25: Faith in the Dark

Written By Denisa Nica

What happens when faith doesn’t feel the way it used to?

You sit down to pray and the words don’t come. God seems harder to find. Something you’ve believed for years suddenly has a question mark beside it, or you reach a line in a worship song you’ve sung a hundred times and realize you can’t quite sing it anymore. Does this mean something has gone wrong? Am I losing my faith?

Today we’re talking about spiritual darkness, John of the Cross and the Dark Night of the Soul, and what it might look like to remain with God when we can’t see very far ahead. Listen in.

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  • 25. Faith in the Dark

    I’m Denisa Nica, and welcome to Walking Anyway. You’re listening to episode 25.

    This is a podcast about living faithfully in uncertain seasons, when life feels unclear and nothing is quite settling yet. If you’re not quite sure how to move through this in a way that feels steady and true, you’re in the right place to keep walking anyway. Each week I offer a reflection and a gentle way to help you live faithfully, one ordinary step at a time.

    I’m an author and spiritual director, and the founder of The Table—an online contemplative community shaped by a weekly rhythm, where women practice this kind of faithful living together, at their own pace, in the middle of their real lives and faith.

    I live in Spain, where life moves a little slower, and that has changed the way I pay attention and the way I live inside my own life.

    Today we’re talking about spiritual darkness, what happens when God seems harder to find, and how we keep walking when our faith doesn’t feel the way it used to. Listen in.

    About fifteen years ago, I went on a cruise with a friend for her fortieth birthday. We were sailing from the Cayman Islands to Jamaica, and I think it was around ten o’clock at night when the power went out.

    Now, I had never been on a cruise before, so I had no idea how concerned one is supposed to be when something like this happens. But it was a very large ship, there were a lot of people on it who seemed perfectly calm, and almost immediately the emergency generators came on. The lights came back, everything was fine.

    Until the generators went out too. And then the engines stopped. And this enormous cruise ship was just sitting there, or drifting there I suppose, somewhere in the Caribbean Sea, completely dark.

    I should probably tell you that I am afraid of the dark. I always have been.

    I grew up in Romania in the late seventies, early eighties, and one of the ways adults encouraged children to take an afternoon nap was to tell us stories about little children who wandered into forests at night and got lost. I’m not entirely sure how this was supposed to make us relax enough to fall asleep, it certainly didn’t work for me. I’ve been afraid of the dark for as long as I can remember. I don’t like walking somewhere alone at night, and if I can avoid driving in the dark, I usually do.

    So being on a cruise ship in the middle of the Caribbean Sea with absolutely no lights anywhere, was not my ideal situation.

    I remember the captain coming over the speakers every so often to tell us they were working on the problem, and I don’t remember exactly how long we were without power. I just remember the darkness because we were out at sea, and there was nothing. No city somewhere in the distance, no houses along a shoreline, no streetlights. There wasn’t even a shoreline.

    And if I needed to move around our tiny room, I had to do it differently than I had a few hours before. I went slowly. I reached for the wall. I tried to remember where the doorway was and how far I was from the hallway and what I already knew about the layout of the room and the bathroom, from having walked through it when I could see.

    I didn’t think much about any of that at the time. I was mostly praying someone would get the electricity working again.

    But I have thought about that night many times since, mostly because it was terryfying, and also because darkness, of course, comes in other forms too.

    Sometimes the darkness is what is happening around us. Something happens in the world, or in our family, or to somebody we love, and we can’t see how any of it is going to turn out. Sometimes we can’t even make sense of it.

    And then there is the darkness we carry ourselves. Grief can feel like that. Fear can. Depression, disappointment, exhaustion.

    But there is another kind of darkness too, and this is the one I want to talk about today. It’s the darkness that can show up in our experience of God.

    It can be hard to explain exactly what has changed. You sit down to pray and prayer isn’t what it used to be, or God seems harder to find, or you hear yourself saying something you’ve believed for years and suddenly you’re not quite as sure what you mean by it anymore. Even the ways you used to recognize God’s presence can begin to feel unfamiliar.

    And of course, real life is rarely kind enough to keep these things separate for us. We grieve and pray at the same time. Something happens to us, or to someone we love, and suddenly we’re asking questions we weren’t asking six months or 3 years ago.

    I wish it were tidier sometimes. It would make my job as a spiritual director much easier. But, it isn’t.

