*DARK/*DARKNESS - SUFFER, SACRIFICE, COST, CROSS, ENDURE, OVERCOME, STRUGGLE
John 1:5 "The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it." (NIV) means unenlightened humanity did not apprehend or comprehend this light. (Bible Versions, p115)
Solution to suffering is to accept it, and to move into it and embrace it - to move into darkness. To use the language of metaphor and the language of faith. If we want to learn about God, we must learn about wisdom, we must take up the cross and move into the darkness of faith as it is presented in the Gospels. Everyone has a lowest point of life and that's where God can be met. There in that darkness which we can call the problem of suffering, God meets the person who can then say with job: "Now my eyes have seen Thee." I believe that we will not see God unless we allow God to lead us into that darkness. http://www.ad2000.com.au/articles/1992/aug1992p10_760.html
In love with the Mystery we name God. The symbol of darkness points to the incomprehensibility of the sacred. (Dark Night, p21)
"The way to greater light leads through the darkness. Going ahead feels like falling back." (Tao 41) Following the Tao at first feels like self-denial. To find peace, must we abandon our goals and values? What seems like surrender actually produces greater success in life. (Tao Peace, p25-6)
The darkness into which I had been gazing becomes profondly dark because of the brightness. (Contemplation, p131)
The dark side of human nature with disordered appetites create suffering and disharmony in our relationships on all levels: personal, societal, universal, and cosmic. (Purif, p111)
The journey to union with God in love is thus a dark journey because we travel always in purifying faith. The journey is dark also because we voluntarily undertake to purify and empty our sense and spirit of every disordered attachment that hinders God's purifying and transforming self-communication. (Purif, p123)
We are like a blind person or someone in the dark. They speak with a person and know that the person is with them because they believe that the other is there, although they do not see the other. (Purif, p202)
Breaking free of control dramas feels anxious at first, because the
compulsion has to lift before the inward solution to to the lostness can be
found. That's why a 'dark night of the soul' sometimes precedes increased
awareness and spiritual euphoria. (Tenth, p151)
Darkness is the emptiness of light, just as evil is emptiness of goodness.
Darkness, unknowing, and aloneness all require the following of us:
1. surrender to it
2. faith in God to get us through it
3. recognition that God is the one that got us through
4. appreciation of God when are through' (Randy)
Darkness, emptiness, silence, nothingness. It has been called "the dark night" not because it is particularly painful, but because of the absence of clear-cut thoughts and images in the mind. (Zen, p34)
There is no way of knowing God directly in this life except by means of pure faith, which is darkness to all the faculties. This darkness is to be understood not as a blanking out of the faculties, but as a transcendence of their activity. (Open Mind, p51)