Dark Night

This week’s theme is Night chosen by Christopher Frost, please go see what the others, listed on my sideboard, have for the Header Challenge theme of Night. 

With oodles of time to myself and not much work save for the hard draining physical sort, my mind has been on things such as the following poem, the relationship that inspired it four-hundred,twenty-five years ago, and the relationship that stands me on my feet each morning and carries me through my dailies.

One dark night,
fired with love’s urgent longings
– ah, the sheer grace! –
I went out unseen,
my house being now all stilled.

In darkness, and secure,
by the secret ladder, disguised,
– ah, the sheer grace! –
in darkness and concealment,
my house being now all stilled.

On that glad night,
in secret, for no one saw me,
nor did I look at anything,
with no other light or guide
than the one that burned in my heart.

This guided me
more surely than the light of noon
to where he was awaiting me
– him I knew so well –
there in a place where no one appeared.

O guiding night!
O night more lovely than the dawn!
O night that has united
the Lover with his beloved,
transforming the beloved in her Lover.

Upon my flowering breast
which I kept wholly for him alone,
there he lay sleeping,
and I caressing him
there in a breeze from the fanning cedars.

When the breeze blew from the turret,
as I parted his hair,
it wounded my neck
with its gentle hand,
suspending all my senses.

I abandoned and forgot myself,
laying my face on my Beloved;
all things ceased; I went out from myself,
leaving my cares
forgotten among the lilies. 

St John of the Cross

Sweet words and yet a sweeter life I find in my Lord. A life that stirs me to more life, better life, abundant life. 

I discovered that Bet has been thinking on much the same as I in the past weeks or so.  Living a life pleasing to God.  Not that we might win favor, for we know we cannot behave our way into His grace, into heaven, but simply to please our Lord as His words through St. Paul and others encourage us to live.

And so, from the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God.  May you be strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy,  giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son,  in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.  Colossians 1:9-14

Often St. John of the Cross’ poem has been seen as a struggling night of abandonment, a night of tension and wrestling.  That isn’t what I read.  I see no dryness, no unheard cries, no bullying withholding God punishing his child.  God is whole if He is anything.  He is all He is, all of the time.  We cannot take part of Him at this moment and part at another moment.  We may feel one of God’s attributes over another at a certain time but it is not because it is that way.  His justice is constant at the same time His love is constant, one does not shadow over the other for this time and then change for another time.  When we have relationship with Him we have relationship with the whole of Him.  And He brings peace, not as the world recognizes peace. 

We may speak of His attributes separately and we may be spoken to of His attributes separately but He does not operate separately, His justice is love, His comfort is justice, His discipline is charity, He is what He is. 

 And He is always with us to the end of the age.