SPIRITUAL FATIGUE (OR, THE DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL)

Do not abandon yourselves to despair. We are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song.¹

—POPE JOHN PAUL II

In my hometown of Bend, Oregon, it often looks on the surface as though life is easy. Set at the foot of the mountains, with vast blue skies, we have more microbreweries and pubs per capita than anywhere else in America and enough dogs to earn the title “Dogtown USA” from Dog Fancy magazine in 2012.² It seems like a relaxed place to live. But if you scratch below the surface just a little, you’ll find the stress of many here who have never recovered from the economic downturn and the housing market crash. People work hard just to scrape by. Many live in a constant state of stress and panic. Additionally, we have just as high an incidence of disease and divorce as any other town in the States. We have friends with MS, colleagues watching husbands waste away from cancer, and young parents struggling for a diagnosis of their sick children.

Life is tough, and ministering to people who are suffering can be overwhelming.

SUFFERING’S REACH

Even as the promise of heaven grounds us in this world, we still face present trials. Our growth, as Christians, is always preceded by and saturated with risk. No one is exempt from the burden of suffering in this world. Not even those who follow Christ.

Nobody escapes life without going through a valley, a dark place, or a time of deep sorrow. Tragedy and suffering are simply inherent realities of the human experience. Although there has been an upswing of teaching within the global church that sends a contrary message—one that says that the people of God can elude such hardship—it isn’t completely true. Certainly God can heal people, bless men and women, and deliver us from hardship, but in the end, at a minimum we will all suffer the death of loved ones and eventually grow old and die ourselves.

I deal regularly with what I would call spiritual fatigue—people who step back from Christianity because life gets to be too difficult or painful. In the intensity of life’s turmoil, we are challenged to endure but often burn out and give up.

In Oregon whitewater rafting is a popular activity. When a raft full of people maneuvers a Class 4 rapid, it is expected that some might be bounced overboard by the turbulence, but the further expectation is that all will get back into the raft.

Likewise, in the height of trials, we can become disillusioned, distance ourselves from church and other Christians—even walk away from God entirely. Some of us who get thrown from the raft never make it back.

In The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis has the demon Screwtape explaining what might be called the natural undulations of joy and sorrow in the life of humans:

Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation—the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks. If you had watched your patient carefully you would have seen this undulation in every department of his life—his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up and down. As long as he lives on earth periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness and poverty.3

But we do not like ups and downs. We would prefer to be in a state of pleasure or peace all the time.

So we fill our time doing the things that we think make us happy. We read books that tell us life is meant to make us happy. We attend conferences that offer keys to finding happiness. Most importantly, we avoid those things that rob us of the joy and happiness we believe we deserve, whatever it takes.

Now, I’m not saying that joy does not belong to the believer. In fact, the One who calls us to follow Him is joy Himself. Even so, all of us will certainly meet suffering and seasons of drought. These “troughs” of which Lewis wrote are simply part of the natural progression of life.

If we become enchanted by promises of prosperity and endless health, we are setting ourselves up for shocking, unmerciful disappointment. If we anticipate adversity, we will do ourselves a lot of good and grow our ability to persevere in our walk of faith.

Biblical teaching offers the promise of growth as a result of suffering—our affliction is not all in vain. For example, James 1:2–4 says, “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.”

How do we find strength by not only expecting, but also truly believing, that our voyage through trials is producing faith in us? How do we know that our seasons of exhaustion and spiritual fatigue are producing something of value?

Bo Stern, a local friend, has written a book on suffering born out of her journey following her husband’s diagnosis with ALS. Recently, she remarked, “I used to think that my faith could help me avoid suffering. Lately, I’m learning that there are some things that only suffering can teach or bring about in us. Faith is being willing to walk that road, believing God is working these things together to make us more beautiful, more like His Son.”

Not everyone has Bo’s maturity and natural positivity. I hope for myself, my family, and the church that we would all be able to have our faith strengthened through trials rather than seeing trials as sufficient reason to walk away from Christian community.

PREPARING FOR SPIRITUAL FATIGUE

My heart’s desire as a pastor is that I would help people follow God and find Christian community. I want to equip them to maintain their spiritual resiliency, find healthy fellowship, and create patterns of behavior to sustain their walks of faith through a deep relationship and understanding of God.

Napoleon the Great, French emperor and military leader after the era of the French Revolution, is purported to have said, “The first virtue in a soldier is endurance of fatigue; courage is only the second virtue.”4 When I came across that quote, I realized for the first time the significance of fatigue.

We don’t often think of fatigue as a big deal, but if you consider the life of a soldier, the reality of fatigue begins to sink in. When the grinding gears of war turn you, you go through more than just one battle. War is prolonged fighting, sleepless nights compounded one on top of the other, and constant bombardment that wear down your body and spirit.

