On The Good Of Desolation

Ruth's comment on my Shakespeare, Jail and Assassination piece kept me busy for the few following days. She is thinking, as I see it, of why it is so easy to forget the value of desolation.

The question goes far beyond my powers, but here's what happened. 

Saint John of the Cross' book, “The Dark Night of the Soul,” came immediately to mind because he explicitly deals with the good that desolation does us. So I read it for a couple days.

One point that struck me most strongly was his saying that we often feel when we experience desolation that God has abandoned us.

Oh, how many times have I been through that!

I think it was the problem that Christ was addressing in his last moments with the words, “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken me?”

I agree with those who believe that Christ was quoting the first words of Psalm 22, sometimes called “Christ's Psalm.” Everyone would have known that Psalm immediately just from those first words. Psalm 22 deals with our repeated experience of feeling that God has abandoned us, and then discovering that it's all to the good.

Perhaps what makes us so slow, even stupid, about seeing the value of desolation is at least in part this feeling that God has abandoned us. I know that when I have that feeling, I am just turned to stone, just obliterated. Sometimes it has taken me years to recover, to alchemize some devastating experience, to come to a redemption through it. But it has always ultimately been redemptive.

I noticed for the first time that John of the Cross did have to do the jail thing. He was in a tight solitary cell for nine months where he wrote this book, and lashed at least once a week, before he escaped through a small window.

*      *      *