Daybreaks: Daily Reflections for Lent & Easter
by Ron Rolheiser, OMI

“Jesus said to him, ‘Rise, take up your mat, and walk.’ Immediately the man became well, took up his mat, and walked”.

(JOHN 5:8-9)

“We tend to think our faith is strongest at those times when we have emotional feelings attached to our imagination about God or when it’s bolstered and inflamed by feelings of fervor. 

Great spiritual writers will tell us that this is a good stage in our faith, but an initial one, commonly experienced when we are neophytes. In the earlier stages of a religious journey, it is common to possess strong images and feelings about God.  

They also tell us that, at certain moments of our spiritual journey, God “takes away” our certainty and deprives us of all warm feelings in faith. Saint John of the Cross calls this experience of seemingly losing our faith a ‘dark night of the soul’. This describes the experience where we used to feel God’s presence with a certain warmth and solidity, but now we feel like God is nonexistent and we are left in doubt. This is what Jesus experienced on the cross and what St. Teresa of Calcutta wrote of in her journals.
 

While that darkness can be confusing, it can also be maturing. It can help move us from being arrogant, judgmental, religious neophytes to being humble, emphatic men and women, living inside a cloud of unknowing, understanding more by not understanding than by understanding, lost in a darkness we cannot manipulate or control, so as to finally be pushed into genuine faith, hope, and love” (33).