Dark Night Lessons

To connect with the great river we all need a path, but when you get down there there's only one river.
MATTHEW FOX

"Some lessons from the mystics about the dark night are these:

1) It is a special and valuable place to be for we learn things here that we do not learn in the light: lessons of wisdom and often of compassion for example.

2) You will be tempted to flee, for the dark night is an uncomfortable place to find oneself. Flight may take many forms including addictions, denial, cover-up, passivity, couch-potato-itis, and a “let the others guys fix things”mentality.

3) Courage is required to stick around at such a time as the Sufi mystic Hafiz put it,  “when God turns us upside down to shake all the nonsense out.”A lot of nonsense needs shaking out today, much of it inherited from a modern consciousness that separated us from ourselves and the Earth and other species.

4) Sometimes one tastes nothingness in times like this. Do not be afraid. Nothingness can turn on a dime to deep creativity. Dare to stick around and taste all that the darkness has to say to us. Silence too. Meister Eckhart once said: “I once had a dream—though a man, that I was pregnant—pregnant with nothingness. And out of this nothingness God was born.”

5) Absence or near-absence of hope tempts us, yet despair is not a worthy option. St Thomas Aquinas says that while injustice is the worst of sins, despair is the most dangerous. Why? Because when a person or a community yields to despair, they do not love themselves and therefore do not care about others either.

Feminist poet Adrienne Rich warns of a “fatalistic self-hatred”that accompanies patriarchy. Such self-hatred can lead to despair. How then do we resist despair? One way is to “look up to the mountains”as the Psalmist proposes. Look to the bigger picture. Let go of our anthropocentrism and narcissism (to use Pope Francis’words) to take in the more-than-human world again. Absorb the cosmos anew and with it the story and 13.8 billion year history that has brought us this far.

Scott Russell Sanders in his powerful book, Hunting for Hope: A Father’s Journey, puts it this way. “I still hanker for the original world, the one that makes us rather than the one we make. I hunger for contact with the shaping power that curves the comet’s path and fills the owl’s throat with song and fashions every flake of snow and carpets the hills with green. It is a prodigal, awful, magnificent power, forever casting new forms into existence then tearing them apart and starting over….

That the universe exists at all, that it obeys laws, that those laws have brought forth galaxies and stars and planets and—on one planet, at least—life, and out of life, consciousness, and out of consciousness these words, this breath, is a chain of wonders. I dangle from that chain and hold on tight.”How tight are we hanging onto that chain of wonders that brought us into being? In this book Andrew Harvey and Carolyn Baker assist us in our dangling and holding on tight; and our wondering; and our healing and getting over ourselves; and our moving to a new moment in our evolution. Are we up to the task? Stay tuned."

-- Mathew Fox