Dark Knights and Dragons

A recurring nightmare I have had recently takes the form of me being helplessly sucked into storm sewer during a flood. I am scratching the walls trying to stop myself from being drawn in but the force of the water pushes me on. In my dream, I feel some sense of the panic that would accompany such an ordeal. As I am drawn further and further down I begin to sense that I am doomed - no one will be able to reach me as far as I am going. Finally, I come to a point of constriction of the pipe and I am pinned in utter darkness with the water rising all around me and it is then that I have this overwhelming sense of fear that this is where my life will end - alone and in the dark. This is it. There is no hope. About then is when I wake up and have a tremendous feeling of consolation that I am actually safe in my bed.

Life at times seems to me to have the form of this nightmare - at times I feel alone, drawn along by a torrent of water that takes me further and further down. The teaching of Jesus Christ is that the world that is presented to our senses is a "veil". Sight, hearing, feeling, taste and smell cannot access ultimate reality. To do so, we would need a "sixth sense", but this is nowhere promised us. Lacking this sixth sense we are "in darkness". In fact it seems to me to be worse than this - we are more accurately " in dangerous darkness". A recent trip to the emergency room for one of our little ones brought home to me the darkness of the senses. My mind was saying "I know you are with me God, I know you are hearing my prayers. I know that everything is going to work out no matter what. Even if this child were to die (albeit a remote possibility in this particular case, but somthing that goes through my mind nevertheless...), indeed especially if this little one were to die, things work out, but all of my senses are telling me I can't handle it and that this is the end of the line. Please God, heal my child."

I'm thankful to report, Bubby was okay.

I have also recently found this idea of our human sensual darkness developed quiet elegantly (my surprise at this resulting only from my ignorance...) in the book "The Dark Night of the Soul". Written by St. John of the Cross, a contemplative Carmelite Monk living during the time of the Catholic Counter-Reformation movement, the book describes both in detail, and with a first hand familiarity, the process of human beings rising to encounter the Divine. But the path described may not be what we want to hear. Especially not the modern ear.

St. John refers to this process of coming into union with the Divine as a "Dark Night" and it is a reference to the veiled darkness our senses have in regards to higher things. A key point made in the book that jumped out to me is that fasting, prayers, almsgiving and all the traditional practices of religion, while not without value, are not the ultimate path to God, because inevitably they arise from our own motives and remain under our control. The ultimate path to God is to abandon one's self to what comes in life and to find the will of God in it. There is another book, "Abandonment to Divine Providence", that makes a compelling objective case for the sublimity of this method, but St. John is concerned with the human experience of the process and the description is challenging.

Ironically, I wound up picking this book up in the Eucharistic Adoration chapel one Friday morning just after Christmas when I went up there to cover a Children's Adoration hour that is hosted by our Parish. With me in the Chapel at the same time was a mother with her four young children. This day, she had her hands full with her charges. I don't remember exactly why, but I was struggling with my own journey as a parent that morning and had come to pray specifically without the kids so I could settle down.

What unfolded next makes me chuckle. As I was reading in the Dark Night of the Soul things like this:

"This night, whereby we mean contemplation, produces in the spiritually minded two sorts of darkness or purgations, answering to the two parts of man, that is to say, the sensitive and spiritual. And thus, the first night or sensitive purgation is that wherein the soul purges and strips herself naked of all things of sense, by conforming the senses to the spirit; and the next is, the spiritual night or purgation, wherein the soul purges and denudes herself of all mental activity, by conforming and disposing the intellect for the union of love with God. The sensitive is usual and happens to many, and it is of these beginners, that we shall treat first. The spiritual purgation is gone through by very few, and those only who have been proved and tried, and of these we shall treat afterwards. The first night or purgation is bitter and terrible to the sense. The second transcends all description, because it is exceeding fearsome for the spirit..."

Literally, at the same time as I am reading this, I am hearing the woman's exasperation with her children behind me. I realized that she was having the exact same feeling I was having and had come to get away from. I don't know why this is, but nothing seems to make it easier to struggle with my kids than to watch someone else struggle with theirs. At one point I casually turned around and saw that she was holding the two "middle" ones (probably ages 3 and 4) physically apart trying to stop a fight as I saw behind her that the 1-year old was eating a blue marker (and had been for some time given the amount of blue I saw in his mouth...). When I whispered the fact to her attention she let out this exasperated groan and "lost it", went into "drill instructor mode" which caused all of the kids to snap to attention. Since I relate quite readily to the sentiment, I turned back around and didn't look again. After the kids were under control I heard her plop back down in a chair and I knew exactly what she was thinking (been there...).

That's when it occurred to me - parenting is my entry into the Dark Night of the Sense - not just in terms of the small, exasperating challenges, but also the big, scary ones like middle-of-the-night trips to the E.R. Parenting is not under my control, but is rather about a surrender to what God has in store for me. And my response to the particular challenges I am faced with is process whereby my soul is "purged and stripped naked of all things of sense, by conforming the senses to the spirit."

I don't know if I am able to write this blog adequately to convey the full sense of what I am experiencing. Somehow, in the ordinariness of my life as a parent, I have gained a small experiential insight into one of the greatest of the spiritual classics that treats of the loftiest of topics, namely salvation and eternal life.

That just blows me away.