Background: We have just finished a series of three Blue December services at Christ Church Easton for anyone who is having a difficult time during this season. We’ve had a heartening turnout, more people each week, and wonderful feedback from those who attended. The services have been put together and led by a Lutheran Deacon (Mike Hiner) and an Episcopal Deacon (Michael Valliant). This is the text of the reflection/homily in third service on Dec. 18.
“Healing, Letting Go and Sunrise”
St. John of the Cross was a Christian mystic and monk who lived in Spain the 1500s. He is most known for talking about “the dark night of the soul.” John thought it was necessary for us to experience or go through dark nights of our souls in order to fully know, appreciate, and experience the love of God.
It’s a memorable phrase, but it’s not a great marketing campaign. No one is going to line up at the door to go through dark nights of the soul. The reason the phrase and the idea is memorable is not because it sounds desirable; it’s because we can relate to it. I would guess when I say “dark night of the soul” there are a number of us here who understand what that feels like in our own lives.
The fact that we are sitting in a church might mean that we are willing to look to God, look to Jesus for some help with those times.
When you are going through a difficult time, parables don’t seem like the most helpful thing you can come across. But Jesus frequently uses them. That must have been annoying to his disciples and friends.
Jesus, could you please just tell me what I need to do? I don’t have time for another story, another riddle.
Jesus’s parables frequently work on our expectations and our sense of time. The one I come back to over and over again is the Parable of the Sower. And the notion of planting seeds—all over the place, on every kind of soil. The thing about seeds is that they take time to grow. And that, though we can help, we can’t make them grow.
Healing what troubles us is sometimes like planting a seed and/or waiting for it to grow. It doesn’t happen quickly, certainly not fast enough for us when we are hurting. Often we find ourselves waiting.
In my most uncomfortable waiting, I am left with the idea that all I can do is show up, let go of my expectations and desired outcomes, and let God work on them.
I want to talk for a minute about healing. Henri Nouwen was a gifted priest, teacher, and author, who taught at Notre Dame, Yale, and Harvard. But where he came alive was when he left those prestigious institutions and became the pastor at L’Arche Daybreak, a community for people with intellectual disabilities in Ontario. It was working with this community where Nouwen got a sense for what work was most important.
He wrote that:
“When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand.”
Someone who shares our pain and touches our wounds. Have you ever had that kind of friend? Have you ever been that kind of friend?
The season of Advent finds us in a time of waiting. There is something about the patience of waiting and the patience of healing that goes together.
Rachel Held Evans was a best-selling author and speaker who died in 2019 at 37 years old from an allergic reaction to a medication she was given for an infection. She wrote a lot about bringing people and groups into the church who felt outcast and unwanted. And she wrote about healing: how the church is called to the “slow and difficult work of healing… being with people in their pain and sticking around no matter the outcome.”
Healing is something that takes time and it is relational. Held Evans wrote:
“Rarely does healing follow a straight or well-lit path. Rarely does it conform to our expectations or resolve in a timely manner. Walking with someone through grief, or through the process of reconciliation, requires patience, presence, and a willingness to wander, to take the scenic route.”
During my lowest times, the immediate thing I want to do is fix whatever is wrong, make it go away and move on. How do I get rid of it?
The only way I have been able to get out of that space is by realizing I can’t fix myself and that ultimately I have to let go of whatever I am holding too tightly—in order to be able to breathe, in order to be able to heal.
In this letting go, I have actually felt weight lift off my shoulders and a sense of being free from whatever it was that had me start to take shape.
This is what Jesus invites us to when he says:
“Come to me, all you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:25-30, NRSV)
We might come to the church, come to Jesus asking to make this hurt go away, and Jesus asks us to set it down, to give it to him… breathe… take a minute… readjust. Taking Jesus’s yoke upon us—being gentle, humble in heart, is how we find rest for our souls.
It takes letting go and it takes time. But we can get there.
I don’t know if you’ve had this experience, but there are times when I can get so worked up, so upset about something that I can physically feel it—it’s a tension, like a clenched fist. Jesus invites us to open that fist. Let it go, give it to him. “Learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart.”
Jesus is offering us rest, both by taking our burdens and by giving us his approach—gentleness and being humble in heart, letting go of the tension and anxiety that we’re holding onto.
Jesus is inviting us into a new way of life, a new way of dealing with suffering—letting it go into God’s love, by which our suffering, our pain, is what helps us experience this love.
St. John of the Cross had his dark nights of the soul. But he didn’t stop there, he didn’t stay there, he used them to come to know God’s love. He waited out the darkness until the light came.
Jesus experienced his own darkness and death on the cross. But he didn’t stay there. He became the sunrise.
Becca Stevens is an Episcopal priest who founded Thistle Farms, a community in Tennessee where women come out of prison and are loved, supported, and taught life skills. They come out of their own dark nights of the soul and into light.
Stevens relates this new light, this sunrise, to the Easter story, and to our lives. She says:
“Sunrise in the story of Easter is not just a time of day; it is a state of the heart. Sunrise is the space where nighttime fears move aside for hope, where we feel peace about our mortality in the scope of the universal truth that love abides and where we feel light crest the dark horizons of hearts we have kept barricaded.”
Sunrise is a state of the heart, where nighttime fears move aside for hope. It takes time. It takes love. It takes letting go. Jesus invites us to give our pain, our fears, our anxiety to him. To try his way of being. And to sit with each other, and him, to help us get there.
Featured image (Top of the Page) – Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash