Contemplation 9 – Darkness

The darkness that is man-made can arise in different ways. One of these is an outwardness that gives priority to this world. It finds meaning outside the self, in material possessions, in status, in success, in what other people think of us. We do things, we keep busy, we move forward. There is no room for God in this kind of life. In contemplative terms, the self that we possess is a false self.

Another is the separation that puts the self above God. In traditional Christian language this is the presence of unrepented sin in the life of the believer. In the initial stages, we may have the uneasy feeling that God is remote or has withdrawn. Continue on the path and we may find that God slowly vanishes from our consciousness altogether.

The remedy for the first of these is to acknowledge the longing for something other which lies deep within all of us. As St Augustine said: ‘You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.’ The remedy for the second is obvious.

In contrast, the darkness that is God-given arises through no fault of our own. When we first start to take God seriously, we sense that we are walking in the light. God seems close, prayer is intimate, virtue brings joy. We may throw yourself into religious activity in our enthusiasm to share the divine goodness with others. All this is natural and good.

But there will come a time when none of this works any more. Prayer becomes dry and boring. The sweetness of devotion disappears. We may start to lose interest in the main elements of religion: the eucharist, the liturgy, the revelation of the scriptures, the sense of belonging to a worshipping community. We may also come to question our faith in God. Is there even a God? Was it all a dream?

The first and most obvious response is to ask ourselves what we have done wrong. But that would be a mistake. In contemplative terms, the apparent disappearance of God is known as the dark night. Classic mystical texts speak of different kinds of dark night at different stages of the journey: the dark night of the senses; the dark night of the spirit. What is really happening?

One explanation is that God voluntarily hides from us in order that our faith may grow. God is stripping away our attachment to external supports and to the consolations of religion. God is also stripping away our attachment to God himself. It is as if – to use 14th century language which still resonates today – there is a ‘cloud of unknowing’ between us and God. The only right course is to persevere (in prayer and virtue) with no hope or expectation, but simply in faith. This deepens our longing for the God who seems to be absent.

This is from a modern retelling by Elizabeth Ruth Obbard in The Cloud of Unknowing for everyone (New City, 2007):

God can only be held close by means of love, not thought … Keep your focus by staring at this cloud with a sharp arrow of love and longing, and never turn back from this work, no matter what happens.

The experience of those who persevere is that dryness does not last for ever. At some point the sweetness will return, and with it the sense that God was there all the time. But we are not back where we were before: the experience has changed and purified us. This is when our true self emerges: we identify in our innermost being with the person God called us into existence to become.

But there is another and very different explanation for the darkness that may surround us. Mystical writers speak of a negative way which emphasises the transcendence, the complete otherness, the unknowability of God. It seems to make more sense to say not what God is, but what God is not. In the darkness, language starts to break down and we may lose the capacity to say anything about God.

This happens, not because God is too far away, but paradoxically because God is too close. The Bible tells us: ‘God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all’ (1 John 1.5). The light that is God is brighter than anything we can imagine. Being in the presence of such a great light can have a blinding effect as we temporarily see nothing else at all.

So the darkness is not in God, but is a reaction to his all-pervading light as we progress towards him. As the 17th century Metaphysical Poet Henry Vaughan put it in The Night:

There is in God, some say,
A deep but dazzling darkness, as men here
Say it is late and dusky, because they
             See not all clear.
    O for that night! where I in Him
    Might live invisible and dim!

All this is summed up beautifully by Alexander Ryrie in Wonderful Exchange: An Exploration of Silent Prayer (Canterbury Press, 2003):

It is only people who know something of God’s presence who are aware of and troubled by God’s seeming absence … It is not the godless but people of faith and prayer who find themselves crying out with the psalmist: ‘Why have you hidden your face from me?’ This is because, in a strange way, what we experience as absence is in reality the reverse side of God’s presence, the dark hidden aspect of God’s relationship with us. God’s presence has been described as a brilliant and dazzling light, surrounded by a veil of darkness; and sometimes we are aware only of the darkness. But even in the darkness God has not totally withdrawn.

From where God stands it makes no difference. Psalm 139.12 in the King James Version: ‘Yea, the darkness hideth not from Thee, but the night shineth as the day; the darkness and the light are both alike to Thee.’

Both Alike to Thee is the title of an important book by Canon Melyvn Matthews (SPCK, 2000) in which he points out that negative mystical language ‘is not a way of talking about God’s literal absence; it is, rather, a profound way of talking about his overwhelming presence and the essential difference that makes to human beings when once they have decided to acknowledge it.’ He argues that the Church needs to rediscover mystical theology as the only escape from our postmodern condition: ‘Christians today desperately need to retrieve a spiritual life of great depth in order to remain faithful in a world which contains much moral and social disintegration.’

So do not be afraid of the dark.

Tags: Contemplative prayer