Anthony M Carrozzo, OFM
As we listen to the Passion according to Matthew this year the line that may strike us and may even become our mantra during the Lenten season is: Darkness fell over the land (Mt. 27:45), echoing Isaiah: For darkness fell upon the earth (Is. 60:2). We are living in the darkest of times. Pandemics, climate concerns, floods, fires and earthquakes, political divisions and violence both nationally and internationally, along with our own personal darknesses. We want to flee the darkness and rush toward the light. But the theologian of the darkness, St. John of the Cross, warns us against doing that. John embraces the darkness writing ‘Oh night you guide me, kinder than the dawn, oh night that joined Beloved with beloved transformed.’
St Bonaventure also embraced darkness in The Journey of the Soul into God where he indicates that the darkness is the light, observing ‘darkness itself is brightest itself. It is our mind’s brightest light, just as when the eye looks at pure light, it seems to see nothing.’ Throughout the final chapter of this work, Bonaventure calls us to enter into the dark, urging us to seek ‘darkness, not brightness, not light, but the fire, which thoroughly inflamed, carries us into God.’ So Bonaventure encourages us to enter into darkness.
Bonaventure describes the journey even more scripturally and picturesquely than John does:
With the staff of the cross one passes over the red sea going from Egypt into the wilderness where he tastes the hidden manna and with Christ one rests in the tomb as if dead yet experiencing, as far as is possible in this Pilgrim state, what was said to the Jews, a thief hanging alongside Christ upon the cross, today you will be with me in paradise.
It is not only darkness that both John and Bonaventure embrace but desire as well. John’s Journey into darkness begins with love inflamed and Bonaventure tells us to make the journey into darkness one must be a person of desire. Both Saints show us that unless we embrace the darkness, our desires will be misguided and perhaps even be extinguished. We experience this in the darkness of our times. We find ourselves eating more, drinking excessively, lusting instead of loving, and we become so easily distracted that we waste both time and grace.
So, we find ourselves at an impasse, as contemplative theologian Constance FitzGerald points out. This makes us incapable of moving forward or even backward. We are paralysed. The only way out of this paralysis is through the darkness. But the transition through this impasse, FitzGerald insists, begins when we accept the darkness.
To travel this dark road our spirituality must be based on experience and storytelling. This is not as simple as it sounds. Many of us are comfortable with storytelling because we have listened to the parables of Jesus all of our adult lives. Experience, however, has taken a secondary role to a dogmatic faith stance. Pope Francis is leading us back to experience, but doctrine seems embedded in the Roman Catholic mind. We must turn our hearts and minds to our graced experiences.
In his Epiphany homily Francis is urging us to put aside conventional and formal religiosity to embrace new paths as did the Magi, both in following the star and finding a new way home to avoid the plots of King Herod. Our Holy Father encourages us to enter the Magi’s school of desire. We can recall T.S. Eliot’s Journey of the Magi with its stunning final line, ‘I would be glad of another death.’ The king who said these words realised the old ways were over. He was at an impasse, a dark night.
Travelling through the darkness is travelling through death to new life. The test for that is not the future but the present. Do we cling to our old ways even as we become aware that they are no longer fulfilling our spiritual needs? If so, we are living in a parking lot as Francis tells us. Are we parked in meaningless practices that may have served us previously but now are performed simply out of habit? They may do nothing to help us to grow spiritually. As FitzGerald says: ‘Darkness is the birthplace of a new vision and a hope that cannot be imagined … it mediates the transfiguration.’
Storytelling is as important as experience because stories give a narrative to our experiences. Perhaps there is no storyline more appropriate here than the Trilogy of Elie Wiesel. His trilogy leads us through Night to Dawn to Day as we move through Jewish family experiences of the dark night of antisemitism that led to the Holocaust. Increasing horrifying, Wiesel spares no details of the horrors suffered by innocent Jews simply because they were Jewish. How could anyone survive? But some do survive to tell the story, to warn us of the evil we can do. Scars of body, mind, and spirit remain just as the wounds of Jesus remain in His resurrected body, not so that He may remember what we did to Him but rather that we never forget what He did for us. We must always remember and retell the stories of darkness so that new life, new energy may be born through these acts of remembering and repeating. We must move through this process with the strength and courage of the Wiesels in our life. We must get in touch with our stories as we traverse the darkness into the light, into transfiguration.
