Babbling through the dark night of the soul

Several months ago, we took this picture from our balcony window, straight down into the courtyard. It's a funeral procession.

Today I started reading The Ascent of Mount Carmel/The Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross. After living ‘cross-culturally,’ I relate to this quote in the prologue more than I would have before:

“[Unhelpful spiritual leaders] are like the builders of Babel, who, when told to furnish suitable material, gave and applied other very different material, because they understood not the language, and thus nothing was done.”

I never thought of the fact that they probably tried to keep their gigantic building project going, but because of the language difficulties, it became impossible!

I especially related today while in China Mobile. Savana’s cell phone was stolen near the end of January at the place where the youth group was having their retreat. The thief used up all our remaining money on our simcards. Within a few days of the theft, I went to China Mobile’s office next to the college and Christine (the student we’ve mentioned before) went along to help. We told them the phone was stolen and to cancel the number. Long story short, they didn’t cancel the number. The thief got another 272 RMB to spend on Savana’s stolen phone. And ours didn’t work again. I went twice this week to make sure the number got canceled and try to get the money back. The language barrier makes this almost impossible. The only reason it got this far was because the guy helping me did have limited English (better than my extremely limited Chinese). No dice on getting the money back though...‘nothing was done.'

I realized that I had heard St. John of the Cross’ poem ‘Dark Night of the Soul’ before. Loreena McKennit, whose music our family likes a lot, put it to music. It describes soul's journey to be united with God.

You can hear it here if you are interested: Dark Night of the Soul