The Dark Night's Hidden Dawn

In her masterwork The Interior Castle, Teresa of Avila describes a season when prayer itself seems to dissolve. The words stop coming. The feelings of closeness to God evaporate. The soul sits in what feels like an empty room, waiting for a Host who may never arrive. Teresa insists this is not abandonment — it is invitation.

Romans 8:28 tells us that God works all things together for good. But notice the verse does not say we will see the working. It does not promise clarity. It promises a hidden cooperation between the Spirit and our circumstances that operates far beneath what the mind can track.

This is the contemplative understanding of hope — not optimism, not a cheerful forecast, but a deep consent to the unseen movement of God. John of the Cross called it nada — the nothing that is actually everything. When we sit in centering prayer and release every thought, every image, every demand for answers, we are practicing the very posture Romans 8:28 requires. We are letting God work in the dark.

Thomas Merton once wrote that true hope is found not in the things we can see but in the things we cannot understand. The contemplative knows this in the body, not just the mind — through years of sitting still when nothing seems to happen.

If your hope depends on seeing results, it will shatter. But if you can sit with God in the silence, trusting the hidden weaving, you will discover a hope that needs no proof — because it rests not in outcomes, but in the One who holds all things together.