Faith. Reason. Feeling. Hope.

This week has been a difficult one. My work has demanded much of me, both in terms of the number of hours I've worked and what has been required of me while there. I had a considerable relapse in terms of my stomach condition and also experienced other increased physical discomforts that are part and parcel with being a woman. Parts of my life feel as though they are in limbo, and I know that I cannot force or expedite a resolution.

But I am more committed to this journey than ever.

I've been reading through the recently published private writings of Mother Teresa which reveal the deep interior darkness she lived with for the bulk of her life as a Missionary of Charity. Come Be My Light describes a woman who, though she felt completely deprived of and abandoned by God, remained faithful to the work He had called her to in the slums of Calcutta to the poorest of the poor. In letters to her confessors, she describes the feeling as one of "terrible torture" and being "empty -- excluded -- just not wanted" (p. 222).

Her confessors, the only ones familiar with her deep spiritual pain, knew she was living through the dark night of the soul as described by St. John of the Cross. The spiritual dark night (as described in Come Be My Light) consists of a night of the senses and a night of the spirit. The night of the senses is where "one is freed from attachment to sensory satisfactions and drawn into the prayer of contemplation. While God communicates His light and love, the soul, imperfect as it is, is incapable of receiving them, and experiences them as darkness, pain, dryness, and emptiness. Although the emptiness and absence of God are only apparent, they are a great source of suffering" (p. 22).

While I really don't think I'm experiencing any profound kind of dark night, I do know that at the very least, I'm in a valley. A dimly lit and thickly wooded one. When I began walking this path, it was new and exciting in both an intellectual and a spiritual sense. Despite facing challenges and encountering the occasional obstacles, I felt as I was being carried to new heights in my faith. I was stimulated, excited, my cup filled to overflowing.

The past week or two has been different for many reasons. I see my faith as I know it expanding in a way I could not have imagined possible, and now it is being put to the test. This is nothing new or unexpected where spiritual matters are concerned, but difficult to traverse nonetheless. My prayers are dry; my heart feels little. My obedience comes without any or with little joy. God promises His presence, but I do not sense it.

It is easy to assent intellectually that faith and emotion, while not mutually exclusive, do not depend upon one another. It is a blessed experience to taste, see, feel, and hear God. Who among the faithful does not crave it? But when for a time our senses are deprived of experiencing God, what happens to our faith? I know that in the past, once I no longer "felt" God to be near, my faith and its practice waned. Prayer became a few mumbled lines of obligation at bedtime. I wouldn't go to church unless I felt like it. I rationalized my way out of obedience; since God felt so distant, what did it matter anyway? I would not have articulated it this way at the time, but I understand better now my response to God's silence then.

Reading of Mother Teresa's profound dark night is encouraging to me. Her darkness was infinitely darker and more abiding than what I currently experience, this woman who is easily recognized worldwide not only as a saint, but a woman of deep faith. She never waned in her obedience, trusting in God's closeness rather than relying upon a sensation of it. This was not achieved by cold intellectual assent, but a deep and abiding trust in Him who called her to leave the comfort of the familiar to identify with the poorest of the world's poor in the dark holes and slums of Calcutta. Had she relied more upon a sensed presence of God rather than upon God Himself, we would not know her as we do today; the poor of Calcutta might have been much less loved; none of us would have heard of the Missionaries of Charity. No one would know her name (which, I am sure, is exactly as she would want it), nor would they know her reputation for loving the poor, the diseased, the marginalized, the unlovable.

So while God is decidedly silent with me, I choose to know that He is not absent. I do not feel Him near, but I trust that He is. I did not feel anything particular or profound in attendance at Mass today, but I believe He was present. I feel this week like no one is at the listening end of my prayers, but I rely upon the promise that He hears. Where reason and truth are concerned, I have no reason to doubt Him. I need look no further than my past to see demonstrated evidence of His faithfulness. He has led me to this place and being deprived of a sensory experience of Him does not mean He is any less present and active.

I trust that Christ does not ask of us anything He did not give of Himself. His life on earth was thirty-three years of fleshbound kenosis, a continual emptying out, of learning obedience (Heb. 5), the fullness of which was accomplished on the cross. It struck me recently that Jesus did not feel like being here. In Hebrews, the writer tells us that during Christ's life, "he offered up prayers and petitions with loud cries and tears" (Heb. 5:8). His sacrifice on our behalf was not limited to His crucifixion and the torture that preceded it. His sacrifice for us began the moment He entered the womb of one of His created. He continually emptied Himself for our sakes. He not only took on our sins, but our stomachaches, our splinters, the dirt under our fingernails. And when He took on our sin, God turned His face away; so Jesus too knew what it was for God to be absent. I am deeply humbled to think of it -- I who feel at a loss as He begins the work of stripping me of my old self, I who have barely begun to learn what it means to be emptied.

And come to think of it, isn't that the point? If, after all, I am to be like Him, I must step aside. There must be less of me to make way for Him. Perhaps this is part of what this privation of the senses is meant to accomplish. It is all well and good to feel warm and gooey about God (and I certainly don't think it wrong to be emotional where God is concerned), but I think sometimes it gets in the way of what He really wants to accomplish in and through me. He wants my obedience. He wants my faithfulness. And based on His life, I have to believe that it is never dependent upon my comfort, my convenience, or my feeling like doing it. He has called the faithful to take up crosses daily and follow Him (Luke 9:23), not bread baskets or bouquets.

So I thank God the Father that in His wisdom, He has given us the Church as our Mother to instruct us toward obedience, even when we least feel like being faithful. I am thankful for priests, the rosary, prayers, and liturgy. I am thankful for fasting days, for confession and penance, for kneeling in worship. Already I am beginning to see how following the Church's commandments are for my benefit, and for the benefit of the entire Body. Through the Church, God is pouring into my soul sanctifying grace; He is purging me of old ways that I've held onto for far too long. I still feel my flesh rise up in resistance to what is required of me, but find that Christ has begun the work of excavation, tearing out the dead and decaying remnants of self so that He may expand His residence in me little by little.

And so my continual prayer is, grant me the grace to do Your will, Lord.

In every Catholic church, the fourteen Stations of the Cross are depicted. Today, I attended Mass alone and took my seat at the outside end of a pew near the back. Directly to my left was the tenth station with the description: Jesus is stripped of His garments. How appropriate this was today as He begins to strip layers off of me, as He begins to purge me of the terribly selfish, fleshy me-ness that stands in His way. I'm certainly not enjoying it. But because God is in it, I trust something more wonderful and substantial than I can know is waiting for me on the other side.