Wednesday, December 10, 2025: Trusting the Unknown Path
Father Richard Rohr describes how he came to trust God in times of uncertainty and even apparent darkness:
I came out of the seminary in 1970 thinking that my job was to have an answer for every question. What I’ve learned is that not-knowing and often not even needing to know are—surprise of surprises—deeper ways of knowing and a deeper falling into compassion.
This is surely what the mystics mean by “death” and why they talk of it with so many metaphors. It is the essential transition. Maybe that is why Jesus praised faith even more than love; maybe that is why St. John of the Cross called faith “luminous darkness.” Yes, love is the final goal but ever deeper trust inside of darkness is the path for getting there. [1]
My good friend Gerald May shed fresh light on the meaning of John of the Cross’ phrase “the dark night of the soul.” He said that God has to work in the soul in secret and in darkness, because if we fully knew what was happening, and what Mystery/God/grace will eventually ask of us, we would either try to take charge or to stop the whole process. May writes:
The dark night is a profoundly good thing. It is an ongoing spiritual process in which we are liberated from attachments and compulsions and empowered to live and love more freely. Sometimes this letting go of old ways is painful, occasionally even devastating. But this is not why the night is called “dark.”
The darkness of the night implies nothing sinister, only that the liberation takes place in hidden ways, beneath our knowledge and understanding. It happens mysteriously, in secret, and beyond our conscious control. [2]
No one oversees their own demise willingly, even when it is the false self that is dying. Spirit has to undo our illusions secretly, as it were, when we are not watching and not in perfect control, say the mystics. We move forward in ways that we do not even understand and through the quiet workings of time and grace, as “deep calls unto deep” (Psalm 42:8). In other words, the Spirit initiates deep resonance and intimacy with our spirit, as the endless divine yes evokes an ever-deeper yes in us. [3]
As James Finley, one of CAC’s core faculty members, says, “The mystic is not someone who says, ‘Look what I have done!’ The mystic is one who says, ‘Look what love has done to me. There’s nothing left but Spirit's intimate love giving itself to me as me.’
That’s the blessedness in poverty: when all in us that is not Spirit dissolves, and we finally realize that we are already as beautiful as Spirit is beautiful, because God gave the infinite beauty of God as who we are.” [4]
A Peace Prayer from jack Jezreel:
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