Lessons to Learn from Chaos or the Dark Night

In acknowledging the reality of the dark night of our species, we can prepare ourselves to learn from it and eventually move beyond it.  The first lesson of the dark night is not to run. 

The Sufi poet Hafiz teaches us how the spiritual warrior refuses to run. 

Darkness has a lot to teach us.  We need to stick around in order to learn.  And we as a species have a lot to learn in this time of chaos about the deeper lessons of living and of being human.  Among the lessons to learn are the following:

The Navajo artist David Paladin went through a radical dark night experience as a young man when he joined the army and was captured by the Nazis. He was put in a concentration camp for four years where he underwent supreme torture and agony.  When the allies liberated the camp, Paladin was comatose, paraplegic and weighed sixty-four pounds.  After coming out of a coma two years later, and being cured by the medicine of his elders, he lived a full and productive life as a painter, writer and eventually a minister. 

Toward the end of his life he shared what his elders had taught him: That his extreme suffering in the concentration camp was a school or initiation to teach him to become a shaman.  He said:

So instead of returning pain for pain and action with reaction, the warrior-shaman rises above his own dead body and says: ‘I have died, too.  Now let’s dance.  We’re free.  The spirit is ours because we have died.  Now we are resurrected from the ashes.’

We may be involved as a species today in a collective dark night–an agony and a torture–because we must learn the lesson of becoming shamans and healers.

Adapted from:
Matthew Fox, One River, Many Wells: Wisdom Springing from Global Faiths, p. 417. 
Matthew Fox, Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet, p. 171.
Banner image: Ghostly trees. Photo by Cocoparisienne on Pixabay

Are you a “wounded warrior and wounded healer”?  What follows from that?  Do you imagine rising from the ashes of the current state of our culture?  How can you contribute to that resurrection?

One River, Many Wells: Wisdom Springing from Global Faiths

Matthew Fox calls on all the world traditions for their wisdom and their inspiration in a work that is far more than a list of theological position papers but a new way to pray—to meditate in a global spiritual context on the wisdom all our traditions share. Fox chooses 18 themes that are foundational to any spirituality and demonstrates how all the world spiritual traditions offer wisdom about each.“Reading One River, Many Wells is like entering the rich silence of a masterfully directed retreat. As you read this text, you reflect, you pray, you embrace Divinity. Truly no words can fully express my respect and awe for this magnificent contribution to contemporary spirituality.” –Caroline Myss, author of Anatomy of the Spirit

Creativity: Where the Divine and Human Meet

Because creativity is the key to both our genius and beauty as a species but also to our capacity for evil, we need to teach creativity and to teach ways of steering this God-like power in directions that promote love of life (biophilia) and not love of death (necrophilia). Pushing well beyond the bounds of conventional Christian doctrine, Fox’s focus on creativity attempts nothing less than to shape a new ethic.
“Matt Fox is a pilgrim who seeks a path into the church of tomorrow.  Countless numbers will be happy to follow his lead.” –Bishop John Shelby Spong, author, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, Living in Sin