There is a prayer of St. Bonaventure that will help us to focus on this during the season of Lent. Unfortunately it is commonly called ‘A Prayer of Thanksgiving after Communion’. It is far more than that as we shall see. I will present it in a simplified form to emphasize the principles of this article:
Pierce the depths of my soul, Lord Jesus, with the wound of your love,
with serene, apostolic charity, that my soul may always melt with love,
longing for You, longing to be unloosed to be with You.
May I always hunger for You, the bread of angels, our refreshing food,
our Life-sustaining bread. May my heart always thirst for You,
the flowing source of life, the fountain of wisdom and knowledge,
and the fountain of eternal light.
‘Pierce the depths of my soul’ immediately places us at the foot of the cross, for this echoes the words of The Passion according to the evangelist John: One of the soldiers pierced His side. The desire of the one praying is to enter into the passion of Jesus, to follow Him to the cross, not as a bystander but as a participant. The one praying recognizes that suffering is a part of life, but that the burden is lighter if united to the suffering of Christ for He has promised us that His burden is light.That light can have two meanings.
We cannot escape the brilliance of Bonaventure’s the wound of your love. Theologians have tried many ways to explain the crucifixion of Jesus, for example stating that it was the will of the Father, but Bonaventure would have none of that. The cause of the crucifixion was love. Jesus travels this journey into darkness out of love for us.
Bonaventure illumines our minds and hearts as we pray that we possess a serene, apostolic charity, meaning that our ministry is charity/love but not a busy, thoughtless, frenzied activity. It must be serene, peaceful and peace-giving.
Our hearts melt with love. There is a unity between wound of love and melt with love. Our reaction to Jesus loving us is for us to return that love to Jesus Himself and to His beloved, whom He call us to serve. This is what it means to live a Christ-centered life. But we must be unloosed, given the ability to move freely, without attachments, to fulfil our calling.
So we yearn for Jesus, hungry and thirsty for Him, which yearning is satisfied in the Eucharist. But Bonaventure says more than that by employing one of his favourite images – the fountain – for God is the fountain overflowing into creation filling it with grace, a grace that is enough for us to endure the darkness and even embrace it as John of the Cross does.
Desire, then, which was lost in the darkness and wilderness, comes alive within us once again. This desire is now purified so that it is the desire to seek and find the Lord.
Many years ago Basil Hume, monk and churchman, wrote Basil in Blunderland, recalling a day when he was to care for two children. His concern as a Benedictine monk was to fulfil the obligation to pray the Divine Office but while caring for two children. He found that impossible to do, so he planned the day around the child’s game of hide and seek. For Basil it was more than that, however. It became a day not only to find the children but also to find God, who is hidden yet present, so He must be sought and found.
Hume joins John of the Cross through darkness, Bonaventure through the wilderness and Wiesel through the horrors of the holocaust in searching for a God who is often hidden, but desires that we seek Him.
Darkness has fallen on our land; we seem lost in the wilderness. Holocausts appear in new horrific massacres, yet we seek for God not as cause or solution but as present with us through the darkness and always. We will find Him but only if we too are pierced as we stand at the foot of the cross.
SOURCES:
Regis Armstrong, Into God: Saint Bonaventure’s Itinerarium in Deum (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2020).
Laurie Cassidy and Shawn Copeland, Desire, Darkness, and Hope (Collegeville, Minn: The Liturgical Press, 2021).
The Complete Poems of San Juan de la Cruz, trans. by Paul Hoover and Maria Baranda (Minneapolis, Minn: Milkweed Editions, 2021).