RADIANT NIGHT: Global Transformation

Guest Sermon
Lake Street Church
April 26, 2009

Mystics of all faiths celebrate the fire that clears the landscape of the soul, preparing it for a direct encounter with divine love. Spiritual seekers have embraced contemplative disciplines for millennia in the hope of finding a small glimpse of the emptiness that is plenitude, a single moment of the ego-melting that leads to union with the absolute. Prior to the death of my daughter Jenny in 2001, I had spent decades in pursuit of that spiritual nakedness.

I have never encountered a more direct path to the undifferentiated awareness the mystics speak about than the journey of grief and loss. Tragedy and sorrow can accomplish in a single moment what years of sitting on a meditation cushion may never yield: an unequivocal surrendering into the arms of the mystery. There is no other place to go.

I am not unique. In the years since Jenny died, I have encountered hundreds of people who have experienced the inexplicable gifts of grief and loss, and have dedicated themselves to cultivating, harvesting, and giving away that bounty. This is the grace of radical unknowing the mystics speak about. The terrible initiation of darkness and despair that strips our souls of everything that stands between us and the sacred. The dying that happens when someone we love dies, shattering the container of our hearts. The boundless love and gratitude that comes pouring into and through that broken open container.

I would never have willingly agreed to exchange the life of my daughter for the transformational grace that has come in the wake of her death. I would gladly relinquish every shred of the increased aliveness and childlike wonder with which her death has filled my life, if it meant I could cuddle her close and sing her to sleep one more time. At some point every day, I still hate that Jenny is dead.

Yet, I cannot deny the gift of being emptied and scrubbed and filled with the light the sages of every tradition throughout the ages have spoken of. The boundless love expressed best in poetry and song. The longing that takes away your breath only to fill you with a never-imagined vitality. But only after you have surrendered completely to the darkness, to the fire, to the unraveling of all you ever thought you knew. I have understood almost from the beginning that my only task is to say YES to that.

This secret medicine, as Rumi calls it, which is given to us in our private losses, is not ours alone. Once we are strong enough again, we are meant to apply it to the wounds of the world. The earth itself has been dropped into the darkness of radical unknowing. Greed and unconsciousness have transfigured the planet, the climate, rent the fragile fabric we know as the web of life. The majority of human beings languish in extreme poverty, while a small fraction hoard all the resources. How can we harness the transformational power of our personal descent into the initiatory darkness the mystics speak of in service of a world that has been stripped of its faith?

I remember a morning within the first week following Jenny’s death. I finally convinced well-meaning family and friends that I did not need them hovering over me every moment of every day, and in fact would appreciate an hour alone. Once they had cleared out, I was able to check in with myself. The devastation I encountered there knocked the wind out of me. As I lay sobbing and gasping on the living room rug, I became aware of something at the edge of my emotional horizon. Other women, other mothers, all around the world, forward and backward in time, weeping with me.

My daughter died less than two months after the terrorist attacks of September 11th. The human family was on fire with grief and loss, with rage and forgiveness, with fear and despair and impossible hope. I was connected in an invisible web of love to everyone everywhere who was dying the spiritual death I was in this moment dying. I was not special, and I was not alone. I was a member of the human family, and that family was holding me now.

None of us would have chosen to lose the ones we love to attain the spiritual nakedness we hear about in the teachings of great mystics. But as long as the fire of suffering has stripped us of all the false constructs that stood in our way, I figure we might as well use it. And, in using it, discover how to be of use in alleviating some of the sorrow in this broken-hearted world.

Break the wine glass, Rumi cries, and breathe the Glassblower’s breath! As if the burning up of everything we once held to be true was a cause for celebration. As if allowing ourselves to yield to unbearable sorrow was a good idea.

Who are these holy fools, who claim that the shattering of the heart is good news? The two mystics whose teachings most clearly mirror my own path of suffering and transformation are the sixteenth century Spanish monk, John of the Cross, and his mentor, Teresa of Avila. I had already been swimming in their poetry and prose for years, but after Jenny’s death I completely submerged myself. It was in that descent that I learned how to breathe under water.

John of the Cross, known for introducing the term dark night of the soul into the vernacular, was referring to the kind of spiritual crisis that squeezes every drop of devotional succulence from our senses and entirely dismantles the edifice of our religious concepts. In the throes of the dark night, we cannot feel the presence of the sacred anymore, no matter how many tricks we use to conjure up old feelings of connectedness. We can no longer even conceive of such a notion as God, which has become a mere word, devoid of meaning.

While this ordeal carries an intense emotional charge, it is not primarily a psychological experience. The catalyst for entering these depths may be a disaster – the ending of a marriage, the death of a loved one, the loss of a job or a home or a community – but the mystical darkness John speaks of transcends trauma. It is deeper than depression. It is a dissolving of the separate self into the blinding light of love. Yet the divine radiance only becomes visible when our old eyes have been utterly consumed. This annihilation is excruciating.

Teresa of Avila speaks about the beautiful wound of longing for union with God. The soul that has tasted even a fleeting sip of his love will catch on fire and only absolute union with him will end her terrible suffering. She will be unable to speak of this agony, and yet silence melts her bones. In the very depths of this predicament lies the solution. Our yearning for connection with our divine source is in itself the divine response. The call and the answer are reciprocal. Only the empty cup can be filled.

Both of these mystics testify to the necessity of enduring the profound pain of separation on our path home to God. Both remind us that the divine dwelling place lies inside ourselves, and is in fact none other than the truth of who we are. Both reveal that the joy and peace that lie on the other side of our shattering so far exceed any pleasure we have ever imagined that it would be like comparing the light of a candle to the blazing of a ten thousand suns.

Finally, both John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila teach us that the only real purpose of the mystical experience is to be of simple service once we have returned from that garden of blending with the absolute to the relative desert of our ordinary consciousness. We are back, but we are different. Transfigured by the encounter. Disabused of our illusions. Divested of a false sense of separation and rooted in the certainty of interconnectedness. Once we have witnessed everything we ever believed to be true go up in flames, we have trouble ever again identifying with the story of our own thoughts.

When Jenny died, I became fearless. The worst thing I could imagine had happened. What did I have left to be afraid of? And with that loss of fear came a desire to give comfort, to give sanctuary, to call out to my companions drowning in the darkness: look for the treasure that lies only at the bottom of the well of grief. And, when you have found it – and you will, I promise, you will -- bring it back.

If we can collectively recognize the gifts that lie in the stripping away of all our false constructs, and, as a human collective, surrender to knowing nothing, we can reap the fruits of this transformation and get on with the task of feeding each other, both spiritually and materially. The dark night of global crisis will reveal itself as a state of pure luminescence, where nothing is at we thought it was, and the only possible response is compassionate action, rooted in shattering sorrow and blossoming in radiant joy.