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A Deeper Longing: The Liberation of Desire in the Dark Night

October 3, 2009 | 1 Comment

“Drawing from a number of contemporary philosophical and psychological sources, she [Constance Fitzgerald OCD] described the dark night as ‘a purification of the spirit,’ and not as a direct experience of God, but rather an experience of our inability to grasp God’s presence. She noted that our attempts at experiencing God are burdened by negative memories and patterns of expectation of both God and prayer. Our memories are ‘obsessed with the past.’ Because these memories can color our meaning of the present and future, what is needed to free and purify our desire is an experience of an emptying or an annihilation of memory. This process requires detachment from everything that lodges itself in our memory and stands in the way of the future. Through this ‘deconstruction of memory,’ theological hope is completely liberated from the past and calls us towards the future, a future from which God comes. Independent of any personal achievements or accomplishments, this hope leads us to deeper levels of love through the experience of self-dispossession.

Sr. Fitzgerald described one manifestation of this experience as a ‘prayer of no experience.’ This phenomenon, which she has observed in persons who have sustained immense spiritual discipline over a long period of time, occurs when after years of faithful and attentive prayer, one arrives at a state where nothing is experienced in prayer. A state beyond any normal spiritual ‘dryness,’ it has been described as an experience of a ‘darkness of God.’ However, it is during this precise state of darkness that the self is ‘being worked on,’ that ‘God is working on us from the inside out.’ Contrary to modern understandings of depression, in which the goal for treatment is the restoration or the rediscovery of self, the prayer of no experience seeks the dismantling of self with no hope of reconstructing the self of memory. Indeed, theological hope lies in the understanding that the lost self will never be recovered. In this way, apart from self and expectation, we can yield to God’s future and its possibility.”

~ excerpt from an article by Terrence Zecha


Comments

1 Comment so far

  1. Susan Groves on November 1, 2009 8:05 am

    I would like more information on the artile, “A deeper Longing:The Liberation of Desire by Constance Fitzgerald OCD. I was looking for information on purification of desire and came across the artlicle on the website with Immaculate Heart of Mary’s hermitage report. Thank you

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