Nanowrimo is not happening for me this year, but I’m trying to write everyday in November. I’ll be posting fragments of what I write here daily, edited very lightly for clarity and grammar. Here’s post #10.
“Our most fundamental transformations happen at subterranean levels. Our conscious mind can drop down new ideas into the chasm to see what sticks (or what goes splat), we can discipline ourselves to make new paths in our souls, which is rather like tunneling through granite with a sharpened spoon, or occasionally, life’s explosive pyrotechnics will entirely blow out new fault lines that we can try to mine out or paper over; but in the end, our most gut reactions,the slow daily accretion of decisions all happen in those dark, cavernous spiritual spaces that we only occasion go spelunking within.
When we say “God, transform me!”, we normally think about all the bits we see in the light. Oftentimes, it is those most visible things that change first. However, the more deeply we open ourselves to the spirit of God, the harder it is for us to see God at work. This is exactly what the mystics talk about when they refer to the “dark night of the soul”, what John of the Cross calls Love working in us so deeply that we can no longer sense it.”