When Theresa posed the idea of writing about the dark night of the soul, I was sure I must have something worthwhile to say on the topic. After all, I was certainly familiar with that feeling of falling endlessly within myself, the sense of being abandoned by something I was no longer sure I ever had to begin with. I’d spent the restless nights wondering what strange deficit I inherited which drew me simultaneously toward the Divine and away from the basic threads of survival. It was as if God had tapped me on the shoulder in the dark, whispering, “Come find me,” and immediately I realized I was atop a rock spire with nowhere to go in the search.
This much I’ve felt, and the actions I’ve taken to resolve my inner turmoil have been sometimes extreme yet predictable to anyone familiar with trauma. This isn’t the place to discuss my various wandering paths—those stories are a dime a dozen. Turn on any antiheroic television odyssey, and you can see the sorts of things desperate, lost, and hurt people do when they’re trying to escape their pain. Less often, we’re provided a view of the way out, the way through.
Even less often than that, we’re provided a spiritual path forward that does not imply a drastic rejection of one’s past. Most of our modern ideas of spirituality favor impossible notions of redemption that come without a personal confrontation with and journey through our own darkness. This idea of an external rescuer pervades both the traditional religious paradigm and is glaring in the spiritual bypassing endemic to today’s “love and light” wave of New Age philosophy.
I do not believe that anyone is saved by forcing their eyes to see only the light, nor by some effortless sweeping up of the Divine—though I do believe such beauty is available to us all through some fleeting and occasional merging of transcendence and good fortune. Rather, I believe figures like Christ exist to show us how to save ourselves.
Though the old adage, “God helps those who help themselves” is generally applied to more mundane circumstances than the fate of our very souls, I do think it applies here. If you are stuck atop a spire looking for God, the only place to search is within, and there we find depths much greater than any earthly precipice.
When I was in college, I picked up Come Be My Light: The private writings of the Saint of Calcutta, a book of Mother Teresa’s private journals. I was not Catholic. (In fact, I was reeling from the deconstruction of my Born Again faith which I had inadvertently acquired from rogue evangelical youth group leaders at my mainstream Methodist church.) Nevertheless, I was struck by the fact that this woman felt her darkest hour prolonged not just by days or months or even years but decades. Yet, she continued to seek peace within and serve those without in the name of the absence she felt.
I was so struck by a faith rooted not in the satisfaction of having been redeemed and the victorious rhetoric common among modern Christians but by the heartbreak of a lover who has been bereaved with no reassurance that she’ll ever see her beloved again. In this heartbreak, her only option was to seek glimpses of God in the faces of those she served, resisting the tide of a cruel and punishing world, to seek memories and reflections of Divine love deep within herself.
Her path to God was more akin to a woman placing a candle in the window than it was a sense of being held, the fidelity of a war widow rather than a joyful bride. For this reason, I suspect the great saint came to know the Divine better and more deeply than most of us ever will. Through negation, alone atop her spire, she knew God by all the things God wasn’t.
After reading the book, I wrote the following sestina for her as I began learning and experimenting with poetic forms. The poem has stuck with me for so many years because of the identification with Christ as the doubter. This was not the shepherd cuddling lambs on stained glass but the man begging his father, “Take this cup from me.”
The Value of Doubt
The value of doubt
Acutely aware of a different Jesus, an absent one.
Dare not speak the words that crowd my mind,
for the world would know. The dark would shine.
Acutely aware of a different Jesus, an absent one.
Call, cling, want- no one will answer,
for the world would know. The dark would shine.
Our saint has been forsaken.
Call, cling, want- no one will answer.
Fifty years of a constant busy tone.
Our saint has been forsaken,
prayers returned like sharp knives into the soul.
Fifty years of a constant busy tone-
Wilt thou refuse?
Prayers returned like sharp knives into the soul
drawing out the reality of darkness.
Wilt thou refuse?
Is there some divine intention in
drawing out the reality of darkness?
A saint- a spouse confined to share deeply in his suffering.
Is there some divine intention?
The dear Mother thought it so.
A saint- a spouse confined to share deeply in his suffering,
the value of doubt.
Her life can serve as a reminder that it is not the presence of the Divine which calls upon us to serve. Rather, it is our service which creates the Divine on Earth. It may well permeate anyone and everything we know, but just as light reveals our surroundings, action is required to reveal God, even when the only action available to us is to fall deeply, painfully, and interminably within ourselves.
Christina Lengyel is a gnostic, writer, seminarian, and esotericist among other things. She is particularly interested in community, death and dying, and social activism.
Theresa Contaxis 