It is at that crucial moment—the point at which body and soul begin to splinter under the pressure of exhaustion—that true strength is tested.

We will all encounter seasons of spiritual fatigue. Preparing ourselves as Christians is more than simply expecting difficulty. If we are going to bear up in spite of our spiritual weariness, we must tenaciously build up our strength.

Building endurance requires training.

In today’s Western culture, however, we tend to understand and care more about our physical stamina than about our spiritual endurance—we spend way more time building physical stamina than building faith that will last. When we do think about spiritual stamina, we are likely to think in terms of safeguarding our successes, blessings, and happiness while avoiding struggles, trials, or dark periods.

If we’re going to sustain our Christian walk, how can we prepare for the despair and dryness that will certainly follow close behind those seasons of joy? Our primary concern should not be how to navigate around the desert, but rather where to find water when we’re lost in the middle of it.

THE FACES OF FATIGUE

Spiritual fatigue often comes on slowly.

However spiritual fatigue begins, the reality is the same. It depletes you and drains your motivation to continue on. Like climbers succumbing to the elements on Mount Everest, we begin to shut down and give up.

The faces of fatigue are as diverse as the people who wear them and the situations that produce them. For example, those in helping professions, like doctors, aid workers, pastors, and teachers, often experience forms of spiritual fatigue. Help or service workers are constantly pouring out, and only sometimes receiving affirmation.

The paradoxical lesson of faith is that somehow, emptiness can be redeemed. Hardship and toil, if endured, can shape us. Or, as the Old Testament has it, beauty can come from ashes.

To equip ourselves to endure, we need to know how to identify and respond to fatigue. We need to learn to recognize its many faces.

So what exactly does spiritual fatigue look like?

AN ABSENCE OF GOOD

We may have all walked through seasons when it seems as if there is an acute absence of goodness in our lives. These times are daunting as circumstances compound one after another and threaten to bury us in our fear and inability to cope.

You are not alone if you have ever wondered if God has abandoned you. Scripture is honest about our fears and doubt and equally honest in instructing us how to not only survive, but flourish.

How long, LORD? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?

How long must I wrestle with my thoughts
and day after day have sorrow in my heart?
How long will my enemy triumph over me?

Look on me and answer, LORD my God.
Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death,

and my enemy will say, “I have overcome him,”
and my foes will rejoice when I fall.

But I trust in your unfailing love;
my heart rejoices in your salvation.

I will sing the LORD’s praise,
for he has been good to me. (Psalm 13)

Scripture speaks repeatedly of learning to endure and of training ourselves to walk patiently and faithfully through seasons of weariness. In a letter to the church at Corinth, Paul wrote:

Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. (2 Corinthians 4:16–18)

Trust does not come easily in the midst of suffering.

How do we find the strength to trust, obey, and follow even when we’ve lost the desire to do these things? How do we move forward in faith even when it seems as if there is no good left in the universe?

DISILLUSIONMENT WITH CHRISTIANITY

Fatigue also comes as a result of disappointment with the church. Over the years I’ve seen many people chased away from their faith because they have been wounded by other Christians. In their resentment, they rid themselves of all that is associated with Christianity, often embittered at God Himself because (as we all know) “Christians are such hypocrites.”

My own sister questioned Christianity after our favorite pastor of many years left his wife for his secretary—leaving only a note of explanation for the family to find after he’d already left. She struggled—if this pastor, this teacher, this father-of-a-friend who answered her spiritual questions as she joined them on their family vacations could abandon his family, what did that say about Christianity?

The ugly truth about Christianity is that Christians are sinners. But when those intended to bring life and encouragement appear to become the “enemy,” we distance ourselves from them and end up distancing ourselves from God. In trying to rid ourselves of one problem, we can end up creating a much bigger one.

Disillusionment with the ugly side of Christianity is a real thing. Frustration at hypocrisy is a legitimate response. But abandoning the church because we have unrealistic expectations of what Christian community should be is not. In Life Together, Bonhoeffer explained, “By sheer grace, God will not permit us to live even for a brief period in a dream world. He does not abandon us to those rapturous experiences and lofty moods that come over us like a dream. God is not a God of the emotions but the God of truth.” He added, “Only that fellowship which faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects, begins to be what it should be in God’s sight, begins to grasp in faith the promise that is given to it. The sooner this shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and to a community the better for both.” He concluded, “A community which cannot bear and cannot survive such a crisis, which insists upon keeping its illusion when it should be shattered, permanently loses in that moment the promise of Christian community.5

Are we strong enough to shatter our illusions about Christian community? Are we mature enough to extend grace and forgiveness to our brothers and sisters, even when they betray us or let us down?

