Thursday, August 8, 2019

Why a 'Dark Night'?

Ron Rolheiser

“…a deeper presence of God, a presence that, 
precisely because it goes beyond feeling and Imagination
can only be felt as an emptiness, a nothingness, and absence, 
a non-existence.

"Mother Teresa underwent a Dark Night of the Soul. This is what Jesus suffered on the cross when he cried out, ‘My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?’  When he uttered those words, he meant them. At that moment, he felt exactly what Mother Teresa felt so acutely for more than 50 years – namely, the sense that God is absent, that God is dead, that there isn't any God. But this isn't the absence of faith or the absence of God; rather, it is a deeper presence of God, a presence that, precisely because it goes beyond feeling and Imagination, can only be felt as an emptiness, a nothingness, and absence, a non-existence.

"But how does this make sense? How can faith feel like doubt? How can God's deeper presence feel like God's non-existence? And perhaps most important: Why would faith work like this?

Wrestling with God

1 comment:

  1. Following Fr Rolheiser's train of thought, how else could faith work? Ours is a relative state. We need doubt because we couldn't have faith without it. The great movie, "Doubt," starring Meryl Streep, in which her heroic nun character confesses her doubt, could as easily have been titled, "Faith." It would have been better so entitled as it shows us how doubt makes faith possible. PW

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