Dark Nights

I’ve been finding it hard - no, impossible - to pray lately. Even simple prayers over meals have been strained and feel obligatory rather than a genuine thanksgiving and blessing. I have icons by my desk at home and work to remind me to pray, and instead of seeing them and responding even with a brief prayer or thought, I have simply stared blankly at them. I haven’t prayed an office in two weeks. I haven’t picked up my chokti in more weeks than I can count. The closest I have come to anything resembling prayer has been to read the martyrologies in the breviary for last week, but none so far this week.

I have been a practicing Christian long enough to know that this happens. It just does. Sometimes the spiritual path is joyous and full, and sometimes it is isolating and lonely. Sometimes I see God everywhere, and sometimes I feel like he is too otherwordly to even bother to seek him. In some ways, I take comfort in these times. When we are continuously called to live the spiritual life our minds and souls have to adapt to the change that is required of us (and change is REQUIRED), and we find ourselves in the midst of a “dark night of the soul”. It is part of the process, and part of practicing is knowing that this is just part of the cycle. And yet it is a draining time. It is like sitting in a room with a lover that you once ached for and now no longer feel aroused by her presence.

Sometimes the souls of we lesser creatures fail to remain open due to lethargy, anxiety, or perhaps mental/emotional/spiritual exhaustion. It happens. And it is ok that it happens. None of us are super-Christians. Even the great saints wrestled with doubt, anger, frustration. So did Jesus.  If the Divine Son could feel abandoned and alone on the Holy Cross, then doesn’t it stand to reason that we mortals would also find ourselves feeling that way from time to time?

This is where the wisdom of the elders comes to play. The monastic tradition - especially the Benedictine tradition - seems to put little stress on how one happens to “feel” at any given time. This isn’t the happy-clappy-Jesus-is-my-boyfriend-and-makes-me-feel-so-good school of American pseudo-Christianity. One needs only to focus. Say the offices, pray the Psalms, live your vows, embrace the Rule. Keep on truckin’! Where this becomes a problem for me is that I know this on an intellectual level, and yet I still fail to take the initiative to follow through. The prayerbook is right there. The Rule is at hand. The prayer rope is on the dresser. The icons still open the windows to heaven. I even have a spouse who shares this outlook and practice and wants us to pray together. All of these things are gifts from a loving and benevolent God who continually calls us into relationship with him, even when we don’t especially feeling like heeding that call. Call him persistent. Call him a pain in backside. But God doesn’t easily give up. This is precisely why we have been given gifts like the Psalter, prayerbooks, stories of the saints, prayer aids like beads and statues and pictures. It is also why the Lutheran Fathers preserved the pure Gospel for us, that we are justified purely through God’s grace and mercy, and that no matter how we may feel at any one point in our lives, we know that grace is still active and present. We aren’t alone, no matter how dark the night may appear.

Hopefully my wife will want to pray compline tonight.