JUSTICE FATIGUE

Many of my friends have been burned out by doing good. Initially filled with passion to do the work of justice, people pour themselves out zealously for the sake of the kingdom. There is a thrill that comes with giving our lives away, with being heroes and heroines doing good in the world—until we reach the point of depletion.

One reason many come crashing to a halt in their pursuit of doing what is just and right is that we are often too triumphalistic. We can get caught up in grand visions of success, transforming all of humanity through drastic strides and global movements. Asked by God to change the world, we may fall into unrealistic expectations of personally fixing the world.

Paul wrote to the church at Galatia, “Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up. Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers” (Galatians 6:9–10). There is definitely nothing to be said against the fiery zeal that comes with wanting to obey the call of God, but if we look for harvest at the beginning of summer, we are going to want to quit.

If we have realistic expectations and make justice more a part of the natural rhythm of our life, we will be on a much better trajectory to finding peace, endurance, and courage in the midst of our fatigue.

THE SOUL’S DARK NIGHT

There is another kind of fatigue Christians come upon in the life of faith. As Westerners, we may be unfamiliar with it, but the Desert Fathers understood it as a normal component of spiritual formation.6 This kind of fatigue is what Saint John of the Cross, a sixteenth-century Spanish mystic, was referring to in his work Dark Night of the Soul.

Saint John understood that on our own we will never be able to attain perfect purification of our souls. It is God alone who chooses to draw some of us into what he called the crucible of reformation to be further refined in the fire of suffering. “For this reason, as we shall afterwards say, God leads into the dark night all those whom he desires to purify from all these imperfections so that he may bring them farther onward.”⁷

This is the dark night, which understands fatigue as a normal process of the soul’s development.

Early in the life of the believer, we are taken with the rosiness of spiritual blessing that God provides as we’re learning to walk with Him. With the passing of time, as Saint John suggests, the dark night begins to loom overhead, as God purposefully distances Himself in the way that we experience His presence. C. S. Lewis echoed the same idea that God, in maturing us, makes His presence less evident after a season:

He is prepared to do a little overriding at the beginning. He will set them off with communications of His presence which, though faint, seem great to them, with emotional sweetness, and easy conquest over temptation. But He never allows this state of affairs to last long. Sooner or later He withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all those supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs—to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be.⁸

This can be a difficult thing for us to hear. We spend a lot of time defending God, making excuses for suffering, and claiming that deliverance is right around the corner. We don’t want to believe that God would ever deliberately remove stability, comfort, peace, or security from our lives, or that He would choose for us to suffer.

As trees well adapted and prepared for arid conditions find the ability to grow out of the center of a rock in the desert, we should likewise aspire to rely upon God to carry us through seasons of drought to bud and bring forth fruit despite suboptimal conditions.

When we remain faithful through periods of pain and temptation, we build endurance as a marathon runner builds endurance, by running through the ache and burn of stretching lungs and fatigued muscles.

Saint John of Avila said, “One act of thanksgiving made when things go wrong is worth a thousand when things go well.”9

THE DEATH OF THE SONG

“Music is the universal language of mankind,”¹⁰ said Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Throughout the ages worship, liturgy, and the act of giving thanks have had a rich heritage of musical expression. Since oldest antiquity, song has been used ritually as a form of emotional expression and worship for all peoples. Song and thanksgiving have always been closely connected. Take the biblical examples of Moses’ sister, Miriam, singing and dancing after the crossing of the Red Sea, or of Mary, the mother of Jesus, and her famous song recorded in Luke. In it she began, “My soul glorifies the Lord,” and ended with five successive declarations of what God had done for His people.

The song of thanksgiving is not an inauthentic expression of pure happiness, but one of gratitude that can be sung even in the midst of heartache. Many of the psalms are just this kind of thanksgiving song, what we call the lament.

The lament is an ode to the reality of heartache, a melody carried on in the plea for justice, but always followed with an assertion of God’s ability to deliver. It is a melancholy tune of faith sung from the depths of suffering yet with a deeply entrenched trust in the Divine.

Out of the African-American community came rhythm and blues—a historic musical genre that embodies the very truth-telling, soul-disclosing elements of lament. Cornel West described the blues idiom as “that blue note of dissonance, of defiance.”11 Maybe that’s why the blues have been so cherished for decades—because it’s this dissonant and defiant resonance that captures the discordance of life’s complexities and difficulties within its musical expression.

The lament gives voice to those who find themselves in the midst of trauma, who are caught in the catastrophic storm of the soul’s turmoil. Sadly, within the modern evangelical church, the lament—this song of thanksgiving in suffering—seems to have met its death or demise. Our culture does not accept lament as a common component to worship. Privileged communities have hedged worship expression into narrow categories not including the agony of alienation, discrimination, slavery, and persecution.

