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1
The Light Found in Darkness
Psychologists tell us that one of the most difficult conditions a person can be forced to bear is light deprivation. Darkness, in fact, is often used in military captivity or penal institutions to break down an individual’s sense of self. Once a person becomes disoriented, once they lose a sense of where they are, and what it is that lurks in the dark around them, or where the next crevasse or wall or attack may be coming from—once they can no longer feel in control of their physical surroundings—a person loses a sense of self. Every shred of self-confidence shrivels. The giant within them falls and they become whimpering prey of the unknown. The natural instinct to be combative is paralyzed by fear. The spirit of resistance weakens. The prisoner becomes more pliable, more submissive, more willing to take directions.
It disarms a person, this fall into the sinkhole of sensory deprivation. It can drive them to madness. It is, every military knows, an effective technique.
Nothing does more than darkness to isolate us from the sense of human support and understanding which, whether we’re commonly conscious of it or not, is the human being’s main source of self-definition. Indeed, darkness separates us from reality. It disorients a person both physically and psychologically.
Simple as it may seem, when the lights go out, we simply lose our bearings. The density of the dark makes it impossible for us to fix our positions anymore. We find ourselves alone in the universe, untethered and unprepared. The blackness of lightlessness leaves us no internal compass by which to trace or set our steps. Unlike the blind, few of us ever learn to develop our other senses enough to rely on them for information about the circumstances in which we find ourselves. Interestingly enough, it is those who consider themselves sighted who are most limited without light. And so, in the end, the tenebrous undermines the average person’s self-confidence, affects their vision, leaves them totally vulnerable to the environment and out of touch with the people around them. And that is only its physical effects.
The darkness of the soul is no less spiritually punishing than is the loss of physical light to the psyche. We talk about faith but cannot really tolerate the thought of it. It’s light we want, not shadow, certainty not questions. The aphotic, the place without images, is no less an attack on faith and hope than those periods in life when nighttime brings nothing but unclarity, nothing but fear. Where am I going? the soul wants to know. When will this be over? the mind wants to know. How can I get out of this sightless place I’m in? the heart demands.
The sense of being stranded in the midst of life, of having no way out of this smothering nothingness, this cul-de-sac of the soul, is enough to drain a person’s very personality until there is little left to recognize. Where did the joy go all of a sudden? Where did the feeling of self-confidence disappear to in the midst of this emptiness? Just yesterday life was clear and vibrant. Today it is endlessly bleak. The darkness is unyielding. Nothing helps; nothing takes it away.
There is no light here, we think. But we think wrong.
There is a light in us that only darkness itself can illuminate. It is the glowing calm that comes over us when we finally surrender to the ultimate truth of creation: that there is a God and we are not it. Whatever we had assumed to be an immutable dimension of the human enterprise is not. In fact, it is gone and there is nothing we can do to bring it back. Then the clarity of it all is startling. Life is not about us; we are about the project of finding Life. At that moment, spiritual vision illuminates all the rest of life. And it is that light that shines in darkness.
Only the experience of our own darkness gives us the light we need to be of help to others whose journey into the dark spots of life is only just beginning. It’s then that our own taste of darkness qualifies us to be an illuminating part of the human expedition. Without that, we are only words, only false witnesses to the truth of what it means to be pressed to the ground and rise again.
Darkness is a mentor of what it means to carry the light we ourselves have brought to blaze into the unknown parts of life so that others may also see and take hope. “Rabbi,” the disciples begged of their dying master, “how can we possibly go on when you are gone?” And the rabbi answered them, “It is like this: Two men went into the forest together but only one carried a light. When they parted there, the one with the light went on ahead while the other floundered in the darkness.” The disciples insisted, “Yes, that is how it is and that is why we are so frightened to be without you.” The old man fixed them with a long, strong stare and said, “Exactly. That is why you must each carry your own light within you.”
The light we gain in darkness is the awareness that, however bleak the place of darkness was for us, we did not die there. We know now that life begins again on the other side of the darkness. Another life. A new life. After the death, the loss, the rejection, the failure, life does go on. Differently, but on. Having been sunk into the cold night of black despair—and having survived it—we rise to new light, calm and clear and confident that what will be, will be enough for us.
Growth is the boundary between the darkness of unknowing and the light of new wisdom, new insight, new vision of who and what we ourselves have become. After darkness we are never the same again. We are only stronger, simpler, surer than ever before that there is nothing in life we cannot survive, because though life is bigger than we are, we are meant to grow to our fullest dimensions in it.
As Og Mandino says of it, “I will love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness because it shows me the stars.”
The stars that come with darkness are the new insights, the new directions, the new awareness of the rest of life that darkness brings. Then, at the end of the struggle with it, the spirit of resistance finally gives way to the spirit of life.
Then we are free to simply allow life to go on around us until the contours of it begin slowly to emerge out of the nothingness that our lives have now become. Then we know that a new day is on the brink, that new life is coming to us, that a new direction is finally coming clear again, that the light within us has come to spark.
2
The Delusion of Frustration
The human soul, it appears, is an ageless thing. If we can believe the annals of spiritual seekers across time, whatever bothered it in the third century—anger, desire, jealousy, lust—is clearly still bothering it in the twenty-first. But now it has a twenty-first-century name to suit its style and validate its current claim to legitimacy. We call it the search for “peace of soul” and frame it as some kind of mystical prize.
