Letting go of the last handhold
The maiming became the sculpting. The paring back gave way to a vigorous flourishing.
—Mark Buchanan, Spiritual Rhythms: Being with Jesus Every Season of Your Soul
With the publication of some of her private letters in 2007, ten years after her death, many around the world were shocked to discover that Mother Teresa had struggled for decades with a crisis of faith. The letters she wrote to her confessor are surprising, unnerving even, especially in light of her lifelong, faithful work as a Catholic nun committed to serving the poor and destitute in Calcutta. While Mother Teresa was living, only two or three of her very closest confidantes were aware of her intense personal suffering and struggle. The rest of the world witnessed only her smiling face, her humble demeanor, and her selfless acts of service.
“Pray for me—for within me everything is icy cold.—It is only that blind faith that carries me through for in reality to me all is darkness,” she wrote to her archbishop in 1955.1 “Darkness is such that I really do not see—neither with my mind nor my reason.—The place of God in my soul is blank.—There is no God in me . . . He does not want me—He is not there . . . Sometimes—I just hear my own heart cry out—‘My God’ and nothing else comes.—The torture and pain I can’t explain,” she wrote six years later to her friend Father Joseph Neuner.2 Unbeknownst to the world until long after her death, Mother Teresa suffered from a long and relentless dark night of the soul.
The dark night of the soul takes its name from a sixteenth-century poem written by Spanish Carmelite friar Juan De Yepes Y Alvarez. Known as Juan de la Cruz, or John of the Cross, Alvarez founded the first monastery for the radical Discalced (derived from the Latin word meaning “barefoot”) Carmelites in Spain in 1568. When the traditional Carmelites outlawed the renegade Discalced sect, they imprisoned Alvarez, and it was during his nine months in jail that he wrote his nine-stanza poem—titled simply Noche Oscura—Dark Night—as well as the accompanying line-by-line exposition. Together the poem and explication have come to be known as The Dark Night of the Soul.
St. John of the Cross understood the dark night of the soul to be a necessary part of the spiritual journey toward greater wholeness and intimacy with God. He saw this period of darkness and estrangement from God as a purification process, a painful but necessary purgation, or stripping away, that ultimately leads to clarity, or what he called illumination. “God leads into the dark night those whom He desires to purify from all these imperfections so that He may bring them farther onward,” St. John of the Cross explained. “God grants the soul in this state the favor of purging it and healing it with this strong lye of bitter purgation. . . . In this way God makes it to die to all that is not naturally God, so that, once it is stripped and denuded of its former skin, He may begin to clothe it anew.”3 St. John of the Cross understood the dark night of the soul to be a painful but ultimately good and fruitful experience.
Don’t be fooled by St. John’s language, though. This “favor of purging,” as he so delicately put it, is not typically a pleasant process. Coming face-to-face with your baggage—your sins, your wounds and pain, and the behavioral patterns you’ve created as a defense against these wounds and pain—is difficult. Likewise, beginning the process of allowing God to strip all that away can be terrifying, isolating, and very painful. This is the moment in Psalm 69 when David cries out:
Save me, O God,
for the waters have come up to my neck.
I sink in the miry depths,
where there is no foothold.
I have come into the deep waters;
the floods engulf me.
I am worn out calling for help;
my throat is parched.
My eyes fail,
looking for my God. (vv. 1–3)
In the process of stripping away and dying to self, there is often an accompanying feeling of hopelessness and the sense of abandonment by God. In this moment, up to your neck in “the miry depths,” grappling for a foothold, something, anything, to stand on, our first inclination is often to deny or resist such a painful process. This resistance can be overt—we might outright refuse to acknowledge God’s prodding, like I did the day I heard the question about intimacy while I sat in silence on the park bench. Or it can be subtle—we may use the busyness of our lives to distract us from God’s invitation into purgation.
The morning in the garden in Tuscany, when I suddenly saw so clearly the ways in which I’d been hiding from God, my first instinct was “fight or flight.” Part of me wanted to deny the revelation, to squash what was becoming known to me down into my deepest recesses and back from wherever it had come, to let the branches and leaves that had shielded me for so long swing back into place. The other part of me simply wanted to flee, to dash down the cypress-lined road and up and over the distant hillside, to run myself into physical exhaustion and away from the spiritual and emotional upheaval that was ravaging my body and soul.
