Dark Night of the Body

Imagine you are in fine health and unexpectedly you are diagnosed with a life-threatening, unpredictable, aggressive disease. Equally aggressive and powerful medical intervention is needed to preserve some semblance of your life as you have known it. Of course you agree since you haven’t yet seriously considered how the fact of death fits into your agenda.

The treatment takes you to physical states you had never imagined to visit. One by one systems in your body falter or fail, overwhelmed by the prescribed remedy, to be restored or at least patched in place by heavy doses of other medications. Exhaustion becomes your new normal and a dense fog clogs your brain, making it hard to think or reason.

You’ve had a habit of prayer for years. Suddenly you cannot pray, try as you might. Your re-made body and your thick, drifting mind have become major distractions. You struggle to focus on anything other than all that is not working as it did for your whole life – until now. You feel yourself being dragged down. God, enveloped by the mental mists, feels distant or non-existent. 

How to pray when you can’t pray? Ignatius of Loyola has some very practical recommendations for when we enter into desolation – whatever its origins. Look back over your life, not in comparison with its present circumstances, remember and name as many of the countless blessings you have enjoyed (and are still present – though hidden) as you can. Try to feel what it felt like when God was there, particularly those unforgettable touches of grace. God is still here, now. God is faithful.

Act as though nothing between God and you has changed. From God’s side it hasn’t! You just aren’t able to see clearly in this moment. Do your part. Put time and effort into prayer and love for those around you, as before. Especially if you don’t feel like it. You have all the time in the world. Since you can’t do much else, wait for the day when the sunshine of grace will burn through the temporary fog. Even on the grayest, gloomiest days, the sun is still there, above the blankets of cloud. 

A huge assist comes from entrusting your current state of neediness to your community. Ask them to carry you, in your weakness, through this dark and difficult time. Their faith and prayer will sustain you, if you let them. You will be able to keep going because of their love crying out ceaselessly on your behalf.

Throughout life, and particularly as we age, there are, and will be plenty of occasions where our physical condition fails and weighs us down with it, rendering us dysfunctional. Good thing – life and prayer do not depend on how we are feeling. God’s love is the sole constant force in the physics of spirit, even in the dark.