And just when you feel like you have reached the blackest, sickest darkness, that is the time to lean in even further. When God feels out of reach, your only move is to become still, keep your ear to the ground and wait. The waiting itself will change you. And the answers are somewhere there in the dark and stillness.

The caterpillar submits to a kind of death and forms itself into a chrysalis by instinct. If it had consciousness, it might know it was going to emerge light enough to fly. If it had consciousness, it might also fear, knowing it had to “die” for a certain number of days and be in utter darkness. The caterpillar, just like us, is unaware of how long the metamorphosis will last. It takes as long as it takes. The waiting feels like an eternity when you do not know how long the sentence is. When it ends, that is when you learn how long the transformation was always going to take.

You were always going to emerge refreshed, in all your beauty. You just had to enter into the ugly, gooey, sticky darkness to get there. You must be prepared to enter into that darkness and go to sleep (die) to experience transformation.

We are in such a darkness now as a people – a transformational period. We will look back some day and see how long it took and what we were becoming. At that point, it will all become clear, but for now, the dark is just dark. We don’t yet know what we are becoming. Richard Rohr says we are experiencing an apocalypse. An apocalypse is not the end of the world. It is the end of the world as we know it. The word apocalypse means “unveiling.” We are in the middle of a transformation and that is when it is the darkest.

It is tempting to think God is somewhere other than this darkness. In truth, God is the transformation itself and the substance moving ever so slowly to produce what is to be. God is the substance that lubricates and holds all the potential energy of change. The only thing we can do is enter into it and pay attention.