To be named “John of the Cross,” says a lot about today’s Mystic Monday selection. John, who was born in 1542 in Spain, was a Carmelite monk. The Protestant Reformation, generally dated as beginning in 1517 with Martin Luther’s posting of his 95 theses on the chapel door at Wittenberg, Germany, sparked a reformation within the Roman Catholic Church. John of the Cross was a part of that reformation. As a result, he was arrested and placed in prison, where he wrote The Dark Night of the Soul.
What is the dark night of the soul? If you’ve ever experienced it, you won’t forget it.
According to John of the Cross, the dark night occurs after conversion and after a sustained period of significant spiritual growth. “The ‘dark night,’” writes John, is when a person loses “all the pleasure that they once experienced in their devotional life.”
I can tell you from personal experience; there are times when Bible reading, prayer, meditation, and the other disciplines of the Christian life become numb. And where the inner person at one time experienced the presence of God’s Spirit, there is a void, a “dark night of the soul.”
Here’s what John says about that - “there will come a time when God will bid them (those experiencing the dark night) to grow deeper. He will remove the previous consolation (feelings and the satisfaction that comes from devotional practices) from the soul in order to teach it virtue and prevent it from developing vice.”
John then proceeds to describe what God is doing when the soul enters into this “dark night.”
First and foremost, God is purging spiritual pride from the person’s life. Spiritual pride, seen in self-righteous attitudes, has crept in and needs to be purged.
Here’s where a story from my own life might help.
After working through some deep emotional wounds inflicted during the last few years as a pastor in the States, I was blessed to be surrounded by some loving, grace-filled Christians in Seoul. It was a time of healing, which led to a period of sustained spiritual growth in my life. And, in time, just as John says, spiritual pride crept in.
One day, while Sherri drove us home from church, I demonstrated the extent of that self-righteous, spiritual pride. It was a bad traffic day in Seoul. (Every day is a bad traffic day in Seoul) Sherri was battling it out at a particularly difficult intersection, and she was angry at the drivers around us.
That’s when I said, “You know, honey, I used to get angry when I dealt with Seoul traffic, but the Lord has helped me and healed me of my anger,”
I won’t repeat Sherri’s response. It wasn’t very Christian. Or maybe it was - I needed a wake-up call. And I can tell you; God used incidents like that to purge the growing spiritual pride in my life. And it wasn’t long after that, that I entered into a “dark night of the soul,” really struggling with my feelings and daily disciplines as a follower of Jesus.
I’ll continue this post tomorrow. Tuesday is normally podcast day, but I’m behind. Galatians 2:11-21 is a particularly difficult passage, but it is crucial to understanding the main theme of the letter. I’ll get there. For now, let’s allow John of the Cross to teach us about the difficult, yet rewarding experience he calls “the dark night of the soul.
In Christ,
Dan
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