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.