Write for God

“God calls you to the place where deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

These wise words are from author and minister Frederick Buechner’s Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC. As we traverse our days and weeks, we have highs and lows, anger and serenity, love and selfishness. At certain times, we find the “sweet spot” of our existence and we’re in the place where God calls us to mix our gladness with the world’s hunger.

A monk or a staretz may find it in solitude, a mother caring for children may find it in the din of little ones at play and a seeker may find it in the journey itself. We each have knowledge of that place, even though we may not always be there. During a tough day, a friend emailed me a simple “I’m here for you” and it made my day. My husband brews me a cup of coffee each morning to wake me up and prepares a travel mug with another cup for my ride to work. My daughter tells me how her three children under the age of two get along as they share bottles, diapers and kisses.

Each of these little moments can snap us out of the ordinary and into that sweet spot where joy and God intersect.  Like a breeze that rustles the leaves in our gardens and yet is unseen, the hand of God works in our lives through these moments. Don’t miss any of them, no matter how brief they seem to be. In their brevity is a glimpse of the divine, where God can call us in a tiny, whispering voice or a breeze.

Christian minister and author Frederick Buechner often quotes the late John Updike to explain what is more commonly known as the dark night of the soul by Catholics. As Buechner said, “Perhaps God saves his deepest silence for his saints.”

Mother Teresa’s decades-long dark night of the soul was revealed after her death in Come Be My Light, which I’ve been reading in spurts. Her bouts with doubt and the distance she felt from God surprised many who considered her the epitome of perfect Christian joy. Perhaps God already considered her a saint when he canonized her with his deepest silence during her life. His timeline, after all, has little do to with the Vatican’s process for making saints.

The greatest saints and the holiest monks have battled God’s deepest silence. St. John of the Cross even gave it an apt name. It should not surprise faithful Catholics when they find themselves enmeshed in God’s silence, when deep faith and deep prayer yield only deep silence.

Dante expressed the lowest point of Hell–Dis–as literally the furthest distance from God, where Satan lies encased in ice at the center of nothingness. There are Hells on Earth that we pass before we reach God’s place for us in eternity. When prayer only echoes in the silence without a response, we face our darkest nights. The only comfort we have then is that at least God is listening to the prayers of others who might keep us in their intentions as we experience the darkness. 

There’s comfort in knowing that some of His greatest saints had souls that also knew dark nights. In that, we are not alone.