Chronicling the five stages of faith

1. Awakening
The person awakens to spiritual things and to the presence and love of God. This can happen suddenly, in an instant conversion, or it can take place over months or years: The person becomes aware of God's love as never before, and the experience comes with feelings of joy and even exaltation.

2. Purgation.
Having experienced the love and holiness of God, the believer recognizes that she is out of sync with God. Thus begins a period of mortification, the killing off of desires, habits, and states of mind that get in the way of God. Often serious disciplines are taken up -- longer prayer, fasting, self-examination retreats, sexual chastity, relinquishing possessions -- to conquer spiritual sloth and pride. The period is characterized by moral effort and spiritual pain.

3. Illumination.
Now more morally and spiritually honed, the believer becomes joyfully aware of God at a new level. The knowing in the awakening phase is like enjoying the light of a full moon on a cloudless night; like basking in the noontime sun on a summer day. Many, if not most, people do not proceed beyond stage 3.

4. Dark night of the soul.
The most terrible experience is sometimes experienced at various points in each stage, and sometimes as an extended period of its own. Sometimes called "mystic death," it entails the final and complete purification of the self. It takes its name from a book by John of the Cross, who described the experience.

The chief characteristic is absolute loss of God, a sense that the sun has been completely obliterated. Desolation and despair are the usual emotions the seeker experiences. It isn't that God literally withdraws, but he does withdraw every emotional benefit the seeker has so far derived from faith. The seeker continues through the spiritual loneliness knowing that this "spiritual crucifixion" is necessary: One must learn to seek God for God's sake, not for the sake of the happiness God brings.

5. Union.
In this stage, the seeker enjoys God not as an illumination, in which God shines down upon her; here she becomes one with God. Again, this is not one in the sense that the seeker is destroyed, but one in the sense that husband and wife become one. This stage is often called "Mystical Marriage."

In my experience, this goes in cycles. In the sense of salvation, the Old Man dies once, but in the long haul, his death is a prolonged and painful thing. He appears to die, but he is only asleep, and when God appears to withdraw, the Old Man stirs and wakens again, and the flesh cries out in rebellion over the unfairness of God and his wanton cruelty.

Eventually we submit those areas to God again and find that completion comes in the Giver and not in the gifts, and we find that we can experience the Giver by walking in his ways and being like him to others around us. That's what the list refers to as unity, but it never lasts. God is very jealous; he does not share us with anyone, not even with ourselves, and he will not be content until we are wholly is. Each drink from Christ's cup is a deeper and more bitter draught, but it also fills us with more of his character and life.

I also have to say in all honesty that I think I've only been through that stage once, when my son returned to his birth parents. There have been bad times before, but none of them ever came close to the agony that I went through in the months leading up to and following Chris' departure.

I say that this period is something I would not exchange because, now that I feel I'm finally starting to see the sunlight and feel the breeze again, I've also getting a sense of what I've learned. It's hard to explain in a nutshell, and I don't feel like trying to reduce it to words again at this moment, but essentially it's been a time for depending upon Christ in greater amounts, for embracing the Cross to the bitter end, learning to love others endlessly and experiencing Christ's presence amid meaningless suffering. If I have suffered for doing what is right, and if my son has suffered for no reason at all, then so has Christ. He not only understands, but he shares in our suffering and we have shared in his. And though the experience still makes me cry, that's something I wouldn't trade for anything.

Rather than seeing the stages -- especially the last two -- as exclusive options, I'm thinking of them more of something that we reach by degrees. After the terrors of the dark night come new depths of understanding and closeness to God that bring us closer to what I would call "wholeness" but is labeled here as "unity." One never experiences the entire thing in this lifetime, but by degrees and by the grace of God we start to find our fulfillment in him and not in what he gives us. That's beyond the euphoria of Stage 3 -- what I call "infatuation with God" -- which is why I didn't check that option.

Grief and pain have a way of wakening us to a new understanding of Christ's love and mercy, and I would say anyone who has gone through the long dark night -- anyone who knows that spot where Despair sinks her hook into your heart; anyone who remembers being at that dark and lonely place where there was every sign that God had abandoned them but still said, "Not my will but yours be done"; anyone who has cried out into the void for an answer, for a reason, for hope and heard only the dispassionate response "Follow me," and done just that -- anyone who has survived God's violent love, at some level, through the grace of God, has found wholeness in him.

My own limited experience indicates that the roads to Calvary and Zion are one and the same, and that the more closely we follow Christ, the more it is going to hurt. In the end, the Cross will kill us, but by that time, we will be so full of the light of Christ that his grace will carry us through.

I've been through the Long Dark Night, and it ain't pretty. But I wouldn't trade that pain or grief for any other joy.