What I'm Doing For Lent

This Lent I’ve been spending time with the mystics. Currently I’m reading St. John the Cross, a 16th century Carmelite Monk. I attempted to read him several years ago and he made absolutely no sense. I understood his yearning for union with God, but his writing about “the dark night of the soul” and his statement that “faith is a ray of pure darkness to the soul” were incomprehensible . Now a few years later and several steps farther on my faith journey, he’s making perfect sense.
With the caveat that much of his writing is hard to understand before you’ve personally experienced what he’s writing about, I thought I’d share with you one of my reflections coming out of his statement “The excessive light of faith is darkness because a bright light will suppress a dimmer light”.
Enjoy, be enlightened, or scratch your head in puzzlement as suits you best.

We expect that God will come to us like a bright beam of light, will blind us with its brilliance, and will reveal God’s self in its fullness. We expect that God will bring us greater spiritual clarity and comfort. We wait for greater consolation, more spiritual highs, more mountaintop experiences.
However, the purest Divine light brings deeper darkness. As the love of God illumines our life, all the dimmer lights of our life are extinguished or subsumed into the eternal light. Our consolations dry up. Our ecstasies are more subdued. Instead of better understanding God, we draw closer to invisible Divine Mystery that suffuses our lives and is forever beyond our most brilliant conceptions or most vivid sensual experiences.
We come to a place where the Divine Darkness dwells so purely within us that we can only detect it by the way that we are transformed. All our arrogance, egotism, and preconceptions disappear in shadow. All that remains is Divine Darkness.
Often we pray for light, for clarity, for God to show oneself and make God’s presence known. Instead, perhaps we should pray for mystery and night. Perhaps we should pray for God to work secretly and transform us in ways that we cannot detect. Perhaps instead of praying for divine Light to illumine our lives, we should pray for Divine Darkness to enshroud us in the mystery of God’s love.
Dear Lord, let me reach the Darkness and come into the cool night of the Spirit. Subsume all lights that shine within me and enshroud me with the divine light that extinguishes every other desire of my heart. Cloak me with the Divine Mystery and let me live into the night of your Love. Amen.