"He is gone again"

This article was given as a talk in a Latter-day Saint Sacrament meeting on February 9, 2025.

Doctrine and Covenants Section 6 throws us into a world of shining optimism. It's April 1829—springtime, and Oliver Cowdery has just arrived in Harmony, Pennsylvania, hoping to serve as Joseph Smith's scribe. He'd heard about the plates and Joseph's great translation project the previous winter, and made the journey from Palmyra to Harmony, arriving on April 5. I don't always picture these men as young as they actually were, but at this point Oliver was 22 and Joseph was 23. They must have felt like the whole world was in front of them, that they were getting swept up in something so much bigger than they were, that something earth-shattering was unfolding.

We're told in the section header that Oliver Cowdery had "already received a divine manifestation of the truth of the Prophet's testimony," — that the Lord had "[spoken] peace to [his] mind concerning the matter." Not only that, but once he arrives, he gets D&C 6 as a direct, spoken revelation to him through Joseph Smith. Oliver is just entering a world that Joseph and those around him had been living in—one in which it seems to be a regular occurrence to have angelic or even Godly experiences. Communication with the divine, once you entered Joseph's circle, seemed to flow as easily as a conversation between friends. The words recorded in D&C 6 themselves, as in other scriptures, promise: "if you will ask of me you shall receive; if you will knock it shall be opened unto you." Given the outpouring of revelation, that promise must have seemed obvious, even mundane, to some of the people living through these experiences.

All in all, diving into this section and the world in which these early Saints find themselves, it's possible we can end up painting a very optimistic, even rosy picture; one that speaks to a spiritual reality that I think is true in at least some moments for many of us, and in many moments for some of us: sometimes, and for some people, it can seem like the veil is the thinnest of layers between heaven and earth.

And many of our holy texts attest to this worldview: there is a common sense throughout scripture that God is more than willing to at least nudge us in the right direction, or even if we won't take the nudge, sometimes we'll be picked up and dropped into the right place. The people who feature in our favorite scripture stories are very often moved by the Spirit, or even commanded by it. Sometimes they hear whispers or voices, and on special occasions, they receive visions. These events are packed so tightly together in the scriptural record that it seems like it must be the norm.

But—as I survey my own spiritual life, I'm forced to admit that it hasn't been quite that simple for me. In fact, there have been not just days, but months and years where I encountered a deep, divine silence. Where no matter how hard I seemed to knock, not only did the door refuse to open, but I began to wonder if there was anybody home.

So I want to speak a bit to that experience, knowing that for at least some of us, the divine voice can seem at times curiously quiet. Sometimes, for long stretches. I imagine the current reality for some in this room is that they are praying and fasting, going to the temple, attending meetings faithfully, and where they hope to find a veil parting, instead, they encounter something more like a brick wall.

I say this while acknowledging and honoring that for many here, the experience is vastly different. I imagine too that some of us in this room are feeling like young Joseph and Oliver in the spring of 1829.

But—some are living a different part of Joseph's journey: D&C 121, for instance opens onto a very different scene than the one in D&C 6; it's now 1839, and Joseph Smith is in Liberty jail in Jackson County, Missouri, where he's been for three and a half months. The prophet who ten years earlier had seemed endlessly buoyed up, even invincible through his relationship with the divine, now finds himself scribbling the section's opening words: "O God, where art thou? And where is the pavilion that covereth thy hiding place?"

So even in times of deep spiritual perplexity and divine silence, we find ourselves in very good company.

A young Albanian woman named Anjeze Bojaxhiu joined the Sisters of Loreto in 1928 when she was 18. She had gone to Ireland to become a Catholic nun, where she would eventually take the name Mother Teresa. She began teaching at a convent in Calcutta, India, which she did until 1950 when she founded the Missionaries of Charity to serve "the poorest of the poor." Her eventual impact was both deeply personal and massive in scale: her mission grew to operate in over 100 countries and include nearly 5,000 nuns who managed homes for those suffering and dying from HIV, leprosy, tuberculosis, and much more. She was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 1979 and was canonized as a Saint by the Catholic Church in 2016.

She was also widely known for her cheery public disposition and signature smile. But a series of letters eventually published about 10 years after her death in 1997 showed a deep inner turmoil she kept quiet—hidden from the public and from almost all except those very closest to her, in which time after time she confesses an absence of divine connection that lasted for almost all of the last five decades of her life.

In one letter, she says, "The longing for God is terribly painful and yet the darkness is becoming greater. What contradiction there is in my soul."

For a brief period in 1958 she appears to have experienced a brief respite after attending a requiem mass: "I prayed…" she says, " for a proof that God is pleased with the Society" (referring to the Missionaries of Charity that she founded). She then says "There & then disappeared that long darkness, that pain of loss—of loneliness—of that strange suffering of ten years. Today my soul is filled with love."

