Dark Nights

IRONIC that it was from an atheists’ discussion group in cyberspace that I’d pick up the link to “Mother Theresa’s Crisis of Faith” – an article recently published in Time Magazine that perhaps tells everything about the soon-to-be Saint’s painful experience in dealing with her own dark nights of the soul.  
 http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1655415,00.html

Ironic further, after reading the Time article that I’d tell myself: Mother T, and not Marx K, made me understand that faith, or the absence of it, is a private affair only for as long as one keeps it such; and certain dark nights of the soul is a necessary stage in any spiritual journey or search for a God.

Ironic indeed is faith intellectualized, as de Quiros, quoting his friend who’s a priest, defined faith as the “tension between doubt and certainty… you will never be completely certain there is a God, and you will never be completely convinced there isn’t one.”

Faith is a contradiction? And it is also a struggle. And pain goes with it.

The kind of pain you feel when anger takes the better of your desire to love, to befriend, or simply to connect with another. That kind of anger when you see injustice blatantly committed and ask where God is, what is he doing. The kind of question that you couldn’t find a concrete and final answer to – to believe or not to believe, to make a choice, or just sit on it.

It’s the struggle you wage with God, bringing you to a life much more difficult than when you were struggling with the devil when you were a bit younger. The God who doesn’t’ want to leave you alone. The God who stubbornly persists, sometimes in the back of your mind as a negligible thought, or as an invisible roommate who you call names, asking him questions, pleading for answers – an act you consciously perform, perhaps on a stage mounted on the edge of the dark night of your soul.

And you know you choose to believe. But you also know you’ll live (or die) through another dark night.

.

I know.