Faith in the Night

Every day half the earth is covered with a blanket of darkness, half our planet wonders in the night. The destiny of the earth as we know it, is to be intimately related with the dark.

The destiny of every human heart, like the earth, is also to live intimately with the dark. It’s actually why we are here. For no other spiritual hierarchy knows what it is like to be separated from the light, alone and plunged into the night. Its our unique calling card as human beings. Even priests (Ha!)  sometimes feel uninspired, lying in bed sick with the flu on Saturday, having no idea what to say for Sundays sermon, looking up into the heavens for some light but finding only darkness.

And yet, when the darkness comes, when the loneliness wells up, our challenge is to not fall into despair, not to think that there is something wrong, our challenge is to befriend the dark and to learn to bend our knees, look up and TRUST. For the star of Grace is only seen at night.

Cultivating this trust in the night, this deep faith that there is light in the darkness is the task of the human being. For this trust is what ultimately heals us. This is why Christ tells the centurion in our gospel this week (Mt. 8), that it is faith that heals.

So, dear friends, this means that “when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings. ” (Wendell Berry)