The geography of life is marked by mountains and valleys. From new life and new love to the sorrow of loss and disappointment, our journey through this vale of tears always seems to find us ascending or descending. The same pattern is mirrored in our relationships; anyone married for a long time will attest that struggle and strife often go hand in hand with laughter and joy.
Because the interior life is a relationship with God, it is not exempt from the same challenges and difficulties. The Church and the saints even tell us to expect it. Whether it is the desolation described by St. Ignatius, the harrowing Dark Night written of by St. John of the Cross, or the luminous experiences of advanced prayer recorded by St. Teresa of Avila, the Christian life is not stagnant. It is marked by alternating periods of triumph and trial as we draw nearer to God.
Like marriage, the early stages of the interior life are marked by warmth, light, and hope. As the practice of prayer develops, God fills the soul with consolations meant to encourage and strengthen it. These can be so profound that their eventual absence makes us wonder whether we have failed at our spiritual endeavors, or at least question if we have made a mistake. Yet the saints assure us, and human relationships confirm, that the withdrawal of sweetness is not God’s absence or love diminishing, but the beginning of something deeper.
Marriage itself teaches this. In its hardest seasons, the glossy finish that covers our faults is stripped away, and what remains is the elemental material of love. In those valleys, we are deprived of sentiment so that we may learn fidelity. When the consolations vanish, a new kind of intimacy becomes possible—a love that is not reactive to pleasure but rooted in willing the good.
The spiritual life unfolds in a similar manner. I have known dryness and desolation, and I have also known the deeper valleys described by John of the Cross. It is there that the words of Teresa of Avila struck with a wild hilarity. To Our Lord, she said, “If this is how You treat Your friends, I see why You have so few!” The line sounds irreverent only to those who do not know that true intimacy can bear such speech. Where love has taken root, even sharp words are spoken inside a shelter.
It is precisely that intimacy that God invites us into, and it is often once we attain a measure of it that we suddenly find ourselves driven from the heights into the valley. As painful as the descent is, it is in darkness that Christ’s light is seen most clearly. In the shadow of the mountain, we discover that His is the only light.
Desolation and dryness are unpleasant but akin to growing pains. The Dark Night is something else. John calls it an “awful horror” and “torment,” a sense that the soul is “being undone and lost.” Like life’s most severe trials, it tears away the glitter and cosmetics that conceal the rot in the hidden corners of the soul.
In a marital crisis or in the Dark Night, it can feel as though we have never been farther from love. In such Gethsemane moments, we begin to understand how Christ could sweat blood. In the valley, His cry of abandonment from the Cross moves from something heard to something lived. There, the bonds of love are thrown into the furnace, and grace reworks them while they groan and spark. The Book of Wisdom uses language to describe this spiritual reality in one of the most beautiful, though quietly eerie, passages in all of Scripture:
As gold in the furnace, he proved them, and as sacrificial offerings he took them to himself. In the time of their visitation, they shall shine, and shall dart about as sparks through stubble.
Trials in marriage allow love to become something borne and not merely spoken. Once felt, that new love becomes a flag planted in the ground, both a memorial and a beacon, something to return to and something that guides with surety when the next darkness comes. Entered with trust and hope, these trials open a door into a participatory love. We no longer speak about love so much as begin, in some small way, to become it.
So it is in the valleys of the interior life. From the mountaintop, Christ’s Passion can move us, but we remain spectators. In the valley, we are invited to join Him. We do not merely read of His agony; we accompany Him in it. We do not merely contemplate the Cross; we find our hand laid over His, waiting for the nail.
The mystics understood this. Padre Pio and John of the Cross moved beyond a theological awareness of Christ’s sufferings to a lived communion in them. In one of the deepest mysteries of the interior life, they entered His suffering and emerged as instruments of light and love. Like marriage, time in the valley produces a supernatural love.
In this way, the valley is not a sign of God’s withdrawal, but the privileged place where love is perfected and the soul is conformed to Christ. It is in the darkness that the darting sparks amidst the stubble become visible.
Image from Wikimedia Commons