In other words, while the African-American church was coming out of slavery and into the Jim Crow South, much of the rest of the American church was, and has remained, insulated from severe persecution and suffering. The churches of antiquity also experienced greater suffering and persecution than we typically do. The contrast between the suffering church’s experience and the more insulated experience sheds light on the differences in their liturgical expression.

In fact, the lack of suffering or trial in the church can itself be a form of suffering or trial—the absence of something that can refine.

Walter Brueggemann, renowned American author and theologian, admits that the practice of lament within contemporary usage has been widely misplaced. Without lament, the people of God lose their means of voicing injustice, and worship devolves into disingenuous celebration and praise.¹²

The significance of lament lies in its relational quality. It allows for us to be initiators, and for God to respond. It also serves as a declaration of the fact that things are not as they ought to be.

Lament is about justice. “God, what will you do?”¹³

We suffer from the loss of lament because we are meant to be able to cry out to God against injustice. In Brueggemann’s words, “A community of faith that negates lament soon concludes that the hard issues of justice are improper questions to pose at the throne, because the throne seems to be only a place of praise.”14

UNDERSTANDING A THEOLOGY OF SUFFERING

Without a theology of suffering, we will assume something is wrong, broken, or out of balance whenever we face trials. We may then find ourselves wavering, frantically searching for prosperity and blessing that we believe is the Christian experience, rather than obediently moving forward in the steps of the Savior. Our comprehension of suffering as intrinsic to the life of the believer is essential if we are to find our voice among the faithful—among those who know lament.

Throughout the Psalms, we are told to sing a “new song” to the Lord.¹⁵ As the church and as individuals, it is time that we find our song.

When we find ourselves caught in the violent grip of fatigue, suffocating in the terror of the soul’s dark night, we need a song to sing. Like Paul and Silas, sitting in a damp, dark prison cell, ankles raw from heavy chains, singing loudly enough so that all the other prisoners could hear, so should we lift our voices.¹⁶

This need for song is really an expression of a deeper issue—our need for a richer theology of suffering.

A friend of mine, Alex Mutagubya,¹⁷ is the founder of Transform African Ministries and pastor of the City Church in Kampala, Uganda. Speaking on the differences between the African and the American church, and on the African Christians’ greater resilience in the face of trials, he said, “There is, within the African Christian community, a robust acknowledgment of spiritual warfare that informs the church’s ability to endure the agony of fatigue. Even when it does not make sense, God remains God in the midst of suffering and pain.”

This theology of suffering is not unique to the African church. In most of the world, the church is familiar with adversity. The prosperity of the West has sheltered us from hardship, which has led to an anemic understanding of the place of suffering in the life of believers. Songs of suffering help us endure our seasons of fatigue. Suffering should make sense to the believer.

One of the ways we come to know God is in adversity. We draw close to Jesus in suffering. The very One who calls us to follow Him was well acquainted with suffering and sorrow. “In Gethsemane the holiest of all petitioners prayed three times that a certain cup might pass from him. It did not.”18

Paul wrote of how Jesus spoke to him of his trials, “But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore,” Paul added, “I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties.”

He concluded with one of the more astonishing spiritual truths of the New Testament, “For when I am weak, then I am strong.”¹⁹

Paul had the maturity to say in the midst of difficulty that God could move and was moving. Can I also look at the challenges in my life as the grace of God? It is easy for us to see God in our blessings, but can we see God in our trials?

TRAINING TO ENDURE

It’s been said that the way you train is the way you will perform. We must train ourselves for bad times as well as for good. Just as marriage covenants refer to both bad times as well as good, so our covenant with God should acknowledge the certainty of both. How we anticipate and are willing to accept pain will dictate whether we walk away or sustain faith through times of suffering.

Our expectations and preparation for trial will govern our ability to endure spiritual drought and burnout. Building a robust theology of suffering both prepares us for and acquaints us with the journey we have been called to walk.

How we train is how we perform.

How we pattern our thinking with regard to difficulty affects our response to God when difficulty comes.

In the life of faith, it is easy to tend toward either extreme optimism, a gospel of health and wealth only, or a fatalism that sees God as distant and unfeeling. A realistic understanding will accurately locate us in the middle of a story in which to suffer is to share in what it means to be human.

We have been called to follow One who understands and empathizes with suffering. Our Lord warned His disciples, “ ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also.”20

Jesus suffered, so we should expect to suffer. We should expect it, but we should also begin to rebuild a proper theology of suffering within our confessions of faith. We need to strengthen our trust that, although we will undoubtedly meet adversity and pain on His account, He is also the one who has overcome the world and in whom we have life.

As Corrie ten Boom, the famed Dutch Christian whose family hid Jews from the Nazis during World War II, once said, “joy runs deeper than despair.”²¹

I waited patiently for the LORD; he turned to me and heard my cry.

—PSALM 40:1