Thomas Keating wrote that people came to him for spiritual direction, sharing how they used to have a warm and solid sense of God in their lives but now complain that all that warmth and confidence have disappeared and they’re left struggling with belief and struggling to pray as they used to. They feel a deep sense of loss and invariably this is their question: “What’s wrong with me?” His answer, in essence, says this: Despite your pain, there is something very right with you. You have moved past being a religious neophyte, past an initiatory stage of religious growth, which was right for you for its time, and are now being led into a deeper, not lesser, faith. You felt that you understood God and religion. Then the bottom fell out of your faith and certainty, and now you are finding yourself a lot less sure of yourself, considerably more humble, more empathetic, and less judgmental. Fr. Rolheiser writes that we tend to confuse faith with our capacity on any given day to conjure up a concept of God and imagine God’s existence. We think our faith is strongest at those times when we have affective and emotive feelings attached to our imaginations about God. Strong imaginative images and strong feelings about God are, in the end, just that, images. Wonderful, but images nonetheless, icons. An image is not the reality. Mystics such as John of the Cross call this experience of seemingly losing our faith “a dark night of the soul.” This describes the experience where we used to feel God’s presence with a certain warmth and solidity, but now we feel like God is non-existent, and we are left in doubt. This is what Jesus experienced on the cross, and this is what Mother Teresa wrote about in her journals. While that darkness can be confusing, it can also be maturing: It can help move us from being arrogant, judgmental, religious neophytes to humble, empathic men and women, living inside a cloud of unknowing, understanding more by not understanding than by understanding, helpfully lost in a darkness we cannot manipulate or control, so as to finally be pushed into genuine faith, hope, and charity.