Nate opens this episode in the dark — literally. A wanderer, a treacherous boy named Liron, a whale carcass on a frozen marsh, and a burning ember pressed into a man’s chest by a king who trades in counterfeit fire. The story sets the stage for what Saint John of the Cross calls the pinnacle of distress: the moment when the soul has loved God long enough and deep enough that God stops cleaning what you do and starts cleaning what you want. The will reaches for God and finds nothing. Not silence. Not peace. A wall.
Nate walks through Book Two, Chapters Seven and Eight of The Dark Night of the Soul and shows why this stage is different from early spiritual dryness. This is what happens when love has gone so far out that God presses the one place it hurts most. Chapter Seven names the agony — the will straitened between the memory of closeness and the present emptiness, hit by sudden darts of grief, unable to receive comfort even from wise counsel. Chapter Eight goes further: God may allow the soul’s worst fears to rise — am I rejected? Am I lost? — not to crush it, but to hollow it out so completely that only he can fill it. Jeremiah gets pulled in. Job gets pulled in. Lamentations 3 comes to the table because plain speech cannot carry this kind of sorrow on its own. And then Nate lands the episode somewhere you might not expect: hope that doesn’t feel like hope, a trembling hand placing one sentence on the altar, and a silence that turns out not to be absence at all.
Saint John of the Cross — The Dark Night of the Soul | Lamentations 3 | Fresh Ground Theology: freshgroundtheology.com
The post EP: DC2.4 — The Dark Night of the Will | Fresh Ground Theology appeared first on Fresh Ground Theology.
Leave a Reply