Forgotten.
learning to walk in the dark, Advent 4.
Wind blew down from the tower, parting the locks of his hair.
With his gentle hand, he wounded my neck and all my senses were suspended.
I lost myself. Forgot myself. I lay my face against the Beloved’s face.
Everything fell away and I left myself behind,
Abandoning my cares among the lilies, forgotten.
~ “Songs of the Soul: One Dark Night”
In last week’s post, we looked at Saint John of the Cross’ first “night of sense,” that place where darkness obscures all past sensory knowledge of God, and we feel utterly alone, cut off. We are not alone at all, John assures us, but we have indeed lost the inner assurances that were such comforting companions in the past. We are in new (and perhaps distressing) territory.
Look at the lines of John’s verse above: This is how he ends the poem that gave rise to his treatise on The Dark Night of the Soul. Drawing upon his own fresh sufferings (at the hands of fellow monks, no less), he finds an unlikely combination of forces at work—a highly sensual encounter with the Beloved that harkens back to the Song of Solomon… alongside a wounding that brings a loss of self, almost a spiritual amnesia. Strange bedfellows, these.
The loss of sense is something I think most of us can relate to, some point (or points) along our journey where the presence of God seems to vanish like a phantom and we wonder what has gone wrong. John seems to think that something has actually gone right, as disorienting as it feels. Yet if this weren’t challenging enough, John describes a second phase of darkness that he calls the “night of spirit.” In this phase, the night falls completely. Not only do we lose all perception of God’s presence with us, we lose touch with even the idea of God as a reality.
And it’s here especially that John wants us to understand several crucial truths:
That this “wounding” is not what it appears but is, in fact, a gift from God’s heart to ours.
That this amnesia is meant to be a self-forgetting more than a God-forgetting.
That there is an intimacy beyond both sense and spirit, where we can still lay our face against the Beloved.
And that the gift of this dark place includes an abandonment of our cares and worries.
As Advent rises to a crescendo, as all our longing and waiting for God hits its apex just before fulfillment, it is simultaneously both the darkest moment (mirrored in winter solstice of the northern hemisphere) and the moment before the dawning. Christmas. Arrival. Birth. And, John would say, freedom.
Freedom? Yes. Because it is not you who are forgotten, John whispers; it is your cares that can now be forgotten. You are safe. You are known. You are Beloved.
growing the soul
Do you think Joseph and Mary experienced any of these conflicting emotions in Bethlehem? No doubt. So no matter what losses you are grieving now, receive these concurrent gifts of self-forgetting, the intimacy of absence, and the release of sorrows. Receive the Christ Child.
serving the world
In the midst of great global griefs, there are “good tidings of great joy… a Savior.”
takeaway
Abandon your cares.