Not long after, however, she wrote that God "thought it better for me to be in the tunnel—so He is gone again." She would write in 1979 to the Reverend Michael Van Der Peet: "Jesus has a very special love for you. [But] as for me—the silence and the emptiness is so great–that I look and do not see, Listen and do not hear."

These are hard things to process. Most people of faith must be left grappling with what's going on here, especially if, like me, they've grown up hearing the promises that by praying with real intent and a sincere heart—surely Mother Teresa qualified here—we'll receive the answers we seek.

I would feel presumptuous to try to resolve that tension, brought on by the question of God's existence and goodness and involvement in human affairs, that has been asked by people across the faith spectrum for many centuries before any of us asked it. But it seems useful to acknowledge that that tension, even unresolved, can be a meaningful part of the messy human experience in which deep, unexpected challenges often end up being the most transformative.

What I find expressed through Mother Teresa's actions, is a profoundly different view of faith than one we often hear about. It seems that a faith like Mother Teresa's isn't rooted in evidence for God's existence, which remained scarce for so many decades despite her almost impossibly Christlike life. Her life and words don't tell us because she had a particular experience with God, she then believed—and she certainly doesn't seem to be under the impression that her beliefs have somehow saved her, or made her right with God.

Rather, it appears to be much more simple but perhaps more counterintuitive—she simply has something else that I think we can still call "faith"—regardless of God's silence—and it leads her directly into loving action in the world.

In other words, we usually think of some sort of spiritual evidence as the cause, and faith as the effect. The causal machine often goes something like: "I prayed, I had an impression, I now believe" (or even know). But without prominent or ongoing spiritual evidence for belief, Mother Teresa has flipped that paradigm. A faith like hers simply is. It's its own primordial cause, and love is the effect.

Seen this way, "Faith" can blossom into something beautiful regardless of anything else. For those of us who find ourselves forcibly untethered from the evidence-leads-to-faith paradigm, there's really nowhere else in the equation for faith to be, other than the thing that drives us to "heal the brokenhearted, and bind up their wounds."

The 16th-century Spanish Christian mystic, St John of the Cross, was another great spiritual figure who experienced from a deep divine silence. He suffered through own nine-month imprisonment inside a small, dark cell for his attempts to reform his Carmelite order. During that imprisonment he is thought to have composed his poem, The Dark Night of the Soul. In John's view, the dark night of the soul—that deep, painful, absence of God—was what enabled an eventual spiritual transformation.

In his words, from the fifth stanza of his famous poem:

    O, guiding night;

    O, night more lovely than the dawn;

    O, night that hast united

    The lover with His beloved…

In other words, it was the absence—the night itself—that forced the eventual reunion in love. It seems that the dark night of the soul forces a certain humility. We realize that we can't force God to answer us or even force belief. And in this way, we become vulnerable. We recognize our own powerlessness. We become humble. And we may even, unintentionally, as James Finley says, "assume the posture of least resistance to God's love." It may be that our own inability to force faith cracks our hearts open just wide enough to catch an occasional glimpse of a greater plan, a greater and unconditional love emanating from somewhere beyond our understanding, all the more precious because of its rarity.

I want to be careful with St. John of the Cross's story, however, and not wrap it up with too tidy of a bow. Though he found transformation and renewal after his dark night, there isn't any evidence that Mother Teresa had a similar resolution to hers. But what I find beautiful about her story in contrast to his is that even without that miraculous divine reappearance, Mother Teresa's faith, if we want to call it that, continued to express itself, again, not as a belief checklist but as a way to be in the world—one in which while she may not have gotten the miracle she longed for, she worked miracle after miracle in the lives of those who most needed them.

And so I suppose my message, if I have one, is just this: for those of us who find ourselves like Joseph and Oliver on the brink of the publishing of the Book of Mormon and the founding of the Church, in a state of mind where anything seems possible and God seems constantly, almost tangibly present, I hope we recognize that as a real gift—one that can help us bring forth "marvelous works and wonders," but a gift that not everyone has, at least not all the time.

And for those of us who, like Mother Teresa or St John of the Cross, find ourselves in a dark night of the soul of any length, I hope we recognize that as a gift as well. One that can not just break us down, but break us open. One that can change our inwardly-focused faith to an outwardly-focused one, a faith that, as Brian McLaren has said, expresses itself in love rather than just in the form of correct beliefs.

And of course, whether we move back-and-forth between these two states, or find ourselves inside one for the duration of our lives, I hope that we look for the gifts in both, and like the Zion community we're trying to be, live together in love.