Everything is meant to be lost,
that the soul may stand in unhampered nothingness.
- Meister Eckhart

To go into the dark with a light is to know the light
To know the dark go dark, without sight,
And find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
And is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
- Wendell Berry

This morning's scripture reading may seem like an odd choice for Palm Sunday, but it is a portion of the much larger lectionary reading from the gospel of Mark that recounts the entire passion narrative. Palm Sunday is also Passion Sunday.

This is always a challenging week to be in the pulpit. We do not know how much of the story of Jesus' last week is historical and how much of it is myth, a story created to convey a theological meaning. We can be fairly certain that the early followers of Jesus, none of whom stuck around to witness his execution at the hands of the Romans, created some of this story using the Psalms and the prophetic literature. This morning, rather than explore all the interesting nuances of what did and what didn't happen, I want to consider one part of this story within a larger mythological framework.

The portion I'm referring to is the theme of abandonment and betrayal at a moment of crisis. The larger mythological framework is what we commonly refer to as the hero's journey. This is the archetype for the spiritual journey we each have to make in life, a journey marked by departure, struggle, and eventual return. It is that middle stage of struggle that concerns us today; the dark night of the soul.

It was the sixteenth century Spanish mystic and poet, John of the Cross, who first coined the phrase "dark night of the soul." John wrote about this dark night as: first, a time of purifying one's intentions and motivations and, secondly, a process of living by radical faith and trust in God. Gerald May, in his book THE DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL, sums up this experience as

This dark night eventually reveals itself to be a source for deeper meaning and personal transformation in our lives.

If we consider the whole of the gospel traditions about Jesus' life we can posit several times in his life that might qualify as some of his dark nights. The time Jesus spent alone in the wilderness after his baptism and before he began his own ministry is one. This may have been a time of inner struggle after he had left the supportive community of John and his followers. Jesus was reported to have wrestled with temptations and to have overcome them. It was only after this struggle that he could return to the Galilean countryside with a new sense of identity and mission to begin his ministry. These were the gifts of his struggle, his dark night of the soul, in the wilderness.

Another dark night may have been during his final days in Jerusalem as his followers failed to stay awake and pray with him, failed to stand by his side at his arrest, failed to remain a united front against the Roman occupying force that executed him.

The dark night of the soul is nowhere better epitomized than in the beginning verse of Psalm 22: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" This verse was later put in Jesus' mouth as he died on the cross.

Last month at a conference on religion and spirituality, David Richo reminded us of the Hero's journey and the experience of the dark night of the soul that one often encounters more than once in one's lifetime. After giving a brief description of the dark night, he said something that really intrigued me. Richo said that in the ancient mythic traditions it was always the Goddess who watched over us at these dark times of our lives. Unfortunately, Richo didn't say anything more about this and I was left to my own devices to try to learn more about this.

Since the dark night of the soul is about death and rebirth it seems only natural that the feminine face of the divine would be active here. But it really surprised me when I went back and looked at Psalm 22 and saw the verse that reads, "it was you who took me from the womb; you kept me safe on my mother's breast." This sounds like an apt description of the role of midwife. One has to wonder about this reference making an appearance in a Psalm that is so full of despair and the sense of being forsaken by God. Is it at those moments when one feels so bereft and abandoned even by God that the feminine face of the divine reveals itself as it attends to the birthing of something new?

One of the aspects of this dark night of the soul that many mystics speak about is a sense of being in a void in which all the structures that had previously supported and sustained you no longer help. It is a death of the old ways of being that do not support our growth any more. When these old structures fall away, taking our small identity as isolated ego-selves with them, we begin to remember who we really are and why we are here. But this remembrance and rebirth can often take the proverbial forty days and forty nights. This is a long time to endure through the dark night of the soul. The following poem by Kathleen Norris expresses the agony and the possibilities of this long, fertile, lonely night.

The Companionable Dark

By Kathleen Norris

The companionable dark

of here and now,

seed lying dormant

in the earth. The dark

to which all lost things come - scarves

and rings and precious photographs, and

of course, our beloved

dead. The brooding dark,

our most vulnerable hours, limbs loose

in sleep, mouths agape.

The faithful dark,

where each door leads,

each one of us, alone.

The dark of God come close

as breath, our one companion

all the way through, the dark

of a needle's eye.

Not the easy dark

of dusk and candles,

but dark from which comforts flee.

The deep down dark

of one by one,

dark of wind

and dust, dark in which stars burn.

The floodwater dark

of hope, Jesus in agony

in the garden. Esther pacing

her bitter palace. A dark

by which we see, dark like truth,

like flesh on bone.

Help me, who am alone,

and have no help but thee.

While preparing for today's reflection I spent many hours pouring over books on mythology looking for Goddess traditions that might speak to this experience we call the dark night of the soul. I read about familiar Goddesses like the great Mother Goddess of Egypt, Isis. I discovered some new and unfamiliar Goddesses like the Greek Goddess Hecate who was the Goddess of darkness, of the crossroads, and of the lower world. There were many other Goddess traditions that spoke to how the Divine Feminine reveals herself in the dark night of the soul. But what spoke to me most strongly was a little closer to home.

Any student of the Bible who has studied the history of religion and mythology knows that ancient patriarchal cultures took older religious traditions that celebrated both masculine and feminine images for the Divine and rewrote them into myths about a male god. Joseph Campbell wrote;

Yet within this rewritten and now patriarchal tradition one can still see the threads of the earlier traditions. One example of this is in the word Spirit, the root form of which in Hebrew is feminine. Spirit was she who moved over the face of the waters of creation. Spirit was she who gave breath and birth to all living things.

Within the Judaeo-Christian tradition lies the intuition that beyond the gods and goddesses is the one mysterious unity of the sacred that may be expressed in myriad forms, some masculine, some feminine.

In those dark nights of the soul when previously adequate images of the Divine no longer suffice we find ourselves waiting for one who will once again bring the breath of new life.

By whatever name she may be called, may Spirit be with you. May Spirit guide you, protect you and love you through the dark night.

Mark 14:32-42

And they go to a place the name of which was Gethsemane, and he says to his disciples, "Sit down here while I pray."

And he takes Peter and James and John along with him, and he grew apprehensive and full of anguish. He says to them, "I'm so sad I could die. You stay here and be alert!"

And he would move on a little, fall on the ground, and pray that he might avoid the crisis, if possible. And he would say, "Abba, all things are possible for you! Take this cup away from me! But it's not what I want that matters, but what you want."

And he returns and finds them sleeping, and says to Peter, "Simon, are you sleeping? Couldn't you stay awake for one hour? Be alert and pray that you won't be put to the test! Though the spirit is willing, the flesh is weak!"

And once again he went away and prayed, saying the same thing. And once again he came and found them sleeping, since their eyes had grown very heavy, and they didn't know what to say to him.

And he comes a third time and says to them, "You may as well sleep on now and get your rest. It's all over! The time has come! Look, the Human One is being turned over to foreigners. Get up, let's go! See for yourselves! Here comes the one who is going to turn me in."