In this case, the spiritual contest for peace of soul demonstrates itself in the propensity for frustration. It lies embedded in the human psyche, exuding annoyance, publicly prominent and quietly tyrannous at the same time.
Frustration whispers in the night of a kind of systemic discontent with our lives. Nothing is quite right, though, if we were forced to admit it, nothing is really wrong either. All we know is that we want something we’re not getting. The frustration of it all lies in the fact that we’re sure we have a right to what we want. And we’re also sure that we’re not getting it because it’s being obstructed by something, someone who has no right to deny us.
We talk about it freely and we court it consciously. We speak of not being able to finish our work because the noise in the office frustrates us. Or the speed of the computer frustrates us. Or children playing in the yard frustrate us. Or—my father’s favorite—the sound of the vacuum cleaner at night frustrates us. A vacuum cleaner? A child? Office noises? A slow computer? Are these the things on which hang our lives’ content? Hardly.
The glory of frustration, of course, lies in its propensity to justify our own responses to it which, in turn, frustrate the people around us.
The desert monastics in the third century spoke of the inner struggle that gives rise to such spiritual chafing. “Tell me what makes a monk,” Macarius asks. And Abba Zacharias answers him, “As far as I can tell, I think anyone who controls himself and makes himself content with just what he needs and no more, is indeed a monk.” Is indeed, in other words, one whose life centers on what counts rather than on the temporary irritations of it.
The lesson is clear. Learning to be contented with what we have—and no more—escapes us. The ancients tell us that, to develop spiritually, we must discover how to control ourselves in the face of what we claim to lack but have no right to expect.
Without it, frustration obstructs us from being what we are meant to be—loving parents, good friends, partners, holy participants in the creation of our worlds. Or, just as bad, it justifies our not doing what we are required to do—meeting our responsibilities, relating well to the people with whom we live life and doing the work the world needs to have us do. To claim to be frustrated in the midst of life’s normalcies only defeats our desire to be a fully functioning human being. And, ironically, we do it to ourselves.
And why would that be? The case is clear. Frustration is something that does not exist—except within the self. It translates my world to me through the filter of my own need to control it. Frustration becomes the space we put between ourselves and the world around us. It forgives us the effort to live well in a world where noise is a given and the nature of computers is to crash. And so it becomes the dark cloud through which we see our world. Worse, frustration is the very thing that smothers our joy in it and blocks our growth, as well.
The truth is that frustration is not about options, as if we have the right to create an environment independent of the needs of those around us. The very notion of it is pure chimera, a fantasy. No, frustration is about something outside ourselves, outside our grasp, to which we make unwarranted claim.
Frustration is a cover-up for something we have yet to face in ourselves. It lies in what we decide we have the right to demand from life rather than in concern for what life demands of us.
But it keeps us awake at night. It troubles our souls fretting about tomorrow. We lose sleep arm wrestling in our hearts with those whose own lives keep prodding us beyond our willingness to go, to grow, to go on. And it is a delusion.
There is really no such thing as frustration, except in ourselves. We call frustrating anything we want the world to confirm as justification for being unable to control the way we think. It’s what we use to explain the sour or pouty or demanding or manipulative attitudes we have developed. It is the right we assert to be less than we are capable of being.
The paradox of delusion is that, if anything, the very act of putting trivia between us and the world is exactly a sign that we need to question what it is that is undermining our ability to function well in normal circumstances. When we allow the inconsequential to affect our ability to really be consequential in life, the question must be faced: What is really bothering us?
Is it a matter of being unwilling to admit what underlies the impatience, the despair, the anger? Are we frustrated with the computer or with the fact that our need to get a new one has been consistently ignored? Are we frustrated with the children who are playing in the yard because we expect the world to give us perfect silence or because we are unaccepting of the family from which these children come? Are we annoyed with the person next to us at work for walking back and forth outside our door or because they have the position we would really like? What is it in us that the frustration signals but no one has helped us to identify?
Frustration and the simmering agitation that comes with it, invading our nights and annoying our sleep, is one of the dangerous spirits of the soul. It comes in the dark when we should be resting at peace with the world, in gratitude for the day, in hopes of an even more contented day tomorrow. To dispel it, we must begin to confront it in ourselves. It is time to identify the fires that drive our frustration if we are ever to come to know ourselves. It is time to decide whether such great unease is really worth our masking it in the paltry and the picayune.
Frustration is the signal that, indeed, something does need to change in our lives. But no one else can change it for us. Only we have the power to name it and to change it within ourselves.
Only then can we begin to rest in the arms of a God who stands by, ready to companion us through our confrontation with the self to the Spirit of Freedom that awaits us at the end of the journey to Truth.
Luigi Pirandello wrote of our capacity to fool ourselves: “ ‘Truth’ [is] what we think it is at any given moment of time.” A better look may, then, find in us a greater truth—that if we give up clinging to control rather than to possibility—life is good, creative, welcoming, and here for us to taste in many flavors.
Then trivia becomes only trivia. We discover every day that there are greater things to concentrate on in life than the niggling, ordinary, commonplace little things we so often allow to fell us. The task of the truth teller is first to unmask the falsities that lie within ourselves so that the full range of life is now freed to be seen. Only then are we in a position to really examine what is worth getting frustrated about.
