WHAT DARK NIGHTS DO FOR US
On the surface this might seem incongruous, even contradictory; but those two things, her feeling that God was absent and her exceptional selflessness, are not unconnected. The opposite. The latter depends precisely upon the former; her inability to feel God affectively, the dryness of her faith experience, the dark night that enveloped her, were precisely the reason her faith was so pure, and her actions were so selfless.
In short, with all affective feelings gone and with her imagination helpless to create images of God and a concept of God’s existence, she was no longer able to manipulate her experience of God and reshape it to fit her own needs. She had to receive God on God’s own terms, not on her terms. The very dryness of her faith was what made it so pure. The seeming absence of God also helped assure the absence of her own ego.
Evidence suggests that 95% of the time we do manipulate our experience of God to serve our own interests. However, God arranges things so that we cannot do this all the time. God corrects our proclivity to create a God who works for our self-interest by sending us, as he did to Mother Teresa, crushing dark nights of the soul, namely, periods of imaginative and affective dryness within which we simply are unable to imagine and affectively feel either God’s existence or God’s love for us.
While we continue to somehow “know” God at a deeper level, our imaginations and our emotions run out of gas, completely. When this happens, we find ourselves powerless to manipulate our experience of God in any way – and certainly not to work it for our own benefit.
God can then flow into us purely, with our egos, narcissism, and selfishness now unable to color the experience.
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