My resistance that morning was strong and obvious, but looking back, I see now that I’d been resisting this descent into the dark night of the soul for a long time in much more subtle ways—by distracting myself with my to-do list, by being “insanely busy,” by filling my spare moments with social media, and by not making room for silence and stillness in my life.
The irony, of course, was that morning in Tuscany I could neither fight nor flee the invitation into purgation. There was nowhere for me to go. I had no to-do list or errands or work deadlines to draw my attention away from the frightening revelation at hand. I was alone with an abundance of solitude in a foreign country, six long days from my flight home. I simply had too much time on my hands to escape from my own thoughts and the desires of my soul. There was no other choice but to freefall into the abyss that yawned before me. That morning in Tuscany I was finally forced to “let go of the very last handhold,” as Barton says, “the handhold of the self we have created in response to the wounds of our life in an imperfect world.”4 That day under the trees in the garden, I tumbled hard, tearing limbs and branches as I went.
Fukinaoshi of the Soul
Fukinaoshi is a hard prune, usually done during the autumn or winter, when a tree is resting in its dormant phase and thus less likely to resist with various defenses or succumb to infection or disease as a result of the cutting. The gardener makes a number of dramatic cuts, removing whole limbs and branches in order to reduce the tree to its most basic framework. The aim of fukinaoshi, says Japanese aesthetic gardener Jake Hobson, is to prune unwanted branches both to reveal the essential shape of the trunk and make it easier to work on the remaining branches in the future. Work slowly but confidently, advises Hobson, and “understand right from the start that this sort of pruning will not harm the tree.”5
Entry into the dark night is the fukinaoshi of the soul, when God, the Master Gardener, makes the first deep, dramatic cuts necessary on the journey toward uncovering our truest, most authentic self. As Jake Hobson observes, to the untrained eye, fukinaoshi can look rather extreme. He describes it as the transition from a tree to a carcass and then, ultimately, back to a tree again—albeit a tree that looks markedly different from the original. The process can also look and, at least from the tree’s perspective, feel harmful and dangerous, but when done correctly, it’s not.
Fukinaoshi of the soul is much the same. Stripped of our false selves—the array of extraneous leaves and branches we have long used as a camouflaging shield—we stand naked and vulnerable before God and our own selves. As with the pruning of a tree, our own pruning can look and even feel harmful. Pruning hurts; it wounds us and then leaves scars. But remember what Hobson said: this sort of pruning will not harm the tree, and likewise, it will not ultimately harm us, as painful as the actual process feels.
In fukinaoshi of the soul we are like the remaining carcass of a pruned tree: bare, exposed, and, at least to the untrained eye—particularly our own—dead. Except we are not dead; we have merely lost our life in order for it to be saved (see Luke 9:23–24). Like the dramatically pruned tree, which is in a dormant state but still very much alive, the core of our true self is alive and well. Our deepest, truest, most essential self has been waiting all along for this opportunity to be uncovered and exposed to the light, waiting for the invitation to grow into its fullest, richest, most beautiful potential.
There is deep contradiction and paradox here, and if you’re anything like me, your brain is pushing hard against this concept of cutting back in order to reveal and thrive, dying in order to flourish. For instance, you may be wondering how my admission of deep doubt could have possibly been beneficial in any way. How could naming my deepest, most secret sin—unbelief—possibly pave the way toward a truer relationship and deeper intimacy with God? You’re probably thinking that doesn’t make one bit of sense.
I hear you. It doesn’t make sense. That was my exact reaction when I first read Mother Teresa’s heartbreaking confessions of her own darkness and unbelief. My brain couldn’t wrap itself around the fact that she confessed and prayed about her unbelief to Jesus himself. At the urging of her confessor, Mother Teresa addressed one of her most intimate letters to Christ. “In my soul I feel just that terrible pain of loss—of God not wanting me—of God not being God—of God not really existing (Jesus, please forgive my blasphemies—I have been told to write everything),” she wrote. “If there be no God—there can be no soul.—If there is no soul then Jesus—You also are not true. . . . I am afraid to write all those terrible things that pass in my soul.—They must hurt you.”6
Wait, what? I thought when I first read those words. How does one confess unbelief while at the same time addressing that statement of unbelief to the one in whom one doesn’t believe? It didn’t make sense.
