I remember reading a few years ago from Mother Therese’s spiritual adviser that after enjoying a great deal of inspiration and enthusiasm in starting her religious order she suffered most of her life from the ‘Dark Night of the Soul’, a depression and emptiness.

We all like enjoying moments of joy and inspiration but sometimes we just do what we believe is right without the feeling we are doing anything worthwhile. This natural sense of doing the right thing, in joy and sorrow, is, I believe, in all of us, if we are in touch with our being.

Something like this is in nature. Plants can be blasted by bad weather and injury and often survive with the right conditions and environment to grow again.

But these days it is difficult to be in touch with our being. Like climate change in nature, the conditions are not very conducive. There is so much noise, information and communication that being in touch with our nature is difficult. Being in silence is the best way to be in touch with our being but true deep silence is hard to find these days.

Mother Theresa must have really been in touch with her being to keep on going while living in the dark night of the soul. Doing helps us get going, like when I have something to do in the morning I can get up earlier and in time.
But those mornings when I have nothing in particular to do it is very difficult to get going.

If we look at people who we really admire, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton or Mother Therese we find one common ingredient: they were persons of prayer in touch with who they were. Biographers says Martin Luther King Jr., when he had nothing going on, had a hard time getting out of bed but when he did he was sharp and ready to go. Yet King admitted that the busier he got the more time he needed in prayer.

Prayer might not be the answer to all life throws at us but it is certainly a way to get in touch with our being. The way to prayer is silence and the way to silence is prayer. Our being is found in silence.

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