“Though I may stumble in my going, Thou dost not fall.”

As the rain hides the stars,

as the autumn mist hides the hills,

as the clouds veil the blue of the sky,

so the dark happenings of my lot

hide the shining of thy face from me.

Yet, if I may hold thy hand in the darkness,

it is enough. Since I know that,

though I may stumble in my going,

thou dost not fall.

(Celtic, unknown)

The dark night of the soul is an experience of stripping away the assurance of the senses. Disorientation, uncertainty, loss of impetus, mean that absence is more real than presence, and the unfamiliar displaces the familiar. A spirituality fixated on the positive, and in which dogmatic assurances silence those important murmurs of dissent, is for all its triumphalist note, a spirituality of denial. Not self-denial to be sure, but a more toxic form of refusal, a denial of that mysterious withdrawing of God's sensed presence by which we grow beyond adolescent claimfulness.

The above prayer doesn't express the classic experience of the dark night of the soul. The last line of it is reminiscent of Isaiah at his most pastorally poetic, and as the theologian who best describes the rhythm of feeling forsaken by the one who promises not to forsake. This is a prayer I now use regularly because it allows me to be both honest and modest about my experience of God. Honest enough to confess that sometimes God's presence is not felt; modest enough not to think my own sense of God or lack of sense of God makes any difference to the reality of things, that God remains actually present even in acutely felt absence.

"Though I may stumble in my going, thou dost not fall." Since I know that, I know the most important thing. And even if I am overcome at times with doubt, uncertainty, and the pain of unknowing, more important than what I know, is that I am known, and by whom I am known. And one day I will know as I am known. And until then prayers like the one above are, in Eliot's word, valid.