And yet it does. Reading Mother Teresa’s letters now, several years after I first encountered them, I understand how that tension between belief and unbelief can exist. I understand that Mother Teresa’s faith transcended either/or, yes/no, black/white. In naming her pain—even the pain of darkness and unbelief—she was, paradoxically, drawing closer to God, even when she herself couldn’t perceive God’s presence. Richard Rohr explains the paradox like this:
Many mystics speak of the God-experience as simultaneously falling into an abyss and being grounded. This sounds like a contradiction, but in fact, when you allow yourself to fall into the abyss . . . you discover it’s somehow a rich, supportive, embracing spaciousness where you don’t have to ask (or answer) the questions of whether you’re right or wrong. You’re being held and so you do not need to try to “hold” yourself together.7
When we acknowledge our deepest brokenness, we acknowledge our fullest, deepest selves—our whole selves. And it is only when we present that self—stripped naked, 100 percent whole and true—that we are truly able to meet God and allow ourselves to be held by his love. God doesn’t want just the best parts of our selves—the parts we’ve polished and prettied up with a fancy silk bow. He desires the worst parts of our selves most of all—the parts we despise, the parts we are afraid of, the parts we most want to hide from the world, from our own selves, and from him. He even wants the part of us that doesn’t have faith or trust in him.
“God meets us where we are, not where we pretend to be or wish we were,” says psychologist Dr. Larry Crabb. “God’s truth does not set free a pretending or hiding heart.”8 I pretended to be and wished with all my heart that I was an upstanding Christian, my faith rock solid, my belief in God steadfast. That’s who I wanted to present to others and to God, but it’s not the whole truth of who I was (and often still am). Likewise, you may pretend to be or wish you were something or someone else—trusting, surrendered, forgiving, confident, grounded, at peace—but the truth is, God won’t meet you there, because he is not interested in meeting your false, pretending self. He wants YOU—flaws, sins, brokenness, and all.
God is in the deepest recesses of your soul, in your most broken places, in the parts of yourself you most want to hide. “The soul is healed by confession. Sin splits the self,” says John Ortberg. “As long as I keep pretending, my soul keeps dying.”9 In short, God is often where you least expect to find him. God comes to you and loves you where you are, not where you think you should be. Once you understand this truth, you will, as Dr. Crabb says, be set free.
This was the beautiful irony, paradox, and radical grace of my confession on the Tuscan hillside. The admission of both my deepest brokenness (my continuing struggle with doubt and unbelief) and my deepest desire (to know God, to love him, and to know my belovedness in him) set my true self free. As I said earlier, it wasn’t an angels-singing-cherubs-frolicking kind of revelation. It didn’t happen instantaneously (and we’ll get to the waiting aspects of this journey in chapter 7). But it was the beginning.
Letting go and allowing ourselves to fall headlong into the dark abyss is the beginning of our grounding in God. In short, we have to fall before we land. This is, as Rohr says, “the ultimate paradox of the God experience: ‘falling into the hands of the living God’ (Heb. 10:31).” This experience isn’t something we understand rationally, but rather, something we know intuitively, at the soul level. “When you can lend yourself to it and not fight it or explain it, falling into the abyss is ironically an experience of ground, of the rock, of the foundation,” Rohr explains. “This is totally counterintuitive. Your dualistic, logical mind can’t get you there. It can only be known experientially. That’s why the mystics use magnificent metaphors—none of them adequate or perfect—for this experience. ‘It’s like . . . It’s like . . . ,’ they love to say.”10
I’ll say it metaphorically too. It’s like you are a tree, standing in the middle of a garden, your elegant, stately shape obscured by a tangle of leaves and branches. A gardener comes along, tools in hand, and you let him slowly begin to remove the mess, limb by limb, branch by branch, leaf by leaf. It’s painful, this removal of your covering. It’s taken a long time to grow the many layers of this elaborate shield; so long, in fact, that you cannot remember what it’s like to live without it. As bits and pieces of your innermost self are revealed, you feel exposed and afraid.
