The Dark Night of the Soul

I am turning five this year and couldn't be prouder of being a child. I would have named this piece 27, but I have found the joy of regressing into sonship. The 22 years that I walked without Him no longer matter, and it took strength and conviction to trade the burdens of this life for the purpose and wholeness that’s found in God. No true awakening happens without pain, emptiness, and loss of meaning. No awakening happens without a dark night of the soul when one’s consciousness slowly transcends beyond mundane physical and soulish desires through a vista of emptiness that lies between flesh and Spirit. From the place of sonship, I now see clearly. Even in oblivion, I was not as lonely as I thought. It takes sensitivity and humility to discern Ruach's movements. I am becoming more conscious about the presence of Jesus in the places you might least expect. And even more, the workings of His Spirit among the most unlikely people.

Too often, we try so hard to blur our pain and only reveal our successes. But amid our worst heartbreaks, God is always present. Over the last few years, I have lived with the consciousness that 2020 never existed. To many, it is the year that the world shut down and businesses collapsed. But for me, it was different. It was when God decided to walk away and allow the enemy to bring it all to an end. I survived unprecedented mental trauma, brutal confrontations with darkness, and two suicide attempts within this time. And in all that confusion, I was still expected to continue school and life as if nothing ever happened. And for the most part, I did. I always pushed myself through most of the days and often cried myself to sleep at night. And it went on and on. Until one day, I decided to write about all about it. That night, I wrote on and on, and by morning, I had penned 20 pages or so. And in the end, I wept. And then, it ended. I vowed never to frown about it again, and I never did, almost. That season had been folded and thrown into the ocean, never to be heard of again. But now, when I look back at all the darkness, I see the fingerprints of God so firmly embedded into everything.

Of all the people I lost during that season, my best friend wasn’t one of them. We had been friends for years prior, and we found Jesus at almost the same time. We went from talking about girls, movies, and music to blogging, studying, and praying together. Despite knowing him for all those years, it was not until that season that I became conscious of Jesus's workings in him. In my final medical school years, things got so bad that I almost missed half of one clinical rotation. I fought with darkness to exhaustion, and I eventually resigned myself to a loss. Everything seemed to have crumbled at one point, and Peter had to call home. My family went into despair and facilitated me to travel home amid tight COVID-19 quarantines and travel restrictions. At that point, deferral from school seemed like the only reasonable option. I had lost too much ground at such a critical time. But I had grown so withdrawn that few ever noticed my absence. When I came back a while later later, Peter always dragged me to group discussions, and within a few weeks of meticulous work, I caught up and thoroughly passed my examinations.

I can now easily see why God's hand has been on Peter for so long. Many may not remember that in 2009, he was the best student nationally in the Kenya National Primary Education Exams (KCPE). Although we constantly laugh about this now, it was a big deal then. But while he was being interviewed on national television and moving from school to school to motivate students, few people took an interest in understanding what had genuinely transpired beyond the reading and hard work. It took me a decade to understand how hard that season was for him. Having been born and raised in Western Kenya, his parents had become very successful businessmen. But in 2007, everything changed. After the election, violence broke out all over Kenya, and all his family's possessions, including business establishments, were razed all because of their tribe. The subsequent three months were a period of incredible hardship for them, as their family was forced to relocate without a financial plan.

A while later, Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga shook hands, ending the violence. All the people affected were now supposed to live on as if nothing life-changing had ever transpired. I learned from Frida Umuhoza’s account of the Rwandan genocide that the final phase of any injustice is the denial that it ever occurred. Peter's family had to build their lives from scratch as the new government was being set up. I did not know how painful this season was for him for years until he told me a few days ago. When he did, I partly felt ashamed and disappointed in my fellow people from Western Kenya. Still, I was thankful that I had been obedient and faithful to Christ for being hospitable and kind to him, and in a small way, revealed a small light about the people he could have spent his life resenting.   But this pain pushed him to give his best, waking up to study at 4 am daily and revising past papers all through classes 7 and 8, ultimately making him the best student nationally.

Indeed, nothing announces God’s intervention more than thick darkness. Even on those nights when I played melancholic music on repeat, trying helplessly to gasp something valuable out of this life, God was with me. I remember one evening, a few weeks before my salvation, I felt a dark presence forcefully pulling my spirit out of my body. I was not sure about the existence of God then, but I knew undoubtedly that I was about to die. I might have thought of myself as an atheist, but at that time, I knew only God could save me. I rolled into my bed and desperately asked Jesus to help me. And He did. I immediately fell asleep, and the next time I blinked, it was morning, and I wasn’t dead. The unending mercy of God.

Around this time, one of my favorite artists died tragically, and in many ways, that loss triggered a cloud of hopelessness that eventually birthed my spiritual awakening. On 8th September 2018, after finding out about Mac Miller's death, my heart was so broken and numb. No amount of talking could express how I felt. Listening to his albums all day didn’t help either. There was a cry in my heart that desperately wanted to burst out, but I couldn't figure out how or where. But then I read Donna-Claire Chessman's heartbreaking letter to Mac on DJ Booth, an internationally acclaimed music blogging site. She was the biggest Mac Miller fan I knew, and I could feel her pain in every word I read. By the end of reading, I realized she had used creative writing expertly to express her most guarded feelings, and this felt like justice for Mac. And with that realization, I knew I had to write something about him, too. My first article was not about my faith. It was a thank-you letter to Mac Miller, born out of immense hurt and discouragement. Donna-Claire Chessman, an atheist hip-hop blogger with bipolar disorder, is the person who taught me how to hold a pen and express myself through cathartic writing. I remember sending my first article to DJ Booth, and I never expected the CEO to respond so positively. And from that day on, I began to write. And I now realize that God used the unfortunate event to stir something He had placed in me. The ability to create and express using words. Those were the workings of the Spirit of God from a seemingly dry place and through very unlikely people.

