de noche iremos, de noche,
sin luna iremos, sin luna,
que para encontrar la Fuente
sólo la sed nos alumbra
Luis Rosales (1910 – 1992) – Inspired by Juan de la Cruz1
by night we will go, by night
without light we will go, without light
to seek for the Source
our only light is our thirst

“Let us never forget that this simple desire for God is already the beginning of faith.”
Br Roger, Founder of the Taizé community
In his poem Noche Oscura, John of the Cross uses the image of sneaking through a dark night to encounter his lover as a metaphor for the experience of mystical union with God. I understand his poem as speaking about the struggle of the spiritual journey in the absence of the presence of God. In the third stanza he writes:
Upon that lucky night In secrecy, inscrutable to sight,
I went without discerning
And with no other light
Except for that which in my heart was burning.
Much like the poem of Luis Rosales referenced above, John of the Cross is led only by a desire, a thirst for God. But God himself is, at this point, not present. I find a deep comfort in this concept and draw on a similar idea in my own spiritual life, although I frame it in a different way.
For my master’s thesis, I wrote on what I call spiritual homelessness. The experience of believing in God, and perhaps in certain aspects of a traditional faith tradition, but without a fixed doctrine or creed. This place of wandering, an in-between world of uncertainty, I see as similar to the dark night which John of the Cross speaks about. For him, it is a certainty within darkness. For him, if the soul proceeds, even without consolations, she has the possibility of reaching divine union. For me, it is a place of uncertainty. There is no final goal, except to live in the tension of this dark night and to acknowledge it as unknown. The similarity lies in the desire for God. This thirst, or burning heart, seeks for the divine but, in spiritual homelessness, does not necessarily expect to find it. In some ways it resembles exile, and personally I find that image a powerful one. As someone who was formerly a devout believer within the Catholic tradition, it was quite a painful process to realise that I no longer found myself at home there. What happened?
Well, much like doubting Thomas, I struggled, and struggle, to accept the risen Lord. I find myself saying with him, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”2 But what is Thomas to do after all he has lived and experienced with Christ? What would he have done if, at that moment in the Gospel, Christ did not appear to allay his doubts? Perhaps he would have gone off and wandered the Palestinian desert, his life irreversibly changed by his time with Jesus, now unable to follow him but unable to return to what was before? But, maybe in that lonely desert of uncertainty, a small hope burns in his chest. For what exactly, he cannot say, but he cannot let go of everything that has been. As such, there is something of an experience of the absence of what one once knew, and now mourns. This is a via negativa but of a different sort to John’s. In his poem, John anticipates the divine union which follows the dark journey. For him, it is like entering a dark tunnel knowing that a beautiful scene awaits on the other side if one only keeps walking. Certainly, it is a difficult walk! But there is a joy to come. For the spiritually homeless, the other side is uncertain, all is uncertainty, but paradoxically, this is where one can rest – In unknowing.
I am reminded of a poem by Denise Levertov which was introduced to me by a colleague writing on apophatic theology.3 The poem, an excerpt from a longer piece entitled Mass for the day of St. Thomas Didymus contains a verse: Praise god or the gods, the unknown, that which imagined us.4 For the spiritually homeless, for me, the Unknown is a reality. Something I pine for yet cannot reach. Absent, yet present. I somehow know that I am sustained by it, despite not being able to define it. The key, for me, is that in this place of uncertainty, I rest. I do notstruggle to bring about a solution, or some sort of closure. It is lived as an open ending. It is framed by a desire for authenticity and cannot claim to know anything more than this. Perhaps this is something like the “path of dark contemplation” which John of the Cross speaks about. Of the soul’s journey he says, “it seems to be lost, and, being thus full of darkness and trials, constraints and temptations, will meet one who will speak to it like Job’s comforters, and say that it is suffering from melancholy, or low spirits, or a morbid disposition, or that it may have some hidden sin, and that it is for this reason that God has forsaken it.” But the comparison fails in one sense, because spiritual homelessness is being lost and the outcome is unknown. However, the comparison works in another sense, in that being in this place of uncertainty, there are those who would claim that it is not a sustainable way or a real way to live faith and something must be done to get out of it. I’ve liked the works of John of the Cross for some time now. Not only do I find his writing beautiful, I have always appreciated the image of the dark night. It always struck me as a very honest experience.
In writing this reflection I discovered the work The Cloud of Unknowing, a work by an anonymous English monk of the 14th century. Having only glanced at it, I immediately picked out elements I relate to and which tie into the idea of the dark night, and of spiritual homelessness:
But now you will ask me, ‘How am I to think of God himself, and what is he?’ and I cannot answer you except to say ‘I do not know!’ For with this question you have brought me into the same darkness, the same cloud of unknowing where I want you to be! For though we through the grace of God can know fully about all other matters, and think about them – yes, even the very works of God himself – yet of God himself can no man think.5
Similar to the “divine darkness” of Psuedo-Dionysius, for both the author of The Cloud of Unknowing and for John of the Cross, God is that which cannot be fully known. Pseudo- Dionysius writes, “And such a one, precisely because he neither sees him nor knows him, truly arrives at that which is beyond all seeing and all knowledge.”
I cannot claim that my notion of spiritual homelessness is this place which is beyond all seeing and all knowledge, but I find the idea of the unknowability of God helpful and comforting in my own spiritual wandering. All this said, when I read what John of the Cross says about the spiritual ascent to God, I can’t help but feel that my position would not be welcome in the eyes of the saint. His journey is one of faith, into a sure knowledge that God is there and can be met in a divine, intimate union. My own life would probably not match up to his standards of a true spiritual life, and he would not be wrong! But in my own search for God I have discovered my own way, and it may not be perfectly practiced, but it is a way. I do think, however, that we are all spiritual wanderers, not only in the sense of being earthly pilgrims, but also in our solitude, in a dark night when our souls are bare before the Divine, and we realise that all our doctrines, creeds, and sure knowledge of faith means little before a Being which created an unfathomable universe and sustains it. Our squabbles over whether the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son or just the Father start to seem somewhat irrelevant! Perhaps, then, I would humbly put forward the notion that what led me into this spiritual homelessness was the contradiction between sure doctrine and what seemed to me to be the ineffability of God. As such, I feel I can only marvel at existence and contemplate that “who imagined us”. So, I remain in this dark night, led only by my thirst.
Theologically, if we can say little about who God is, then we find speaking of revelation more difficult. How does one progress from this point? If we cannot know, then is there any point? My own answer is to accept the uncertainty and remain there. This renders much of classical theology difficult for me. A part of my concern is that I cannot accept atheism as a solution as it also makes dogmatic claims to certainty. Agnosticism is also a difficult option, as my life has been affected by my spiritual journey, and I have had experiences that would suggest a spiritual reality to me. Dismissing that would be dismissing a formative part of my history and of who I am. But if I cannot fully accept the Christian faith or another faith tradition, then I feel I am left in this no-man’s land of which I must make some theological sense. Therefore, the apophatic tradition is one way for me to speak of my experience of knowing God, but at the same time of not knowing. And so, in the writings of John of the Cross, I find a helpful aid in my spiritual wanderings.
1. I first encountered this poem in the form of a Taizé chant
2. John 20:25, NRSV
3. My thanks to Jake Benjamin for bringing this poem to my attention.
4. Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus, Levertov, Denise., poets.org, https://poets.org/poem/mass-day-stthomas-
didymus-excerpt, (accessed 16 May 2019).
5. Anonymous, The Cloud of Unknowing and Other Works, Clifton Wolters, trans., (London, Penguin Books:
1978), 167.