for the birthright of the land God gave to Abraham and Isaac. Power, success and happiness as the world knows them are his – and we think can be ours if we just fight hard enough – but it doesn’t always turn out that way does it? Instead, the gift, the blessing that God gives us in the dark, and in our vulnerability, is love. Even if God becomes a stranger to us in the dark night of our souls, he does in the end give us everything.
Barbara Brown Taylor tells the story of John of the Cross, a monk in the 16th century whose best known work is The Dark Night of the Soul, which he began when he was imprisoned in a dark cell for 11 months. Most people who read the book expect John to tell them how he got through that dark period by hanging on to his faith in God no matter what happened to him. Instead, for him, the dark night is a love story full of the painful joy of seeking the most elusive lover of all. One of the central functions of the dark night, he says, is to convince people who grasp after things that God cannot be grasped. God is not a thing. And since God is not a thing, God cannot be held on to. Jacob certainly came to that realization.
John of the Cross tells us that the dark night can be God’s best gift to us – intended for our liberation from what we should believe, or do, or say. The dark night can give us the opportunity instead to ask ourselves what powers we most rely on and what is the hope that gives meaning to our lives. The dark night can free us from our fears about God, from doing and believing all the “right” things about God and from our tactics for manipulating and grasping after God. The dark night, if we allow it, can be a place of transformation.
God puts out our lights to keep us safe, John says, because we are never more in danger of stumbling than when we think we know where we are going. When we can no longer see the path we are on, when we can no longer read the maps we have brought with us or sense anything in the dark that might tell us where we are – then and only then – are we vulnerable to God’s protection and blessing. And if this loss of control sounds scary to you don’t worry, I am right there with you. It is scary to let the darkness manage us instead of us trying to manage the darkness.
But then I listen to Barbara Brown Taylor’s words and my anxiety about darkness lessens. She says: “…the good news is that dark and light, faith and doubt, divine absence and presence, do not exist at opposite poles. Instead, they both exist with and within each other, like distinct waves that roll out of the same ocean and roll back into it again. As different as they are, they come from and return to the same source.” If I can trust that – if I can trust God and if I can give my heart to God and remain conscious of that surrender and trust – then faith becomes a verb, and it is my active response to that sacred reality.
Exodus tells us that God spoke to Moses in a dark dense cloud. Our Psalm reminds us that darkness is not dark to God – the night and the day – it is all the same to God – and God is still present and always there. And even though the angel Gabriel told Mary not to be afraid, she had to be when he told her what was going to happen. Maybe the angel came in the night to Mary; it doesn’t say. But even in her fear, the angel tells her that nothing is impossible with God. And so she trusts God even when she cannot see the path ahead of her.
I am about the same age as Barbara Brown Taylor. And as I mentioned, her sermons have often spoken directly to my soul – even in my darkest nights. We both have served as parish ministers. I think that biggest difference between us is that she is a big time introvert and I am fairly extroverted. I think introverts are more comfortable in the dark. We extroverts want lights and talking and noise and energy around us, not the quiet and certainly not the introspection. But early in our careers in the ministry we both wanted the specificity that a divine parent could give us, so we could pass that knowledge onto our parishioners. We wanted God to give us direct answers, clear guidance and specific tasks. Now we are both more comfortable accepting the responsibility for supplying those things ourselves, so we can just rest in the presence of God who accepts all answers, covers all directions and finishes all tasks. I am trying to be comfortable with doubt, uncertainty, and even darkness because I know that I am not alone with my thoughts and feelings and even fears. And I trust that I am not alone in the darkness either.
And so my advent journey continues. Because I do not want to come to the end of my life’s journey and realize that I rejected Love (with a capitol L) because it did not present itself the way I expected it to, or in a form that was acceptable to me.
And so I ask you to go on that journey with me. Let us be like Mary and say yes to God even in our fear. Let us be like Jacob, who limps home in the dawn after glimpsing in the dark the face of Love. Let us be like the Israelites listening to a God who comes to them in a dark cloud. Let us wrestle together and yet not grasp for that which cannot be grasped. Practicing this kind of faith will require us to celebrate the sacraments and blessings of vulnerability, defeat and loss. But since our faith has a lot to say about losing as the precondition for finding, I think we can live with that. May it be so. Amen.
Resources: This sermon borrows liberally and literally (words, sentences, quotes, ideas and whole paragraphs) from the following books.
Learning to Walk in the Dark by Barbara Brown Taylor.
Secrets in the Dark by Frederick Buechner.