Finally, the gardener is finished. You stand alone in the middle of the garden, your naked trunk open to the elements. You feel ugly, diminished, vulnerable, and broken. You do not recognize this new you. You cannot yet see the beauty and goodness that is there. You cannot yet feel that your roots are firmly planted in fertile ground.
That’s how I felt on the Tuscan hillside and in the weeks and months I walked through my own dark night of the soul. I was shaken—devastated by my lack of faith, by the unbelief I’d hidden from for so long, now revealed in the light of day. I felt raw and vulnerable. I did not recognize myself. I could not see, as I would later, that the fall is an inextricable part of the rising.
Sometimes We Have to Be Forcibly Turned
My second-born was breech in the womb—head up, feet down. I knew something wasn’t quite right even before the obstetrician confirmed it at my thirty-six-week appointment. My body told me . . . or rather, the baby did. His head, lodged just under my sternum, caused significant shortness of breath, and his tiny feet jabbed almost nonstop at my bladder and pelvis. I could feel that he was positioned the wrong way.
When an ultrasound revealed the baby was breech, my doctor laid out two choices. We could schedule a cesarean section. Or we could try a procedure called external cephalic version—ECV or “version” for short—in which she would attempt to turn the baby manually. Version is only about 50 percent successful, but, surgery-phobe that I am, a 50/50 shot at success was enough for me. We scheduled the inpatient procedure to take place at the local hospital later that week.
I’d learned enough about ECV to know it wasn’t going to be an easy-breezy walk in the park, so in the days leading up to the procedure, I tried every old-wives’-tale trick in the book to prompt the baby to turn on his own. I propped one end of a closed ironing board on the edge of the sofa and lay on it, my head pitched toward the floor, feet in the air, hoping gravity would work its magic. I attempted, with great awkwardness and much failure, to stand the entire weight of my giantess pregnant body on my head. I did squats and jumping jacks and lunges and waddled mile after mile up and down my street and around and around my block. All to no avail; the baby refused to turn.
The version was performed by two doctors who stood on either side of me, each with her hands on the surface of my enlarged abdomen, one set of hands by the baby’s head and the other by his bottom. I was hooked to a fetal heart monitor and injected with a medication to relax my uterus and help prevent contractions. “Remember, if it’s too much, you can tell us to stop at any time,” my obstetrician reminded me right before beginning the procedure—not exactly a confidence or courage booster. On the count of three, the two doctors simultaneously pressed hard on my stomach, manipulating the baby’s position inside the uterus from head-up to head-down. Meanwhile, though I’d been instructed to do the “eeee,” “ooooh,” and “ahhhh” of Lamaze, all I could manage was to squinch my eyes shut, grit my teeth, and hold my breath.
For the record, a version feels as medieval as it sounds. Though he was less than seven pounds, the baby’s forced roll inside my uterus felt like a tsunami rippling through my torso. My husband, who observed the procedure over one of the doctor’s shoulders, described it as “a scene out of Alien” (thankfully he mentioned this later, rather than during the process). Although it felt much longer, it was all over in a matter of seconds, and the version was successful. The baby was forcibly turned, and he stayed in the proper head-down position until his birth a few weeks later.
The version is a fitting metaphor for the process of spiritual rebirth and transformation. In other words, we don’t always surrender peacefully and amicably to God’s invitation to change our ways. Sometimes, especially if you’re inclined to stiff-necked-ness like me, you have to be forcibly turned. Like my son in the womb, we are often stubborn. We like circumstances to stay exactly the same, thank you very much. Sometimes, because we are not willing or able to turn ourselves, we need God to turn us, and in that turn, there is discomfort. “Whenever we say no to one way of life that we have long been used to, there is pain,” Eugene Peterson acknowledges. When there is a “decisive intervention . . . the procedure hurts, but the results are healthy.”11
Rowan’s heart rate plummeted for a few seconds immediately after he was manually turned in utero by my obstetrician and her colleague. This was expected; a version can be stressful for a fetus. Turning Rowan in utero was a decisive intervention; the procedure hurt, but the results were necessary, healthy, and good. Likewise, an experience of the dark night of the soul, in which we turn (or are forcibly turned) to face our shadow side, are stripped of our defensive armor, and turn back to stand naked before God, is an intervention, a decisive dismantling of our status quo that is often painful but ultimately necessary, healthy, and good.
