Sometimes… we all feel that huge, intense despair inside us. We feel the hopelessness, the emptiness—or what St John of the Cross calls “the dark night of the soul.”

In the dark night of the soul, there seems to be no one there. There is an immense nothingness, a darkness in which it can feel as though even our breath stops.

We may try to hide from this place, to turn away from it. But if we are truly honest with ourselves, if we dare to look deeply at ourselves in the mirror, we know that the dark night of the soul is also part of our human journey.

And then I turn to the trees. Grace.

I turn to the sky. Grace.

I kneel down and surrender.

I am invited to rest in Grace…

 

 

When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light.

For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

 

~ Wendell Berry