The Light Shines Above the Clouds Even When We Feel Trapped in the Gray
A Personal Reflection
Years ago, the Atlanta area endured an unremitting period of heavy cloud cover. It rained off and on, but the most defining aspect of the period was the dark heavy clouds which turned our lives into a heavy gray nightmare. Every day, we would wake up and hope to see the sun pierce the gloom, hope to feel the sunlight on your face. Day after day, the clouds crushed those hopes.
During that time, I had to fly to the Upstate New York area for work. Leaving home generally brings a heaviness to my mood, though my love for my work soon lifts that heaviness. As I sat in my familiar Delta Airlines window seat during take-off watching the surrounding trees and buildings wiz by, the most remarkable thing happened. Our ascent took us through the clouds and the whole world exploded in sunlight and beauty. Warm colors bathed the white clouds in magnificent contrast to the clear blue of the sky. The world was bright and radiant, and my heart soared at the sight of it. I felt renewed.
The plane eventually descended back under clouds and the world grew hazy again, but the beauty of that sun-soaked paradise above the clouds stayed with me. Even as I write this, I feel the exhilaration of breaking through the clouds and seeing that world of light. My life, my work, our home, it was all below beneath the clouds, still shrouded in the haze, but the darkness lost its hold on me.
There is a term, the dark night of the soul, coined by the 16th century Spanish monk John of the Cross. He writes about our early life in Christ as comparable to a being a small child, when the mother cares for the child and tends to its every need. As the child grows, she must distance herself, wean her child, force independence on the child not out of a spirit of neglect but a desire to see the child grow into adulthood. According to John of the Cross, God can operate in a similar way. The time of distancing, the time of growth can feel like abandonment. God loved me in my youth, fed me, encouraged me, and now I feel I am left to do it all alone. He took His grandiose displays of affection away from for my own good, but the result can be despair. There is no light, no warmth of his presence, no respite from the night.
But like the sky above the clouds, His love remains above us, waiting for us to ascend to it. There is power in knowing it is there even as we feel trapped in darkness. The gray is oppressive, but the light is real and shining on a more beautiful world than we can imagine. The hardest reality to face is that we may never see it this side of heaven. God doesn’t promise to shine light on us every day in this world, only that the world of His light is our true home. It beckons us, and only through Him will we find true and lasting peace. We are not citizens of this world, but ambassadors for another.
God told the people of Israel in Jeremiah to take comfort in the knowledge that though they were rightly judged and certain to face dire consequences, the Lord would relent, and their children would see his mercy. As Abraham Heschel wrote in his book The Prophets after first quoting passages from Jeremiah:
“Their children shall be as they were of old, Their congregation shall be established before Me; I will punish all who oppress them. Jeremiah 30:20
They shall come and sing aloud on the height of Zion, They shall be radiant over the goodness of the Lord… Jeremiah 31:12
Nebuchadnezzar’s soldiers burned the temple, the king’s palace, the larger houses of Jerusalem. The walls were razed, most of the inhabitants deported.
The Jerusalem man is busy destroying, God is erecting.” P177
Even as the people of Israel lived under terrible judgement, God prepared restoration. As Heschel writes, Jeremiah’s greatest fear wasn’t God’s judgement, but His abandonment. God promised faithfulness through the darkness. He would not abandon God’s people.
Mercy is real, and that is our comfort. The soul’s comfort can’t be grounded in the reality of our dark circumstances, but in the truth that these circumstances are the briefest of moments in an eternity of shining beauty to be enjoyed in the presence of our Creator. When depression takes hold of me, I try to rest on Paul’s message of our true home in Chapter 5 of 2 Corinthians. A coming world that is just and good and beautiful and true. A real life that awaits us, though we cannot see it. The hope, the knowledge of its reality carries me through. The promise of the remnant, the blessing of future generations, the hope that all things will be reckoned to Him for mercy or judgement. This dark night is but a moment in something inconceivably larger than me and my troubles and my victories, my joys and pains.
Not a home in the clouds but something more real and more present. Home.