But the longer we stay on this journey, open and honest, curious and discerning, the more we see that maps are not all that helpful. The thing we really need is a compass.
And, thanks be to God, we have one. A heart open to Presence is a compass, a good one--not perfect but good enough. Experience and Presence are always tuning, 'truing' the compass. And it's a good thing--because we never know exactly where we are, where we're going, or how to get there.
Many of us come to faith-spirituality-religion yearning for something like certainty. Ironically certainty to spiritual pilgrims is like kryptonite to Superman.
Gerald May's book, The Dark Night of the Soul, wisely explores this frustrating and wonderful reality. It was Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross who named this necessary and counter-intuitive reality The Dark Night of the Soul. "Dark' here does not stand for bad or depressive--it simply stands for Mystery, for unknowing. To KNOW God doesn't mean we ever really understand God. Knowing God means we experience God, we have a relationship with Being Itself.
Coming to experience our Dark Night necessarily makes us queasy--and necessarily keeps us feeling disoriented. Yet it's not that we aren't allowed a map--it's that we come to understand there is no map, maps don't work. Abiding works. Trusting works. Following works. Again, not perfectly but delightfully adequately.
Making peace with Mystery is a basic calling, a necessary learning. The three paragraphs that follow are Gerald May's very helpful distillation of making peace with Mystery.
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As far as I can tell, the dark night of the soul is endless. This is, for me, the most hopeful thing about it; the dark night is nothing other than our ongoing relationship with the Divine. As such, it must always remain mysterious, dark to our understanding and comprehension, illuminated only by brief moments of dawning light. And as such it never ends; it just keeps deepening, revealing more and more intimate layers of freedom for love.
As our dark nights deepen, we find ourselves recovering our love of mystery. When we were children, most of us were good friends with mystery. The world was full of it and we loved it. Then as we grew older, we slowly accepted the indoctrination that mystery exists to be solved. For many of us, mystery became an adversary; unknowing became a weakness. The contemplative spiritual life is an ongoing reversal of this adjustment. It is a slow and sometimes painful process of becoming "as little children" again, in which we first make friends with mystery and finally fall in love again with it. And in that love we find an ever increasing freedom to be who we really are in an identity that is continually emerging and never defined. We are freed to join the dance of life in fullness without having a clue about what the steps are.
The darkness, the holy unknowing that characterizes this freedom, is the opposite of confusion and ignorance. Confusion happens when mystery is an enemy and we feel we must solve it to master our destinies. And ignorance is not knowing that we do not know. In the liberation of the night, we are freed from having to figure things out, and we find delight in knowing that we do not know.
