I couldn’t but help talk about silence and words in my sermon last week as I talked about grief. To recap: in times of grief, the last thing we want to hear is, as coined by one of our pub ministry participants, “religious nuggets”, no matter how truthful and well-meaning they might be. (Like the dreaded – “God needed your loved one more than you did…” etc.)

Sometimes, silence is all we need in times of great stress and struggle – just the caring presence of someone we know loves us in the midst of the chaos of our lives.

But what about the flip side of that – the silence when we experience God hasn’t spoken to us in a long while?

This is harder to describe and write about it. It feels like it should be included as one of the questions in the Banned Questions of the Bible book coming out this month. (Maybe it is.) St. John of the Cross, a cool Christian dude who lived in Spain sometime ago, coined it as “the dark night of the soul”. These are intense periods of desolation, when God’s warmth and presence seem distant, and no matter what we do, our rituals, prayers, and praise seem hollow or empty.

There are probably some theologians who have trumpeted the idea that if you can’t feel God, then you aren’t doing it right. Like, hey, you need to do what you do differently. There could be truth to that, as sometimes breaking out of the routine can lead to a fresh experience.

Some saints have considered it a blessing, a gift to the most devout of the followers of God, a test. Mother Teresa, a modern day example of one who lived a powerful, controversial life in service to the poor, experienced this dark night for many many years as revealed in her journals. Her dark night was accompanied with doubt and deep struggle.

And still, folks like me think it can be a little bit of both… or even something else, a mystery, a natural stage of spiritual maturity. Not every Christian experiences these kinds of moments, and the frustration can be that they come when things are going well, not necessarily when things are going poorly.

In the end, I find comfort in the ending of Job. Job and Moses are a few of the handfuls of people in the Bible who actually ever encounter God face to face. Job ends up saying this after all of his prayers, laments, and frustrations of his current situation and his own dark night:

Job 42:5 – “I had heard of You by the hearing of the ear, but now my eyes see You.”

Job’s deep struggle with all the terrible things that have happened in his life, his questions of God, his cries for justice, the sense that God has abandoned him leads him to go from a second person to first person faith – from a bystander to a witness of God.

I’m not going to pretend that it’s all heartwarming for people who go through a dark night of the soul. It’s not. And it may not ever lead to some euphoric saintly experience, but God may even use such a struggle for something beautiful and profound.

Join us as we draw near to the end of our laments and explore the dark night of the soul together.

- Nathan