Spiritual self reflection series#

John of the Cross was a Spanish monk in the 16 th century who was a close friend of Teresa of Avila. So outwardly things were falling apart & going nowhere, and inwardly was lost.

Much of what I had worked for and poured myself into was being dismantled, and despite angry memos and fierce confrontation, I was powerless to change any of it. Decisions were being made by that had a direct negative effect on our ability to find and recruit new students, so our numbers dropped, our revenue plummeted. We went through a downsizing and our department of five was reduced to two people in a matter of a few months. Three to four years we had been at it with no success. That was the summer POWER had its Fast for Family Values where people camped out in front of the Capitol Building in Harrisburg to try and convince the state legislators to increase funding for public education and they seemed to have cared less. And while it didn’t happen every night, this pattern went on for months. Those feelings had no connection with had gone on the day before, they so showed up in the middle of nowhere. I would wake up in the middle of the night with powerful feelings of sadness, or loneliness or anxiety or fear. I had another dream where I was driving people around and I had something in my eye so I was having trouble seeing, and I didn’t know where I was going. I had a dream where I was caught in a cavernous hole that I could not get out of. I began having these vivid dreams that I wrote about in my journal of people and events in my past, I had not thought about in decades. I have a practice of first thing in the morning having a time of journaling, reading Scripture, usually reading some book on spiritually-related topic and prayer. In late August of that summer, I began to feel myself slipping into a place I later realized was spiritual darkness. and so being silent before a silent God was little more than I thought could bear at the time, but I got thru the experience. When I have any sense of God, it is usually in a crowd. The time with the spiritual advisor was the only time we were allowed to talk the rest of the day we were silent.įor a long time, I have known that I am not very good at hearing God in silence. And I might go thru those passages tow to three times on the same day. I was to read the passage attempting to place myself in the passage in some way, reflect and journal my thoughts and feelings, and pray about whatever came up. He would give me three or four passages of scripture and a theme for the day like Praise, or Confession or Discerning the Spirit. Basically, we were following the pattern of the Ignatian spiritual exercises. Essentially, each day consisted of meeting for an hour with a spiritual director who would give me my assignment for the day. Pretty quickly I confirmed that the monastic life was not for me, and after two days I seriously considered cutting out altogether. I saw it as an opportunity to do something I otherwise might never do, and so on a lark, I signed up for his experiment, and got to go on this retreat for free. A brain researcher at Jefferson Hospital was doing research on the effect of spirituality on the brain and offered to pay anyone’s way to this retreat if they would allow him to scan their brain before and after going on the retreat. In the summer of 2015, I had an opportunity to go on a seven-day silent retreat at the Jesuit Center in Wernersville, PA about 8 miles west of Reading. And it was about a feeling God’s silence and God’s absence. While depression, anger, sadness and all sorts of emotions were part of the experience, it was more about feeling lost in the world, feeling powerless, and not knowing what the future would hold. John of the Cross called “the dark night of the soul.” Most people assume that spiritual darkness has to so with depression. What I want to talk about was my experience with spiritual darkness or what the sixteenth-century monk, St. Like anyone, I have had my share of frustrations, fears, stresses, disappointments, and sadness, but it has all occurred in the context of privilege, and I need to acknowledge that at the start. I have lived with undeserved and unmerited privilege.

I want to begin by acknowledging that compared to many people I have had a very fortunate life. Here is the text of my reflection shared on Novemat West Philadelphia Fellowship

Spiritual self reflection series#

NOTE: As part of a series of sermons on Mental Health and the Church, I was invited to share my experiences with spiritual darkness.