DARKNESS AS PREPARATION
“When the just cry out, the Lord hears them, and from all their distress he rescues them … The Lord is close to the brokenhearted.” - Ps 34:16, 19
Today’s Responsorial Psalm is a reassuring hymn to those in suffering. The lines above particularly stick out to me.
I feel grateful that during this season of Advent, I don’t feel an overwhelming sense of suffering that compels me to cry out. However, as 2021 nears its end and I reflect back on the year, I recall experiences of distress and heartbreak, especially with the loss of my paternal grandmother in February. The pain that once felt all-permeating has gotten dulled a bit with time. In some moments I will be flooded with grief, but the moments have become more and more spaced out from each other.
St. John of the Cross says, “The endurance of darkness is the preparation for great light.” As we celebrate the memorial of this great mystic today, I think of all the suffering he, too, experienced and how he was able to write those words from that perspective. In darkness, I can feel isolated, abandoned, fearful, and hopeless. Yet, the longer you’re in the dark, the more your eyes adjust to it and you begin to regain sight. Perhaps it’s not that pain and sorrow have left my life, but that enduring them – feeling my more difficult, less pretty feelings (not just avoiding or trying to numb them) – has allowed me to see with a new kind of clarity, one in which the light and goodness in my life appear all the more brilliant.
As I continue to move through this Advent season in expectant hope for a renewed and deepened sense of the Incarnation, I thank God for the moments of peace and stillness, for the people who fill me with joy, and I am learning to trust that in times of desolation and heartache, God will always have the last word and will bring a gift out of it.
What suffering or brokenheartedness might God be close to you in right now – whether it be your own or in your accompanying others in theirs?
Have there been times when, looking back at darkness in your life, you’re now able to see how God used it to prepare you to see great light?
Jessica Gerhardt
Photo Credit: Jason Wong on Unsplash