This is exactly what Paul experienced on his journey to Damascus (see Acts 9). A notorious persecutor of the early disciples of Jesus, Paul (who was known as Saul at the time) was traveling from Jerusalem to Damascus with arrest warrants for “any there who belonged to the Way” (Acts 9:2), when he was suddenly dazzled by a brilliant flash of light. As he crumpled to the ground, a voice boomed from above, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” (v. 4). Discovering he had lost all sight in the mysterious exchange, Saul stood and was led by his companions to Damascus, where he languished blind, hungry, and thirsty for three days until Ananias, obeying God’s command, restored Saul’s sight and proclaimed him to be filled with the Holy Spirit. Brimming with clarity, faith, and a new mission, Paul went on to become a founder of the early Christian church and one of the greatest evangelists of all time.
Most of us are so familiar with Paul’s tremendous contributions to Christianity, we forget that before he became St. Paul he had to be forcibly and painfully turned by God toward God. That frightening experience on the road to Damascus and the three harrowing days of darkness, hunger, and thirst that followed was Paul’s literal and figurative dark night of the soul.
The Bible doesn’t tell us what those three days of blindness and fasting in Damascus were like for Paul, but we can assume it was neither an easy nor a pleasant experience. In fact, we can assume those days were probably among the most difficult and painful in Paul’s life—a rock-bottom period of self-reckoning in which Paul, alone in the darkness with ample time on his hands, was forced to turn toward his shadow side, face his deepest brokenness, and walk through it and out the other side.
Paul did not plan for or choose this intervention, and the subsequent dismantling of self that occurred was undoubtedly difficult and exceedingly painful. But the results of that turning and transformation changed Christianity and the world. Stripped of his false self, Paul emerged from darkness, stepped into the baptismal waters, and was reborn into the man God had created him to be.
Your Name Will No Longer Be Jacob
Solitude, says Henri Nouwen, is “the place of conversion, the place where the old self dies and the new self is born. . . . The struggle is real because the danger is real. It is the danger of living the whole of our life as one long defense against the reality of our condition.”12 This is the key issue, and questions beg to be asked: What is the reality of your condition? What is it you are so vigorously defending against? What are your greatest fears and your deepest desires? Will you allow a fukinaoshi of your soul? Will you submit to the decisive intervention? Indeed, like Paul and, as we will see, like Jacob, you may have to be forcibly turned.
Many years after leaving home, Jacob, son of Isaac, decided to return to his homeland and his family with his two wives and his eleven sons (see Gen. 31–33). The Genesis story tells us that Jacob hadn’t left home on good terms. He had betrayed his father and deceived his brother, and as a result he had hightailed it out of Canaan, fearing for his life. Jacob stayed away for a long time, and he knew he would have many amends to make upon his return.
When they reached the Jabbok River on their journey home, Jacob ensured his wives, sons, servants, and his many possessions made it safely across the water. Strangely, though, Jacob himself stayed on the other side of the river by himself and prepared to sleep alone on the riverbank that night. This detail has always struck me. I often wonder why Jacob didn’t cross the river with his family. Was it simple cowardice? Was Jacob offering up his family and possessions, hoping to appease his angry brother so that Esau would decide not to hurt him? Or was there perhaps another, deeper reason he stayed on the other side? Could he have realized that he needed the time, stillness, and space of the dark night in which to work through the heavy emotional baggage he carried as he journeyed toward home?
Genesis tells us Jacob was approached during the night by a man (some translations refer to the man as an angel) who wrestled with him until daybreak. The two were apparently evenly matched, until the man, seeing that he could not overpower Jacob, touched Jacob’s hip and injured him. Then the man said to Jacob, “Let me go, for it is daybreak” (Gen. 32:26).
