Journeying Through the Dark Nights of the Soul

Lent 1C; Deut. 26:5-11; Lk. 4:1-13; St. Paul’s Smithfield, NC 2/14/2016

Jim Melnyk, “Journeying Through the Dark Nights of the Soul”

In the late 1980s The Last Temptation of Christ opened in theaters challenging audiences with what many people saw as an all too human Jesus – a Jesus who struggled deeply to understand his identity, and what it meant to be both Son of Man and Son of God.

And it seems that every year at this time I hearken back to some rather foggy memories of a scene from the movie.  Taken from today’s Gospel story, Jesus has just been baptized by John and led out into the wilderness by the Spirit of God – though in the movie the Spirit speaks to Jesus through John the Baptist.  There, in the wild solitude, in the best tradition of ancient Jewish mystics, Jesus takes a stone and traces a circle in dirt.  He then steps into the center of the circle asking God to speak to him, and waits for whatever will come his way – and it is indeed a long wait. 

Hungry and tired, nearly spent with days of fasting, meditation and prayer, Jesus finally comes face-to-face with the Tempter who in the movie wears many faces and speaks with many voices; one who offers Jesus quick and easy answers to the difficult journey that lay ahead.  Years later I would hear about the Native American practice of Vision Quests – and that movie scene would come back to me – Jesus alone in the circle seeking God’s will for his life and facing the one who would challenge his willingness to follow the Holy Spirit’s lead.

In the movie, and in the Gospel lesson for today, Jesus actually does embark on a Vision Quest of sorts.  Beginning his own journey into the promise of God, Jesus is faced with the same temptations which faced the mothers and fathers of his faith tradition in the wilderness so long ago and which Moses speaks to this morning in our lesson from Deuteronomy.  

Sticking more with the Gospel now, we hear the temptation for Jesus to depend on himself rather than on God for his immediate needs – “command this stone to become a loaf of bread.”  There’s the temptation for Jesus to turn from God and embrace something false – “worship me, and I will give you the world.”  And finally, there’s the temptation for Jesus to put God’s promise to the test – “throw yourself down from the heights, for it is written, ‘God’s angels will protect you.’”  Tired and vulnerable, Jesus faces what must surely seem to be perfectly plausible choices, stemming from Jesus’ most immediate emotional and physical needs.

For Jesus – as for us – the wilderness is a place “where things fall apart and where things may come together for us in unanticipated ways. ... The wilderness, in short, is a place of threat, vulnerability, and danger. Yet it is also the place where, incredibly, we encounter a love we never could have imagined” (Belden C. Lane, Synthesis Today, 2/13/2016). 

Jamie Sams is author of a book about Native American Spirituality titled Dancing the Dream: the Seven Sacred Paths of Human Transformation.  She might refer to this moment in Jesus’ life as a “Dark Night of the Soul” – a phrase borrowed from the 16^th century poet and mystic, Saint John of the Cross.  This dark night of the soul is a time when chaos and confusion, heartache and hunger, threaten to overwhelm him.  Seneca and Cherokee traditions describe these moments as “periods [which] force us to reevaluate what we think, how we feel, what is really important, which values give us strength, and what to let go of that no longer serves us.  These Dark Nights [of the Soul],” Sams writes, “create [in us] major reality adjustments that force us to reevaluate our priorities” (p. 256). 

Jesus faces the temptation to feed his belly, his brain, and his ego rather than accept the challenge to follow a path of transformation that feeds his heart and his soul. 

The temptations speak to us of the fullness of Jesus’ humanity.  His Spirit-awakened response shows us the depth of God’s presence in the person of Jesus – and awakens us to the promise of that very presence in our own lives. 

Those of you who were here on Ash Wednesday heard me share what I believe to be an incredible insight from Dancing the Dream.  Sams writes that the turning point on the first path of human transformation occurs when we sense that our lives have purpose – that we are here for a reason we may not yet fully understand.  That sense of purpose unfolds “when we finally turn and face the Creator, the Great Mystery, God, and acknowledge that our life cannot be lived fully without [being connected] to the Divine Presence that made all life.”  Sams tells us that we must be “willing to acknowledge that we are spiritual beings who happen to have human bodies,” and that we are connected in some unknown way to the Great Mystery, who is God.  Jesus is the sacramental exclamation point of this incredible mystery of creation: that we, like Jesus, are spiritual beings who happen to have human bodies.  Our humanity is an integral part of who we are – but it can never stand apart from the spirit within, which in us is the image and likeness of our Creator God. 

The season of Lent is a particular time for us to be aware of our journey in this world, and our journey into the heart of God.  It’s an opportunity for us to check in with ourselves and check in with God – to get a sense of our anxieties and fears – our failures and victories – our hopes and our dreams.  Like Jesus before us, we journey in the wilderness of this world – challenged by our own Dark Nights of the Soul.  We may be tempted to think the journey doesn’t matter, but that’s not true – the journey is part of what defines the destination.  

As our Monday Night Study Group read about the Gospel of Luke the other day, “To make decisions for the future requires us to take our hopes into account.  As soon as we do, decisions come into play that will also change our present; [and] once the present has been changed, nothing will ever be the same again” (Frederick W. Schmidt, Conversations with Scripture: The Gospel of Luke, p 86).  God’s hope for us, I believe, is that our hopes and decisions will be shaped by the Dream of God that seeks to draw all humanity into the heart of God.  

That said, we are constantly challenged to give into our own temptations – to give into chaos and confusion, to heartache and devastating experience, to satisfaction of the belly, the brain and the ego, rather than nurture our own hearts and our souls, and the hearts and souls of all around us – we often find ourselves overwhelmed by the challenges and struggling to experience God’s dream for each of us. 

Like Jesus before us, we are called on this journey to be faithful to the God who gives us life – and faithful to those who journey with us along wilderness paths.  And like Jesus before us, we get to choose which path to follow through the many experiences of wilderness which surround us.  And like Jesus before us, the Spirit of the Living God enfolds and fills us – and will always be our true and constant companion along the way.