    And I know this particular kind of darkness because I’ve lived through it myself. I’ve had stretches of my life when the ways I had known God for years no longer seemed to work in quite the same way. And now I sit with people in spiritual direction who describe something similar. The details are different, of course, but I recognize the bewilderment in something that has changed, and you don’t know yet what to call it.

    We tend to want a name, don’t we? At least I do. A name, preferably followed by an explanation and perhaps a reasonable estimate for how long this is going to last.

    Unfortunately, the spiritual life doesn’t tend to provide those.

    But Christians have been talking about experiences of spiritual darkness for a very long time, and there is one phrase you may have heard before: the Dark Night of the Soul.

    That language comes to us especially through John of the Cross, a Spanish Carmelite priest, poet and mystic who lived in the 1500s and wrote about what happens as a person is drawn into deeper union with God, including those times when the familiar ways we have known and experienced God begin to fall away.

    Now, I need to say something here before we get too far into John of the Cross because this is a very big conversation. People have spent entire academic careers studying John. There are books about the books he wrote. We have, depending on how long I talk today, perhaps thirty minutes.

    So we’re going to stay in one small corner of this.

    And I don’t want you listening to this episode with a little mental checklist, trying to decide, “Okay, is this what I have?” because that isn’t really what I’m hoping to do here. Not every period when God feels distant is what John meant by the Dark Night, and even what he describes isn’t one clean experience that begins on a Tuesday, lasts for the prescribed amount of time and ends when we have learned whatever lesson we were supposed to learn.

    Which is a relief, I think, because most of our actual lives don’t work that way either.

    You might recognize it in very ordinary moments. You open your Bible one morning and realize you’ve read the same paragraph three times and couldn’t tell anyone what it said. Later you try to pray and find yourself thinking, “I don’t even know what I’m doing here.”

    Someone says, “God has a plan,” a sentence you may have said yourself many times, and instead of comforting you, it irritates you. And then, of course, now you’re irritated and you feel guilty about being irritated.

    Or you’re standing in church singing a song you’ve sung a hundred times and you get to one line and stop. You’re not making a theological statement, you’re not trying to be difficult, you just can’t quite sing those words anymore.

    And then someone tells you with great confidence what God is doing in your life, and you find yourself thinking, “How could you possibly know that?”

    And what makes all of this so unsettling is that you haven’t necessarily walked away from God. You still care about God; in fact, that may be exactly why this hurts so much. Faith just doesn’t feel the way it used to, and after a while another question begins to form underneath all the others: Am I losing my faith?

    I want to stay with that question for a while today, because I don’t think the fact that our experience of faith is changing, by itself, means that our faith is gone.

    There’s one thing in John’s writing that I have found helpful, and it’s actually fairly simple: God and my experience of God are not the same thing. Which sounds obvious when I say it out loud. I know, of course they’re not. But I’m not sure it always feels obvious when you’re the one sitting there wondering why you can’t pray anymore.

    I know what prayer has felt like at different points in my life. I know what it is to sit down with my Bible and my journal and feel as though I know where I am with God. I know what it is to recognize his presence. And when something has been part of your life with God for a long time, of course you begin to associate that thing with him. Why wouldn’t you?

    Those experiences are gifts. I don’t want to diminish them. But the experience, is still not God.

    And we can begin, without really meaning to, to depend on those experiences as evidence that God is near. Then when that familiar experience isn’t there anymore, it can be very difficult not to wonder where God went.

    John doesn’t understand that loss of consolation as God abandoning us. He sees something else happening there, a kind of purification in which God is drawing us toward deeper union with himself, even when we can’t experience that closeness in the ways we once did.

    So the absence of consolation is not necessarily the absence of God. And just because prayer feels different, or harder, doesn’t automatically mean we’ve gone backwards.

    This is one of the places where my work as a spiritual director has taught me to go a little more slowly.

    When someone sits across from me and says, “I don’t feel God anymore,” I usually don’t know what that means yet, so we stay with it for a while. What actually changed? What was happening in your life when you began to notice it? What happens now when you try to pray? And often, underneath all of that, there is another question: What are you afraid this means?

    Sometimes, after we’ve talked for a while, the person will say something like, “But I still want God.” This is something I really pay attention to.

    Sometimes they can’t even say that much. Sometimes it’s, “I think I still want to want God.” I know that one too.

