Homily on Spiritual Desolation for the feast of St John of the Cross, given at Sacred Heart Church (Jersey) on Wednesday 14 December 2022.
Readings: Isaiah 45:6-8,18,21-25 and Luke 7:19-23.
Have you ever tried to pray but come back empty? Like nobody is listening? Like you’re just ploughing into a brick wall? Empty prayer, or dry prayer, what we call spiritual desolation, especially in moments of crisis, can feel like a threat to our faith. If God is really there, we might ask, why do I feel like he isn’t? We can often build this picture in our head that someone with real faith always feels alive with it, like they’re on fire with the Holy Spirit, and yet for many of us this isn’t always the case, it's not even often the case. Does this mean we are lacking something? Does it mean we don’t really have faith? Has God abandoned us?
Today’s Saint, John of the Cross, was no stranger to this feeling. In fact he wrote perhaps one of the most famous religious poems on exactly this subject, he called it the Dark Night of the Soul. Many saints throughout the history of the Church have experienced this same Dark Night of the Soul; where they pray without any consolation at all, Saint Therese of Lisieux and St Theresa of Calcutta both went for many years in this condition of desolation. Did they all lack faith?
No. They didn’t lack faith, and nor do we. These little crises of faith are part of God’s design for us. In our spiritual lives, we are like small children learning to walk. Those times when we are on fire with faith, those times we feel God close, it is like a parent holding our hand. But those times when we feel nothing, when we feel alone, God (like a parent teaching a child to walk) is standing a few paces away calling us to him. He lets us struggle, and stumble, without his hand there, so we can come to understand how much we need Him, so that we desire His guiding hand more than we would if it were never taken away.
St John of the Cross wrote that these sufferings we experience, especially spiritual desolation are a preparation; they prepare our souls to receive the Lord by making us desire His presence. They teach us to recognise what the Lord said through Isaiah in our first reading “Apart from me, all is nothing.”
When we experience desolation, when it seems like God is far away, we must listen to Christ’s words in the Gospel “happy is the man who does not lose faith in me” and we pray more earnestly, using that time of spiritual suffering to reflect on our need for God, and to trust in him more completely.
This Advent season is about preparing for the coming of Christ, especially His coming at the end of time, when we desire to receive from Him all the riches He promised. John of the Cross reminds us
the soul cannot enter into these treasures, nor attain them, unless it first crosses into and enters a thicket of suffering… and has undergone spiritual training.
Spiritual Canticle of St John of the Cross
from the Office of Readings for his feast day
When we experience our own Spiritual Desolation, our own feelings of emptiness in prayer, we should be joyful that the Lord is giving us a gift, letting us walk on our own so we can come to Him more deeply, more fully. We might remember the joyful words of St John of the Cross in his poem, we might even use them as our own prayer;
O guiding night;
O night more lovely than the dawn;
O night that hast united
The lover with His beloved,
And changed her into her love.
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