Susan Griffin says that “Nothingness spreads around us. But in this nothing we find what we did not know existed.”* The Dark Night has much to teach us.
Meister Eckhart teaches that the Dark Night increases our sensitivity including our sensitivity to the suffering of others. What is this darkness? What is its name? Call it: an aptitude for sensitivity. Call it: a rich sensitivity which will make you whole. Call it: your potential for vulnerability.
Is it your experience that the dark night and the tasting of ashes and the truth of nothingness actually result in an increased aptitude for sensitivity? Sensitivity to suffering, but also sensitivity to beauty and its omnipresence? Sensitivity to Joy even when one is being “stripped down to the very substance of oneself before God” as Howard Thurman puts it?
Does this rich sensitivity actually make you whole? In what ways? Does it include putting your vulnerability forward? Is that a good thing?
There is a special relationship between the via negativa and the via transformativa, for as we learn more sensitivity from our suffering, we are more tuned to the suffering of others.
When this occurs, moral imagination (the via creativa and via transformativa) can kick in to assist in the relief of the suffering of others. Including changing structures and institutions and thought habits that contribute to the suffering of others.
One example of transforming a thought habit that oppresses is how introducing the concept of “original blessing” can offer medicine to those whom “original sin” has kept down.
Gandhi connects the via negativa and via transformativa with this practical advice: To make any progress we must not make speeches and organize mass meetings but be prepared for mountains of suffering. Is this what awaits the time of resistance beginning officially on January 20?
How do we prepare for “mountains of suffering”? One way is to meditate on those who have preceded us, our ancestors, and how they dealt with mountains of suffering. Jesus is one such person who countenanced putting love above fear.
The author of the Letter to the Hebrews said this: “Suffering is part of your training. God is treating you as his sons or daughters.” Jesus suffered.
That is what the cross represents and why many can identify with it. Suffering can be redemptive.
Birth pangs accompany giving birth to something new: A newer democracy; new ways of deriving energy from the earth without poisoning it altogether.
A co-creation with Spirit and a new political imagination exploding to bless the earth anew so that humanity can be its better self and abide by its “better angels” (Lincoln) in order to hand on to future generations a healthy and peace-filled existence worthy of the beauty we have inherited.
Is there time for that to happen? The only way to answer that question is to find allies and to try.
*Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her, p. 159.
Adapted from Matthew Fox, Original Blessing, pp. 148, 157.
See also Fox, Meditations with Meister Eckhart, pp. 35-64.
Banner Image: Crescent moon on a dark night. Photo by Behnam Norouzi on Unsplash
Queries for Contemplation
Is it your experience that the Dark Night has much to teach us that is important? And sensitivity, vulnerability, moral imagination and creativity can increase during a Dark Night? And service too, while “dwelling in the desert”?
Recommended Reading
Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality
Matthew Fox lays out a whole new direction for Christianity—a direction that is in fact very ancient and very grounded in Jewish thinking (the fact that Jesus was a Jew is often neglected by Christian theology): the Four Paths of Creation Spirituality, the Vias Positiva, Negativa, Creativa and Transformativa in an extended and deeply developed way.
“Original Blessing makes available to the Christian world and to the human community a radical cure for all dark and derogatory views of the natural world wherever these may have originated.” –Thomas Berry, author, The Dream of the Earth; The Great Work; co-author, The Universe Story
Meditations with Meister Eckhart: A Centering Book
A centering book by Matthew Fox. This book of simple but rich meditations exemplifies the deep yet playful creation-centered spirituality of Meister Eckhart, Meister Eckhart was a 13th-century Dominican preacher who was a mystic, prophet, feminist, activist, defender of the poor, and advocate of creation-centered spirituality, who was condemned shortly after he died.
“These quiet presentations of spirituality are remarkable for their immediacy and clarity.” –Publishers Weekly.
5 thoughts on “Susan Griffin, Eckhart, Gandhi: Lessons from The Dark Night”
Like it or not, we are on the brink(in the brink) of a great chasm. It’s hard to look at(imagine) what is knocking on the door of America this January 20. Your DMs and questions, Mathew, help us not to be afraid, remember the light in all of us, and stay firm in our faith hope and love for humanity and Mother Earth. I have a very good feeling that together(the good, the bad and the ugly) will birth a better way of life good for all. As in giving birth, we must remember to breathe. It makes the suffering bearable.
Thank you for your wisdom, Mathew, and your never failing light.
Yes! My experience of the Dark Night and suffering on my spiritual journey has mysteriously continued to increase my Faith, compassion, and empathy for the feelings and suffering of others. We All need this Faith and realization of Our ONENESS in DIVINE LOVE in Our Eternal Souls with one another and All of ongoing Creation and Evolution of Consciousness in our Earthly, Cosmic, and Spiritual Dimensions in the Sacred Unfolding Process of the ETERNAL PRESENT MOMENT… COSMIC CHRIST CONSCIOUSNESS….
Thank you Matthew. One thing the dark night of this decade is teaching me is that we cannot rely on Democracy, our system of checks and balances, our traditions, or the goodness of the majority of our citizens to move this country toward justice. I have had too much faith in our system of government, the courts, the good faith of Congresspeople, to move us closer to justice for all, including the planet. We’ve been moving away from all that since the beginning of the 21st Century. I thought it was time to see the pendulum swing back. Then, in a day and a night, it’s as if a bomb went off right under the pendulum and it was shattered into a thousand pieces, and we find without any pendulum at all. Directionless. All a meaningless void. So, once again, our faith, my faith anyway–a faith that was relying on Democracy with all its strengths–is wildly challenged. I guess it’s time to put my faith back in God. I don’t believe God will “fix it.” I don’t believe this is “a part of God’s plan.” We are God’s hands, feet, hearts, and minds. I believe it’s on us. We must be the ones who move our country and our planet toward justice. I’m exhausted and still devastated. I’m going to have to remind myself every single day to ask God to guide my own actions so I can do my share of the work.
The Rev. Dr. Barbara Holmes, of blessed memory, has written of and spoken of “Crisis Contemplation”, which is the communal response to communal trauma that removes the very ground beneath one’s feet–like the ripping away of Africans to be sold as slaves, the destruction of Jews in Germany, and the genocide of Native Americans. I think we need to turn to these resources to gain courage and purpose from their experiences. We Americans, I believe, have been spoiled and protected from the ills like invasions, wars, and famines that sweep through other countries. The challenge is to dig deep for faith and hope and to come together to resist injustice wherever we see it.
How wonderful to witness a genuine passion to make both Mary and Joseph real again at the time of Jesus’ birth!
It is clear that they were outcasts … Joseph would have been considered ‘unclean’ for acting as the midwife. I recall a man writing in Homemaker magazine that having been present at his child’s birth changed his whole attitude to war i.e., he became a pacifist.
Opening this Meditation with a quote from the author Susan Griffin is so appropriate:
1)”All history is taken in by stones…perhaps we are like stones; our own history and the history of the world embedded in us, we hold a deep sorrow within and cannot weep until that history is sung.”
2)”Is there perhaps a silent hope, buried along with inadmissible memories, that some fragment of what has been censored from the official story will be restored? And the pain and shock of that memory woven thus into a fabric of meaning shared in the common arena of knowledge.”
From Griffin’s book Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War. [1992]
She also wrote Pornography and Silence: Culture’s Revenge Against Nature [1981]