    But this is also usually the point where I want to fix it. I want to find the book or change the prayer practice or go away for a few days or do something that will make me feel close to God again.

    I actually know this impulse very well. I love books, retreats, and I‘ve built a good portion of my life around spiritual practices, so clearly I am not about to tell you to stop reading books or going on silence and solitude retreats.

    There’s nothing wrong with any of those things, au contraire. But I do think there's a difference between a practice that helps me stay with God here, and using a practice because I’m trying to get back an experience I used to have.

    I learned something about that difference during one particular stretch of my own life. There was a period in my life when my prayer life had pretty much crashed into a concrete wall. Daniel would leave for work in the morning, and I would sit in this butterfly chair we had beside a big window. I could see part of the patio from there, the pine trees and a little bit of sky. I usually had coffee with me, my journal, my Bible, and I would light a tapered candle.

    And then I would sit there.

    I wish I could tell you those mornings were beautiful and contemplative. They weren’t. It was a difficult time for me, and prayer felt dry and rough, almost like sand in my mouth.

    Some mornings I didn’t feel much of anything. That was part of what was so strange about it. I had known what it was like to have a sense of God’s presence, and now I just didn’t. I would sit there and feel almost neutral. If anything, I was more aware of God’s absence than his presence.

    And sometimes I cried. I think some of those tears came out of longing and grief, and some were probably just frustration because I didn’t know what to do with any of it.

    This was also during the pandemic, and there was already so much darkness around us, so much uncertainty and loss. And of course, that was precisely the time when I wanted to experience God’s comforting presence. I needed that comfort. But when I sat down to pray, I often couldn’t find it.

    I would sit in silence for a while and pay attention to my breath, which was something I knew how to do by then. But there were mornings when even that became too painful. I couldn’t just keep sitting there, and I didn’t have words of my own either.

    So I started borrowing some. I began making my way through the Psalms, very slowly, using a simple form of Lectio Divina that I already knew. I would read until a word or a phrase caught my attention, write it in my journal, and stay with it for a while. Sometimes I had something to say back to God. Sometimes I didn’t. That was about as complicated as it got, which, considering how many books about prayer I own, was probably good for me.

    Eventually, some of what I wrote in that chair became prayers of my own, and some of those prayers became poems. Much later, some of those poems became my book Kairos, When The Holy Meets the Daily.

    But I want to be careful saying that, because I wasn’t sitting there turning a difficult period of my life into a book. I didn’t know there would be a book. I wasn’t trying to get something useful out of what was happening.

    I was trying to pray. And for a while, 2 years in fact, that was prayer for me. I opened the Psalms, paid attention, wrote when I had something to write, and came back the next morning.

    Most mornings there wasn’t some great moment with God. I read for a couple of minutes, wrote in my journal, drank my coffee. Sometimes I sat there longer than I wanted to, staring out the window, and then eventually I got up and went on with my day.

    But the next morning, I came back.

    As I was writing this episode, I kept thinking about those mornings in the butterfly chair and asking myself, what would I have wanted someone to tell me then? What do I wish I had known, or read somewhere, that might actually have helped? And I kept coming back to four very small movements.

    Not four steps for getting out of the dark. I don’t have those. Just four small ways of being in it that I think would have helped me.

    And none of these are ways of making God feel close again. That’s important. They’re ways of remaining where we actually are without trying to manufacture the light ourselves.

    The first is: go slowly.

    When the lights went out on that cruise ship, I had to move differently. I couldn’t walk down the hallway at the same speed I had walked through it a few hours earlier. I reached for the wall, tried to remember where the doorway was and I paid attention to the little bit I could actually see.

    I think spiritual darkness asks something similar of us. We can become so anxious to understand what is happening that we rush toward an explanation. God has left me. I’ve done something wrong. I’m losing my faith. This must be a Dark Night. I need to fix this.”

    No you don’t, and you don’t have to know yet, or diagnose the darkness before you’re allowed to live in it.

    The second movement is: trust what you know, and notice what remains.

    On the ship, I couldn’t see the hallway, but I had walked through it before. I knew there was a wall beside me. I knew roughly where the stairs were. I didn’t know everything I wanted to know, but I wasn’t starting from nothing.

    There may still be things you know too, even if right now you know them differently. You may not be able to say all the things about God that you could say five years ago. There may be a worship song you can’t sing anymore or something you once felt certain about that now has a question mark beside it. Okay. What remains?