This experience on the riverbank was Jacob’s descent into the dark night of the soul, a literal and figurative wrestling with God in the darkness. Jacob had a lot to work through with God on that riverbank. Deceitful, manipulative, controlling, and power-hungry, his false self had dominated for years, but it was there, in the dark of night, that Jacob was reconciled both to God and to his true self. Like my son in the womb, Paul on the road to Damascus, and me on the Tuscan hillside, Jacob did not turn easily or willingly on his own. It was a painful battle, one that left him with a lasting limp.
I find the next part of this story particularly intriguing. Refusing to let go of the man, Jacob demanded a blessing from him. In response, the man asked Jacob a puzzling question, seemingly out of nowhere and appearing, at least initially, to have little to do with the encounter at hand. “What is your name?” the strange man asked Jacob (v. 27).
In Hebrew, the name Jacob is Ya‘aqob, which is translated as “heel holder.”13 This makes sense when you consider that when he was born, Jacob emerged from the womb gripping his twin brother Esau’s heel. A closer look at the root of Ya‘aqob, however, reveals some interesting details that shed additional light on Jacob’s name and character. For example, the root of Ya‘aqob comes from the verb ‘aqab, which not only means “to take by the heel,” but also to “supplant,” “overreach,” or “assail.”14 Likewise, the adjective ‘aqob means “deceitful,” “sly,” “insidious,” or “slippery.”15
All of this makes perfect sense in the context of Jacob’s story as the second-born son who deceived his father, stole his brother’s birthright and blessing, and fled before he could be made to pay for his transgressions. Jacob wasn’t simply the twin who grabbed his brother’s heel at birth. He was also the insidious, deceitful younger sibling who circumvented tradition and supplanted his brother as the rightful inheritor in order to gain the power and control he desired.
In demanding that Jacob state his name before he blessed him, God insisted that Jacob come face-to-face with his whole history, including his past, his faults, his mistakes, and his sins. In the moment Jacob stated his name before God, he stepped out of hiding. He was, for the first time ever, finally willing to see himself as he really was and, quite literally, name it in God’s presence. This was his transformative moment, the moment in which he shed his false self and was made new by God.
“Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel,” God proclaimed, “because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome” (Gen. 32:28). As the sun rose behind him and the dark night receded into morning, Jacob limped away from the place he’d met God face-to-face. God had intervened, there had been pain, but rebirthed and renamed, Jacob—Israel—was set free on the bank of the Jabbok River to live into the person God had created him to be.
Your dark night of the soul may not be as dramatic as Jacob’s or Paul’s or as long as Mother Teresa’s, and it may not manifest itself physically in the same way it did for me. Nonetheless, you have a shadow side—some aspects of yourself that are not aligned with God’s vision for you. Confronting your false self and naming it is a necessary and critical part of deep transformation. Though it doesn’t feel like it in the moment, the dark night—the fukinaoshi of the soul—is the opening into a deeper, more authentic union with God. The loneliness, fear, and sense of abandonment you feel during the dark night is the result of the stripping and emptying, but it is also this stripping and emptying that creates the space for God to enter in. As Ruth Haley Barton says, “Emptiness is prerequisite to being filled. The presence of God is poured out most generously when there is space in our souls to receive him.”16
The dark night of the soul is the pivot point, the most critical moment on the journey toward uncovering and discovering your true self. Will you accept God’s invitation to let go of the last handhold? Will you allow yourself to be turned, or will you require a forcible intervention? Will you cling to your many branches and leaves, or will you cede to the Gardener’s shears? Will you open yourself to the difficult but necessary fukinaoshi of the soul? The hard prune, allowing yourself to be cut back to your basic, most essential framework, opens the way for the first tender shoot to sprout from old wood.
Author and pastor Mark Buchanan describes the hard prune as a maiming that ultimately becomes a sculpting.17 There is pain, a wounding, before there is healing and flourishing. Be gentle with yourself during this fukinaoshi of the soul. You are moving toward openness, exposure, and vulnerability, yet this is also a process that cannot be rushed. The questions bubbling to the surface may not be answered immediately, or perhaps ever. Now is the time, as the poet Rainer Maria Rilke advises, “to have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart.”18
Here are some questions to consider as you begin to yield to the Master Gardener’s shears: