A series of trying weeks had morphed into a string of difficult months, and I was feeling emotionally and spiritually battered. The bittersweet emptiness of dropping my youngest son off at college was still fresh; the wrenching grief of my father’s death six weeks earlier was just beginning to take up permanent residency in my heart; and a series of setbacks at work
was driving a sense of personal failure and financial peril. “It’s too much!” I had lamented to my wife the previous evening. “It’s just too much to process and deal with all at one time.”
The notion that a good Christian life would protect me from overwhelming sorrow is a self-serving fallacy. It is merely another form of the prosperity gospel, the grossly false belief that God shines earthly favor on those who faithfully follow. Had I secretly believed I could avoid my own crown of thorns by being a good and faithful disciple?
Finally, I picked up a copy of Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross. In the introduction, the translator, Mirabai Starr, explains the theme of the Spanish mystic’s message:
“Say what’s secretly going on is that the Beloved is loving you back. . . .
[I]t is only in [the] vast emptiness that he can enter, as your beloved, and fill you. Where the darkness is nothing but unutterable radiance.
Say he knows you are ready to receive him and to be annihilated in love.
Can you say YES to that?”
Aha! The human experience of emptiness is the opening to be filled with the divine experience of love. Suffering is not a consequence; it is a beginning, like a heavenly steel plow overturning the hardened soil of our lives. The dirt must be softened, loosened, even pulverized for the life-giving water to penetrate and the seeds of love to germinate.
The only question is . . . how deep do I want the roots of Spirit to reach into the clod of earth named me?

Deacon S. James Meyer, adapted from God Plays a Purple Banjo

S. James Meyer is cofounder of StreetLights Outreach and Whatsoever You Do, Inc., and a permanent deacon in the Diocese of Green Bay, Wisconsin.