The Dark Wood IS Our Road Home

That is why, even after the good advice and counsel of many, I can still say with Dante, “In the middle of the way of our life I find myself in a dark wood.” This experience is frightful as well as exhilarating because it is the great experience of being alone, alone in the world, alone before God.

Henri Nouwen, “Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life”

I wished more people would know that the road home to true belonging – to being at home within our own embodied souls – requires us to leave the things we have been grasping in our attempt to find belonging where we are. Very often that means leaving the SELF we have learned to painstakingly curate in order to be found acceptable by the people around us and stepping into the unknown of who we were created to become in Christ.

Perhaps if we had the privilege of being received and loved just as we are from our earliest days by care-givers who were at home with themselves (i.e. reasonably grounded, secure, self-possessed and self-loving), and then grew up in an environment where other adults were similarly grounded, loving and wise, we would have learned in an organic way how to be at home in ourselves through the natural challenges of growing up. Unfortunately, the vast majority of us were born into environments where our care-givers and significant adults are themselves fragmented in their core, insecure and striving in their different ways to find security externally because they are not deeply rooted in self-love and the love of God for them.

What happens then, when our elders, teachers, leaders and those with authority and influence over us are themselves still seeking “home” without knowing it? I say it is “without knowing it” because it seems to me that most of them are sincere and convicted that what they are trying to teach and pass on to the younger generation is indeed “the right way”, because it is the only way they have known and they have yet to come across anything better themselves. I believe what happens is that we learn to be preoccupied with finding a way to remain “safe” through external means instead of learning to live from deep trust – a trust that can only be found when we are at home with God and our True Selves.

I wished more people knew that the interior journey into integration and true belonging takes us in the opposite direction of safety and control and requires us to take incrementally greater risks of going into uncharted territory – into the “dark wood” where we find ourselves utterly alone, and alone before God.

I wished that more people knew that even something as “otherworldly” and noble as faith, spirituality and religion can become merely the means to our seeking external belonging and a sense of psychological safety through tribal membership instead of being the path to interior belonging and fearless love of ALL – a love that transcends and even defies all sense of tribal mentality of “us” vs “them”. If we knew this, we would begin to learn the difference between what leads us into true interior freedom and what lures us into a sense of safety and complacency through what we think we can control and understand.

I wished more people knew that the interior journey into integration and true belonging takes us in the opposite direction of safety and control and requires us to take incrementally greater risks of going into uncharted territory – into the “dark wood” where we find ourselves utterly alone, and alone before God. Terrifying as this may sound to us when we are just beginning the interior journey, this IS the way HOME. In fact, I may even dare say that while there may be many possible paths home, all of them take us through the dark wood we wish to avoid. For it is only in that dark wood that we can come to know our selves intimately, and to allow ourselves to be known and loved by God intimately.

…while there may be many possible paths home, all of them take us through the dark wood we wish to avoid. For it is only in that dark wood that we can come to know our selves intimately, and to allow ourselves to be known and loved by God intimately.

For reasons I do not try to understand, it seems that not everyone awakes to their deep desire to be at home in themselves. And even among those who do awake to it, few begin the interior journey in earnest. On the other hand, I believe there are many, many interior pilgrims who make the journey without having the conceptual knowledge of the interior journey because this is a journey of grace and of responding to grace much more than it is a journey of understanding. (It is much more important to walk the walk than it is to be able to understand the path or to talk about it.) You can tell who the interior pilgrims are by the transformation the journey makes in them over the years. These are people in whose presence you find peace because they are at peace with themselves and their rootedness offers you grace to be present to yourself while in their presence.

To come home to ourselves we need to leave the “home” we have known thus far. We need to leave the security of our programming – the life scripts we have developed to fit into the world we know – and to put out into the deep with Christ, to enter the dark wood of our fears so that we can be liberated and become who we truly are.

Fellow Pilgrim, I wish you courage to enter your dark wood. Do not be afraid, but learn to recognise how divine grace is already with you and before you, showing you each step to take and pausing with you whenever you cannot go forward. You are never abandoned on this journey. The One who calls you home knows every grace you need to make this journey and exactly when you need each grace. Do not try to hurry before the needed grace is given, but wait for grace, even as grace patiently waits for you.