Donna-Clare Chessman

Some of my biggest questions about the church are about the subconscious insistence on obscuring this aspect of God. The God who moves over the Earth that lacks form and void and commands light to appear out of darkness. This is the side of God that I first experienced and that touched me so profoundly. I am heartbroken when we reject the movements of the Spirit of God in circumstances that confound our understanding. And when we close our eyes to the transformative power of God's Spirit, we risk turning a spiritual body into a social organization where many whom He is drawing will be excluded. What’s the use of painting someone’s mural if we cover up all their wrinkles? That's what we commonly do. And in cases where they still appear, we quickly reject and malign them. And push them to the background for something more worthy . As if to protect our God from the shame of being associated with the same wrinkles he stood upon to bring the whole picture into existence.

Moreso, as a travel enthusiast, it is easy to fall prey to the selfish tendency of drawing to the beautiful things destinations offer while ignoring their people's struggles. As beautiful as the source of the River Nile was, my most profound experience in Uganda was seeing the torture chambers where Idi Amin’s authoritarian government killed over 200,000 people through electrocution in water and suffocation. In my childhood, I often heard stories of how human bodies were constantly found floating in Lake Victoria, as far as Kenya, during this period. But seeing the dark, stuffy chambers where thousands of people were crowded for torture was beyond heartbreaking. It is interesting that after almost 50 years, a painful piece of writing that was made by a victim’s finger dipped in mud is still visible, “Obote my support for you cost me my life, what about my children?" Only after experiencing this pain can one appreciate how much the country has progressed over the last few decades. One can understand the miracle that one can now freely travel from Kenya to be ministered to by some of the great apostolic voices in our continent, like  Robert Kayanja and Grace Lubega, in a city once of dread and horror.

Idi Amin's Torture Chambers

 It is now easy for Kenyans to flood Kigali to attend Kendrick Lamar's concert. It is easy for them to enjoy breathtaking drives in some of the cleanest cities in the world while in Rwanda. But just beyond the clouds of normalcy lies stories of trepidations that defy understanding. Learning that over a million people were killed in 100 days is tragic. But sometimes, we are so caught up with big numbers that we forget the horrifying experience that every person individually endured. Those were not a million deaths. Those were individual deaths, one after the other, that went on and on until a million people were wiped out. It is only after reading these stories from a personal perspective that one can appreciate the mental anguish of being systematically targeted and killed by people you once considered neighbors and friends. Not with bullets or bombs, but with machetes, clubs, and knives. Slow and painful deaths were happening in unimaginable proportions, sometimes facilitated by church leaders and government officials. In those days, the prayers of men ceased from being petitions for God to keep them alive, but pleas to be hit by clubs instead of being decapitated by knives when their fateful day came. It is impossible to imagine that people who survived such degrees of violence would at one point stand in churches and write books about the love of God and forgiveness. But this is the nature of Yahweh, to draw himself close to those with the most broken of hearts. 

God’s best sermons are not always preached on pulpits. Some of the words God has spoken over me were fulfilled by people I wouldn’t necessarily consider spiritual. And so, I realized that one does not necessarily have to know God to hear or be guided by Him. He is the father of all spirits and can reveal Himself to whoever He wishes whenever He pleases. Even in gross darkness, He always connects with us and guides a part of us. This is the story that we repeatedly see in the Bible. As Pharoah began killing all of Israel’s male newborns, God was protecting and building Moses for their redemption. As Herod killed all the male children in Jerusalem, God was hiding and protecting Jesus in Egypt for His ministry of salvation. Before the restoration of God's Kingdom during Christ’s millennial reign, the Bible reveals that Earth will go through unprecedented tribulation. Even world history reveals this pattern of divine intervention. For instance, as the Nazi regime murdered 6 million Jews during the second world war, God was facilitating the restoration of Israel into their ancestral home after 1874 years in exile. Satan's worst expressions of darkness always precede the great moves of God. And so an easy way of discerning the working of God is to connect with people's struggles and pain,

This piece is is inspired by St. John of the Cross poem, about his existential crisis that led him to the person of God. This is my conviction, that all who endure patiently in a place of dread, hardship, and obscurity, a flicker of light will indeed begin to show. And after the dark night of the soul, the glory of God will surely appear.

Daniel 7: 20-22

20 I also wanted to know about the ten horns on its head and about the other horn that came up, before which three of them fell—the horn that looked more imposing than the others and that had eyes and a mouth that spoke boastfully.

21 As I watched, this horn was waging war against the holy people and defeating them, 22 until the Ancient of Days came and pronounced judgment in favor of the holy people of the Most High, and the time came when they possessed the kingdom.