The desert that becomes home

Q: Archbishop J, what is the difference between drift and darkness? 

One Friday morning, as a seminarian, I took the first bus from Mt St Benedict into Port of Spain. As I did every week, I was going to a caring centre for people living on the streets—a ministry of the Living Water Community I had helped to establish before entering seminary. I would serve the food and, while the people waited for breakfast, lead a Lectio Divina.

Afterwards, on my journey back up the hill, a question came to me—quietly, almost casually, which made it more disturbing rather than less.

If God sees the poor as His privileged ones, why is it that when they ask for things real and necessary—food, shelter, dignity, healing—He seems not to answer, yet when I ask for a bus to arrive, He seems to answer?

It was a simple question. But as it formed, it pulled a thread that unravelled everything—my spiritual certainties, my sense of how God operated in the world. I was plunged into a darkness I could not name, and the question stayed with me for 16 years.

What the darkness is—and is not

St John of the Cross gave this experience a name: the dark night of the soul. He understood it not as God’s absence but as God’s deeper work, a purification of faith that strips away its dependence on feeling, consolation, and reward, until what remains is trust itself, bare and undecorated.

It does not mean God has withdrawn, but that He is drawing the soul into a deeper, more mature relationship—one that no longer depends on emotional experience to sustain it.

This is the disciple’s participation in the Paschal Mystery at its most demanding depth. Christ Himself descended into the darkness of Gethsemane—the silence of Holy Saturday, the apparent abandonment of the Cross.

The desert that the disciple enters is terrain Christ Himself has walked, and the same Spirit who sustained Him through His descent sustains disciples through theirs, holding what cannot be felt and forming what cannot be seen.

The prophet Hosea speaks of this desert with extraordinary tenderness: “I will allure her… I will lead her into the desert and speak to her heart” (Hosea 2:14). This is not a God who sends His people into desolation to punish them, but one who leads them there because it is the only place quiet enough for the deepest conversation.

Everything that filled the space between the heart and God has been cleared away; the noise settles, and the heart begins to hear at a depth it could not reach before. What feels like losing everything is often the beginning of finding Him.

Drift is not the same as darkness

Drift is the gradual loosening of the practices that hold us. It describes one’s slow distancing from prayer and community, and a lack of attentiveness when external structures fall away, or a competing vision quietly takes the centre.

It is often invisible until it has gone quite far. It does not feel like a crisis from the inside; it feels like a reasonable adjustment, until one day you hear something in yourself that shocks you into seeing how far you have travelled from where you began.

The dark night is more interior and more demanding. Here, the practices are maintained, but consolation withdraws. Fidelity is sustained in the absence of feeling; God is present in a way that cannot be felt but can, over time, be trusted. It does not arise from neglect; it arrives, often unexpectedly, in the middle of faithful practice; not a sign of failure but of deeper engagement, in its own strange way.

Both are part of the journey, and both share a common medicine: the faithful recommitment to the practices that have kept the channel open.

In drift, they restore what was lost; in the dark night, they hold what is being transformed. This is why they must be built in the good seasons—already habitual, already trusted—before the drift or darkness comes.

The practices that sustain the turning

Conversion is not sustained by intention alone. It requires structure, not the structure of legalism, but of love. Jesus teaches these practices in the Sermon on the Mount, quietly, for God alone.

Prayer is how the turning is renewed each day. In the desert seasons, when life feels empty, and God feels absent, fidelity to the practice is itself the act of love: we show up not because we feel His presence but because we trust it. Lord, I am here, spoken into silence, without answer, is not the absence of prayer but prayer at its most essential. Beneath it, the Holy Spirit is already interceding, praying in us when we do not know how.

Fasting protects the direction of our lives by weakening the grip of what competes with it. Disordered appetite—for food, comfort, distraction, control—quietly colonises the heart if left unchecked. Fasting keeps the body in the posture of seeking even when the soul cannot feel what it seeks. Then, the flesh joins the spirit in its turning.

Almsgiving ensures that the turning toward God also becomes a turning toward others. Jesus identifies Himself with the poor: “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” (Matt 25:40).

My Friday mornings at the caring centre were an act of almsgiving that became an act of formation. The question that broke open my dark night arose precisely from sitting with the poor and being unable to reconcile their suffering with my easy prayers.

Reconciliation is the sacramental provision for the moments when we lose our way entirely. And we will. Jesus tells it perfectly in the Parable of the Prodigal Son: the father runs towards him before the speech is delivered: restoration preceding explanation. This is what the sacrament enacts: not a God waiting to weigh our guilt, but a Father already running towards us.

Beneath all four stands the Eucharist—the Body of Christ given as food for the journey, the Real Presence that does not withdraw when consolation does, the one encounter the desert cannot touch.

From desert to home

Sustained over time, these practices do what effort alone never could: they transform the landscape of the interior life. What began as a place of stripping slowly comes to feel like home; the place of desolation becomes the place of encounter.

This is the Holy Spirit’s longest work in the disciple, the slow movement from obligation to desire: from Lord, I am here, spoken into silence, to Lord, I am here, spoken from a heart that has learned, in the darkness, that here is exactly where it wants to be.

Julian of Norwich received her visions while gravely ill, enclosed in a cell amid the Black Death. From inside that darkness, she received the word: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” She was given no explanation, only an assurance—the same word spoken into every desert season, before the evidence is available.

If you are reading this in the middle of a darkness that has lasted longer than you expected—a question unanswered, a prayer met with no felt response—then what the seminary years were for one person may be what this season is for you.

Not abandonment. Formation. The practices that feel hollow are holding something you cannot yet see.

Key Message:

The dark night is not God’s absence but His deeper work. When consolation withdraws, fidelity to prayer, fasting, almsgiving, and the sacraments keeps the channel open, and the Holy Spirit forms in the darkness a trust that the consoled life could never produce. In time, the desert itself becomes home.

Action Step:

Choose one practice to hold faithfully through the next dry season—even a single line of prayer offered each night into the silence: “Lord, I am here.” Do not wait to feel His presence before you show up. Showing up is the love.

Scripture for Reflection:

Hosea 2:14