Hugging the Mountain

There is an image I have used for some time now, adapted from St. John of the Cross, to describe the dark night of faith, and the trust that is involved in it.  For me it has always been like driving a car up a mountain in the dark of night, along a winding path.  The headlights only allow you to see so far in front of you, and the dark night for me was always a way of saying that I don't need to see the top of the mountain, I only need to see what's right in front of me, knowing that even if the ultimate goal is not known, the next step ahead is, and so I just take that and trust that I will know when it is time to make a turn.  Something like that.

Lately, however, it has taken on a different characteristic.  It's as if I've been asked to get out of the car and walk the rest of the way.  Whatever little comfort I drew from the light of the headlights is gone, and now I'm walking up this treacherous path, and the only thing left for me to do is hug the mountain and trust that if I do so, I won't fall off the cliff, even if I have no idea where I am going.  The car, I think, represents certain crutches that I have leaned on in bringing me to God, things which in themselves are good - the structures of religious life, the sweetness of the Eucharist, the comfort of community, the beauty of prayer - but ultimately which hold me back from total abandonment to God.  So now in the darkness my relationship with the mountain - that place of my encounter with God - is being transformed, and in the pitch black of night I am feeling the sand between my toes, my hands pressed against the coldness of the rock, the cool damp air pressing against my face, all while my eyes remain totally blind.  There is no sight, there is no God, and somehow in all of this God is being revealed - the perfect paradox.

This is dramatically changing my prayer.  Recently in one of our community meetings we were discussing loneliness, and how ultimately our lives as consecrated celibates means not that we are to experience intimacy in community and with one another, though that is certainly an element of our lives, but rather that we are called to a deeper experience of intimacy with God.  Thus, one thing we often hear is that in the experience of loneliness we are often called to throw ourselves more fully into prayer.  One friar pointed out, however, that even this can be dangerous, because it can be as if we are going to prayer trying to find some special "experience" of God, as if God is a faucet we can just turn on when we need our fix.  Prayer then becomes just like all the other things to which we turn to fill the void, just like some people turn to television, or to alcohol, or to shopping, just a way of creating a kind of buzz that dulls our sense of loneliness.  

For me, though, this isn't the case, and this isn't a danger, precisely because I have been stripped of all expectation that God will show up in my prayer.  God is totally absent, and so now when I go to prayer, when I sit in silence calling on the name of Jesus, I do so knowing that He is not there, that He will not come, that He does not listen - and yet I give myself to Him fully anyway, because somehow I know that this is all I can do. I know this will scandalize some, but the irony is that as faith has left me completely, I somehow have greater faith than ever.  I don't know how to articulate it better than this.

So I keep on hugging the mountain.  It's all that's left to do.