A Dance of Intimacy
Richard Rohr reflects on the dance of divine intimacy:
The divine-human love affair really is a reciprocal dance. Sometimes, in order for us to step forward, our partner must step away a bit. The withdrawal lasts only a moment, and its purpose is to pull us closer—but it doesn’t feel like that in the moment. It feels like our partner is retreating.
God creates the pullback, “hiding his face,” as it was called by many mystics and scriptures. God creates a vacuum that God alone can fill. Then God waits to see if we will trust our God partner to eventually fill that space within us, which now has grown even more spacious and receptive. This is the central theme of darkness, necessary doubt, or what the mystics call “God’s withdrawing of love.” What feels like suffering, depression, uselessness—moments when God has withdrawn—are often deep acts of trust and invitations to intimacy on God’s part. On the soul’s inner journey, we meet a God who interacts with our deepest selves, allowing and forgiving mistakes. It is precisely this give-and-take, and knowing there will be give-and-take, that makes God so real as a Lover. [1]
A translator of Spanish mystic John of the Cross (1542–1591), Mirabai Starr offers this stirring description of the dark night, in which God moves from dynamic presence to loving absence:
Say when you were very young the veil lifted just enough for you to glimpse the underlying Real behind it and then dropped again. Maybe it never recurred, but you could not forget. And this discovery became the prime mover of the rest of your life in ways you may not have even noticed….
Say these [spiritual] practices fill your heart. They make you feel holiness like wind through every fiber of your being and think rivers of holy thoughts…. The passion of your love for God intensifies….
Say prayer starts to dry up on your tongue. Sacred literature becomes fallen leaves, blows away. Meditation brings no serenity anymore. Devotion grows brittle, cracks. The God you bow down to no longer draws you….
Say each of the familiar spiritual rooms you go to seeking refuge are dark now, and empty. You sit down anyway. You take off your clothes at the door and enter naked. All agendas have fallen away…. This quietude deepens in proportion to your surrender.
Say what’s secretly going on is that the Beloved is loving you back. That your first glimpse of the Absolute was God’s first great gift to you. That your years of revelation inside his many vessels was his second gift, wherein, like a mother, he was holding you, like a child, close to his breast, tenderly feeding you. And that this darkness of the soul you have come upon and cannot seem to come out of is his final and greatest gift to you.
Because it is only in this vast emptiness that he can enter, as your Beloved, and fill you. Where the darkness is nothing but unutterable radiance. [2]
References:
[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe (Convergent Books, 2021), 78–79.
[2] Mirabai Starr, introduction to Dark Night of the Soul, John of the Cross, trans. Mirabai Starr (Riverhead Books, 2002), 1–3.
Image credit and inspiration: Laura Barbato, untitled (detail), 2020, photo, Italy, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Wiping the fog from the window becomes our small gesture of being in the Dark Night—an embodied “I’m here” that reaches for clarity amid unknowing, while the small, steady candle reminds us that the spirit still burns softly even when the season feels bright and our inner world does not.
Story from Our Community:
As people are in a frenzy preparing for Christmas and the summer break here in the Southern Hemisphere, I’ve noticed feeling irritable, disconnected, and a little jealous. I am working straight through the traditional holiday break. Reading the meditations this time of Advent has been a pool of life, providing me with a deeper understanding of Jesus’s call to “abide in me,” which puts my irritability and jealousy into perspective. The meditations remind me that I am never disconnected; sometimes it just feels like it. Thank you. May you have peace this holiday season.
—Sarah B.