Inaccessible Light

     I've been thinking some more about the story of Mother Teresa's dark night of the soul.  It seems to me that the question at the heart of her experience is, "Who is God?  What is His Name?"

     "We know His holy Name," one of my brethren might respond.  "It is I AM, that is, I AM the one of whom existence cannot be predicated in the same way as it is predicated of anything else, since God is His own existence, and is the cause of the existence of all things."

     But we Christians also believe in the Trinity -- and therefore, to concentrate an insight from Pope Benedict, we must conclude that relationship too is a primary thing: that part of what it means essentially to be is to be for.  To put it a different way, the name of God is what Saint John says: "God is Love," a Love that took flesh of the Virgin and dwelt among us.

     The structure of love, then, is not what the pagans took it to be in Paul's day, and not what pagans take it to be now in our own.  It is also not exactly what too many Christians take it to be.  Granted, the soaring visions of Plato in the Phaedrus and the Symposium touch the unsuspected truth, here and there: Love is not merely desire for a good that you do not have, but also, more mysteriously, the outpouring of the soul, which entails a healing of that soul.  Plato's myth assigns to Love the parentage of both Plenty and Poverty -- and he comes breathtakingly near the heart of the matter.

     We assume, without thinking too hard about it, that Love is either the desire for a good thing you lack, or the noblesse we show when we shower some good thing upon somebody else who lacks it.  But if Being Himself is Love, then such a definition falls far short of the mark; it is at best what a not too generous adolescent might think.  To love as God loves must be to be for what is not oneself, radically.  In God, this love is so radical that it calls things into existence from nothing.  He does not simply love what He has made: He loves them into being.

     But if God is who we say He is, then why should we expect that He will always play the lesser part, as for a dim and self-absorbed child?  If He gave us the sweets we demand, even if those sweets are in themselves good for us, how could we learn in the end to love as He loves?  For God needs no joy from us; He gets nothing from our delight that He Himself does not already eminently enjoy.  He does not love us for the good that such love might bring to Him.  Then we, if we are to be perfected in love -- which is another way of saying, if we are to be made one with Christ -- must learn to love God not for the delight that derives from that love, not for the sweets and the plenty, but for the poverty.  I mean that radical poverty wherein all is taken away, and only God remains, dark with excess of light.

     These are not theological word-games here.  It really could be no other way, given the inner structure of love.  God, Himself a relationship of Love even had He not created the universe, poured Himself out upon the nothing, and there was light.  Christ abandoned Himself to the darkness of the Cross.  Man, growing in love, growing like God, partakes of that love.  At the highest pitch of grace, he does not love God for what God brings him.  Indeed he loves God when He seems to bring him nothing -- a spiritual desert that is like the deep, before the heavens and the earth.  That is not cruel.  We cannot logically say, "A God who behaves this way does not truly love us," when He shows by it that He loves us so much -- so fearfully much -- that He would have us also love with the love that brought light out of darkness.  Or, we might say, with a love so plentiful that it emptied itself for poverty, for the things -- and the sinners -- that were naught.

     I wish Christians would recall this way of speaking of God's love; it's to be found in Gregory of Nyssa, in Bernard of Clairvaux, in Dante and Thomas -- really, everywhere.  In it lies true comfort for souls who are entering the desert.  For the desire for God -- by the very nature of God and of love -- is more fulfilling in emptiness than is any pleasure.  Let Christians in times of fruitful desolation cry the cry that ends the last stanza of George Herbert's poem, "Afflliction" (I):

     Yet, though thou troublest me, I must be meek;
          In weakness must be stout.
     Well, I will change the service, and go seek
          Some other master out.
     Ah my dear God! though I am clean forgot,
     Let me not love thee, if I love thee not.