"To Meet the Night in Ways that Bring the Dawn"

This has been a most difficult post to complete.

Perhaps due to the number of quotations I could not bear to lose.

Or because it is based on one meaningful to me for most of my life.

Though it hasn't brought me or anyone I know out of difficult times, it reminds me how to keep from them.

“to meet the night in ways that bring the dawn”[1]

a book title

and poem

a poet reading from his work

sits among us sharing lines

composed for his individual students

their talents encouraged

personalities affirmed

and hardships acknowledged

“to meet the night in ways that bring the dawn”

when circumstances force

dark nights of the soul

I know morning follows evening

"but evil thought and deed

suffering so apparently growing

power subverting greater ideas and causes

turns me under like a wave—flipped

sand-stirred, churned in the break

without surface or boundary"[2]

“. . . it is necessary that [the soul] be placed in emptiness and poverty and desertion on all sides, and be left parched, void, and empty and in darkness.”[3]

to meet the night

do not be caught off guard

in ways that bring the dawn

be assured of its passing

persevere toward and welcome solution

“Moses drew near to the thick darkness

where God was.”[4]

---

[1] To Meet the Night in Ways that Bring the Dawn, Ross L. Mooney

[2] “Ignorance Is Not Innocence,” Jennifer Elliott Jackson

[3] The Dark Night of the Soul, St. John of the Cross

[4] Exodus 20:21 and used in Losing Moses on the Freeway, Chris Hedges

Reverie

Time it just right and you can sit by the water’s edge where the golds of autumn not only wrap above you, but blanket the earth like snow obscuring path and stream where all vision belongs to one scene. There is no boundary, no regulation, no protocol as to how you should interpret the surroundings. For a few brief days the world can be anything. And that is true freedom, isn’t it? To receive no dictation.

But it does not last. We are not allowed the reverie. We are taught repeatedly the lessons our seasons reveal.

One of Ben Witherington’s favorite phrases in his books and lectures is that God reveals enough to give us hope, but not so much that we don’t have to live by faith.

So I await the time when experience will retain eternally all the vividness of fall, purity of winter, creativity of spring and abundance of summer.