The Dark Nights

Noche Oscura is The Dark Night. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross wrote about dark nights of the soul. The term has come into common parlance as meaning a bad time, a dry time or a hopeless time. We think of the “dark night” as a time when we can’t feel God’s presence. But Richard Rohr writes about the dark nights and he says that what Teresa and John were really talking about was dark nights as a spiritually necessary time.

Teresa of Avila’s dark night was a mind-shifting time. It preceded great growth and her magnificent books. This is not exactly the “Life is suffering” that Scott Peck writes about but “necessary” because, as Rohr says, the dark night of the soul is when God is actually deeply close, so close that he is working in us. These are the times God is so deep in us that it’s almost like he is doing surgery.

In steps 6 and 7 we ask to be healed, we ask to be relived, we say to God “I am willing and I have tried and now if it’s ever gonna change it’s up to you”. Then we ache. Often we say that surrender is painful, but through the lens of writers like Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, we can see this as the kind of necessary pain that comes with healing.

A few years ago I took care of a friend who had just had a serious surgery and I could see his healing pain up close. The first thing that the nurses said when he woke up from surgery was, “Get out of that bed and walk.” They were adamant: “You have to “ambulate”--get up and walk”.

It made me think about Jesus when he performed acts of healing and he would say matter-of-factly,“Take up your bed and walk.”

July 22 Mary Magdalene Day

Now here is a feast day in the Roman Catholic Church that sober women can celebrate. She was a real woman and she appears in stories in the New Testament Gospels. The good news is that Mary Mag was the first witness to the resurrection of Jesus, one of his first and most ardent followers and it was she who brought the news of the Resurrection to the Apostles.

But here is more interesting news about Mary Magdalene. Most scholars agree that she is the same Mary that used her wealth to support Jesus mission and teaching and she most likely is the same woman that Jesus healed by casting out seven demons.

It’s not a far stretch to understand “demons” as addictions and what it is like when one day we have them and the next day we don’t. Sober women can imagine this woman, like us, so grateful for the person who carried a message of healing and grace to her.

You can read more about this amazing Jewish woman who became part of the Christian story through her healing and then by her service in the book, “Alone of All Her Sex” by the historian Marina Warner.

But think about this: She had seven “demons” or “devils” or “infirmities” and a miracle happened. In a life of long sobriety we each have at least that many that need healing. I have alcohol, drugs, food, work, shopping, relationships and my thinking. How happy I am to have a program that can “cast these out” of me.

Get Out of the House

When I was a kid and my parents fought I used to stay in the room with them, panicked and afraid to be with them but also to leave them. My older brother would leave the house at the first sign of tension but somehow I needed to stay. To witness? To protect? To calm them? To clean up after? All of those are theories well dissected in many therapy rooms. What I know is that there was some strange kind of loyalty and inability to leave. As I return to that scene now—and visualize the very young child I was then—I wish for a woman to come and escort me out.

This week I realized that through recovery and therapy I have become the kind of woman that I wished for then. Now I can go into that room and take that child out of there. I can say to her, “Come with me, I can take care of you” and I can say to them, “Sorry, I’m taking her out of here.”

I can return to that childhood house in my imagination and show her, “See these are my car keys and this is my checkbook, and see this card: I am 55 years old, with a job and money and friends and all kinds of resources and you are coming to live with me now.”

When I get scared or think I am stuck in some situation today I say to myself, “Nope, you don’t have to stay; I can take her out of there”.

A Legion of Demons

I met with a spiritual director yesterday and talked with her about the ways that my old beliefs and negative thoughts torment me. For days I have been thinking about the story in Mark 5: 8 -16 where Jesus heals the “demoniac”. Isn’t that a great word?

Jesus speaks directly to the “demons” in the possessed man. “What is your name?” Jesus asks and the answer comes, “My name is Legion; for we are many.”

Now that is a case for Jesus as Psychotherapist I think. The legion of demons tormenting this man has to be old beliefs, schema, voices. The story says that the man is tied in chains and I understand that feeling when these old beliefs are hell bent on convincing me of my defectiveness and my deprivation.

But what is startling on re-reading this story is that Jesus does not talk to the man but he talks to the “demons” directly. The demons and Jesus have a conversation about what to do; where they can go, how to make this work. Jesus bypasses the man and goes right to Legion. What does that suggest in terms of steps 6 and 7? In terms of healing? In terms of being restored to sanity? And most powerfully, in terms of respecting the old parts of ourselves that once existed to help us but that now tie us up in chains?

Ted Shawn Modern Dance

Mark Nepo, poet and teacher, told this story at a writing retreat:

A man was in Divinity School when he was diagnosed with polio. He had this idea –an intuition--that if he moved more it would help him with his polio. He decided to learn how to dance. He took some classes and slowly began to integrate dance into his life. He danced every day. Through dance he cured himself of polio. Ted Shawn left Divinity School to dance and to choreograph. He became the “father of modern dance” and he founded Jacob’s Pillow.

Healing My Thinking

I went to a meeting today and talked about my thinking. An AA friend named Bill says, whenever he speaks, “I didn’t have a drink all day.” For him it has been many many days but he makes the point that he didn’t drink today.

I have not had a drink today or for many many days, but as I said in the meeting, “I want to be able to say that I didn’t have a THINK all day.” It is my thinking that undoes me. It is my thinking that upsets me. It is my thinking that unravels me. It is my thinking that scares me. I scare myself coming and going.

That is the miracle of recovery that I most want: the evidence of being restored to sanity will be when I d not scan and sift and search for thoughts that will scare me. I am so ready for this change. So ready.

Thornton Wilder's Wounds

Without your wounds where
would your power be? The
very angels themselves
cannot persuade the
wretched and blundering
children on Earth as can one
human being broken in the
wheels of living. In love’s
service, only the wounded
can serve.

--Thornton Wilder