“God I am lost and confused and I do not know where you are in my life. I cannot feel you like I used to and I feel as if you have turned your face from me!”
This is a common prayer for people who feel distant from God. This is the type of prayer that is resonated through Psalm 88, and this is the type of prayer that St. John of the Cross wrote extensively about. This feeling of distance and isolation was one that was very familiar to him as he faithfully served God even in the midst of his own great spiritual darkness which he calls “the dark night of the soul.” The perspective he brings however is significantly different than what we might expect. He defines the dark night of the soul as a time when God desires for us to grow deeper. He writes that “The ‘dark night’ is when those persons loose all the pleasure they once experienced in their devotional life. This happens because God wants to purify them and move them onto greater heights.” Interesting.
Is he trying to say that God at times will intentionally bring us into times where we feel distant and separated from Him? Yes, but it is for our own good. It is for a greater purpose that we probably do not understand at that point, and most importantly, it is out of His great love for us!
Later on in the his book, he writes that:
[God’s] love for us is not content to leave us in our weakness and for this reason He takes us into a dark night. He weans us from the pleasures by giving us dry times and inward darkness…Through the dark night pride becomes humility, greed becomes simplicity, wrath becomes contentment, luxury becomes peace, gluttony becomes moderation, envy becomes joy, and sloth becomes strength. No soul will ever grow deep in the spiritual life unless God works passively in that soul by means of the dark night.
These times of darkness and distance can very well be gifts of God presented to us for our own growth. God has not left us there, He has brought us there. There is some way in which He desires for us to grow in order for us to truly experience Him in a more complete way. God’s joy is not for us to be stagnant in our faith, but to come to a deeper lasting knowledge of who He is and how He desires our lives to be played out.
This is why we must hold onto the truth of Christ and the recognition that God is the “God of my salvation” as Psalm 88 is keen to point out to us. This psalm does not end in hope, but that does not mean that hope does not exist. We must cry out to God openly and honestly as we trust that as He has brought us into these times, He will be faithful to lead us out again. He has our best interests in mind. “Trust in the LORD with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight.” (Proverbs 3:5-6)
Scott E. McGhee
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