    Maybe what remains is simply that you still want God. Or maybe even that feels like too much, and all you can say is, “I still want to want God.” Start there.

    The third movement is: leave room for what you don’t know.

    I wish I were better at this one. I like knowing what things mean. I like understanding what God is doing. I would also, while we’re making requests, like to know approximately how long it will take.

    But there are times in our lives with God when we simply don’t know what is happening, and I think I’ve spent a lot of energy trying to get out of that sentence. Maybe you have too. But “I don’t know” can be an honest thing to say in the presence of God.

    And the fourth movement is: stay with what is given.

    For me, for a while, that was the Psalms. It was that chair and the candle and coming back the next morning.

    Tish Harrison Warren writes in her book Prayer in the Night, about relying on the prayers of Compline during a time when grief and doubt made it difficult to find words of her own. I understand that. Sometimes we do need words that have already been prayed by someone else.

    And sometimes staying with what is given has very little to do with what we normally call a spiritual practice.

    You make breakfast and go to work. You walk the dog, you answer your friend’s text, you make dinner, and you watch 2 episodes of your Netflix show, and then you go to bed.

    And tomorrow, you live another day with God, even if you’re still not quite sure where God is in it.

    Eventually, close to 3 am, the lights on our cruise ship came back on. The engines started again, and we continued toward Jamaica, which I was very happy about for a number of reasons, including the fact that I could once again see where I was going.

    But I don’t want to make too much of that, part of the story, because I can’t promise you that whatever feels dark in your life with God will suddenly become clear, or that your experience of God will return to what it was before.

    What I keep remembering about that night is what happened while the lights were still off.

    I didn’t need to see the whole ship. I just needed enough to take the next step.

    And maybe faithfulness in the dark isn’t learning how to see in darkness. Maybe it’s learning that we don’t have to see very far in order to keep walking.

    I actually say something at the end of every episode of this show: just like light moving through a room, you don’t need to see everything at once to start living faithfully here. And I say that because I don’t think faithfulness begins when everything finally makes sense. So much of our life with God is lived before we know what something means, before we know where it’s going, and sometimes even while we’re still trying to find God in the middle of it.

    If something in today’s episode stayed with you, or you simply want to tell me where you find yourself in all of this, I’d love to hear from you.

    May you make room for what you know  and what you don’t,

    for the God you can find and the God you can’t, without forcing yourself back to who you were before. And may there be grace enough for the life that is yours today. Amen

    Thanks for listening to episode 25.

    I hope this conversation, and these four small movements, help you if you find yourself in a place like this. Whether what you’re experiencing is what John of the Cross called the Dark Night of the Soul, or simply a darkness you don’t yet have a name for, I hope you can be a little less afraid of it, and trust that you don’t have to understand the darkness in order to live faithfully within it.

    If, as you listened, found yourself somewhere in today’s conversation, or it brought something up for you that you’d like to talk about, I’d love to hear from you. Really. You can always send me a note at hello@denisaonica.com, or come find me on Instagram. I’d love to know how you’re doing and where you find yourself these days.

    While you were listening today, if someone came to mind, someone who might be asking some of these same questions or finding that their life with God doesn’t feel quite the way it used to, I hope you’ll send this episode to them. You can simply say, “I thought of you.”

    And if Walking Anyway has become a podcast you’re glad to have in your life, I’d be so grateful if you would take a minute to rate the show or leave a review. It really does help other people find their way here, and decide if this might be a place for them too.

    Thank you for doing that, and really, thank you for being here each week, I don’t take it for granted.

    As always, you can find me at denisaonica.com., on Substack at denisaonica.substack.com or on Instagram at denisa.o.nica. I’d love to see you there.

    As you step back into your day, notice what stayed with you, and let that be enough for today. And you know what I always say: just like light moving through a room— you don’t need to see everything at once to keep living faithfully here.

    The Psalms have often been my borrowed words when I haven’t had words of my own. There’s one verse in particular that I want to leave with you. This is Psalm 139, verse 12: “Even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you.”

    I love how Eugene Peterson renders that same verse in The Message, his contemporary paraphrase of the Bible: “It’s a fact: darkness isn’t dark to you; night and day, darkness and light, they’re all the same to you.”

    Thanks for listening, I'll be here with you next time.

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