Is this the death of the Light?

                                                                                                                                    By Sr. Mary Magdalene

While in COVID-19 quarantine, my husband and I watched the movie A Hidden Life.  If you are not familiar, it is based on the true story of an Austrian farmer and devout Catholic man who was conscripted to serve in the Nazi military but refused to take the required oath to the Fuhrer.  He seeks the advice of Church leaders and other faithful, begs his wife’s understanding, and endures both the buffets of his community and torture by the Nazis for doing so.  In one particular scene, a faithful friend, pondering the Nazi influence in Austria, asks him, “Is this the death of the Light?”

Though I typically have a terrible memory for the particulars of movies, this line struck me to the point that I chose to take a pen to tablet and write it down.  How many times, I wonder, in the midst of suffering or isolation, might we flounder in the darkness and wonder if the Light remains?  
While great theologians have attempted to answer this question of suffering, the irony of Our Lord’s cross (and our own) remains a great mystery for many of us. How is it that this instrument of torture became the enduring symbol of our salvation?  And how is it possible that our own crosses, the real burdens, fears, and obstacles of our lives, can be a source of grace and growth in holiness?  The short answer is that without uniting our own sufferings to the Lord’s, we fall short of making any real sense out of their power in our lives.

 While wrestling with this question of “the Light,” I  ran head-long into a quote by the French poet and dramatist Paul Claudel.  Claudel, himself a devout Roman Catholic said, “Jesus did not come to explain away suffering, or to remove it.  He came to fill it with His Presence.”

And so these two lines collide in my mind. The first, a question, “Is this the death of the Light?” and the second, a statement of hope, “[Jesus] came to fill [suffering] with His Presence.”  Self-imposed as it sometimes may be, I think of suffering as a form of darkness in my life.  But this quote by Claudel seems to indicate that Jesus, the true Light, comes to fill that suffering [darkness] with the light of His Presence!  In the very dailiness of our experience, perhaps especially in times personally or communally challenging, the Lord wants to bring a comforting light.

The fact that our present public health crisis, and the subsequent removal of the faithful from the Sacraments, happened to fall during our Lenten journey is not lost on me.  It feels much like our own kind of 40 days in the desert, tested and tried, searching and seeking for its meaning in our own lives and in our world.   Some may be able to say that they have readily found this to be a time of renewal or closeness to God and have an increasing awareness of their hunger for the Sacraments.  I have not.  I have, in fact, found myself distracted by both the necessities and the diversions, sensing little detectable closeness in my own 40-day trudging.  Though not a crisis in faith, I have pondered the task of how to struggle well.  That is, how to grapple with my present experience in such a way that it offers Light even when my own eyes may seem dimmed.

So, what of the reality that many of us are having difficulty feeling the presence of God -  this desolation of heart, mind, and sense? 
 
Many saints over the centuries could speak to this struggle in very particular and intimate ways.  One of our contemporary saints, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, is perhaps the most well-known to us.  Mother Teresa, we glean from her writings, suffered for years with an apparent darkness and struggled to feel the Lord’s presence in her life.  She remained faithful - trusting, pining, thirsting for God’s consolation, sure of His Creator-omnipotence, His omnipresence, despite His apparent absence to her human senses.

Our own Dominican tertiary, Saint Catherine of Siena, also experienced periods of desolation, often feeling totally abandoned by God.  It was at these times that she moved outside of her solitude and poured herself out among the people: the poor, the sick, and the destitute.  In her Dialogue (a series of conversations between God and a soul), Catherine tells of the withdrawal of consolation by God Himself for the benefit of an imperfect soul.  She seems to indicate that many of us may find ourselves loving God imperfectly.  That is, loving Him selfishly and for reasons related to what God can do for them or how He can make them feel (for consolations, for instance).  This, rather than loving God for God’s own sake, does the soul little good in the overall journey toward the great perfection of love of God and love of neighbor.  Will that loss of consolation, itself a sensing of the goodness of God, cause the imperfect or selfish soul to quickly lose ardor for God and neighbor? In Catherine’s words: “[grow] weak by degrees”? 

Again, in her Dialogue, the Lord tells Catherine:
… I withdraw from their minds My consolation and allow them to fall into battles and perplexities.  This I do so that, coming to perfect self-knowledge, they may know that of themselves they are nothing and have no grace, and accordingly in time of battle fly to Me, as their Benefactor, seeking Me alone, with true humility, for which purpose I treat them thus, withdrawing from them consolation indeed, but not grace.

As I re-read the words taken down by St. Catherine, I can appreciate “the soul’s” need to grow in humility, to know and understand its right relationship with God, its smallness; to recognize that all good that comes to the soul is initiated by God, even the very consolation for which it hungers.  And though it is stripped of consolation, it is never abandoned by grace.
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I recently listened to a recorded retreat done by a Dominican friar in which he contrasted the difference between physical or bodily maturing and spiritual maturing.  He noted that when an infant is born it is totally and completely dependent on his mother to attend to all his bodily and emotional needs, but as the infant grows and matures he steps out into a bit more independence.  He learns to dress and feed himself.  As he grows more, he matures enough to separate himself a bit from his parents and live independent of them, creating his own new space and experience.  Spiritual maturity, on the other hand, does not yield more and more independence of the child from the parent (creator Father) but rather a growing need and dependence - not a separation, but a growing intimate closeness.
  
 And [Jesus] said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven”  (Matthew 18:3 NIV).

 The Lord allows the struggle to learn and know our small-ness, but does not leave or abandon us to our own strength.  Grace is still at work, even when our sense of spiritual consolation, the warmth of the Light that we so desire, seems overcast.  The Light reveals the pitfalls, obstacles, chains and wounds - and for a time, our eyes get fixed on that which is illuminated and fail to see the Light, Himself.  But soon, when the heart comes to know well those chains and wounds, and the soul in humility embraces its smallness and utter dependence, it turns its eyes to the Light itself and becomes filled.

Though our eyes may become dim as we find our minds and hearts frenetic with both the noise and the silence of our days, the Light remains.  Grace remains.  The Light, which is Christ Himself, fills our suffering with His Presence.  He calls us to become as little children, to know humility and our utter dependence on God’s goodness.  In this way, He can enter into our suffering, binding it to His own; the Light remains, and its warmth can once again be detected.  

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