A part of the journey with Job to emerge from “the night of faith”

“If this continues, we will put him in an artificial coma. » Brought to the hospital on a stretcher by the firefighters for an attack of cardiac arrhythmia, I heard these worrying words from a doctor. They keep me; I have to stay in bed, because at home, I have fallen down several times, out of breath. The weeks pass, the exams follow one another. I have always had a taste for God: I pray a lot. But… Something is broken. Nothing compares to the moments of low fervor known in the past. I feel disconnected. It’s over.

To my daughter-in-law Nancy who supports me with her visits, I ask to bring the Bible which is dear to me. “The old Bible? – Yes, that one, the Jerusalem Bible, given to me by my mother. » Certain verses are underlined; sometimes, in the margins, a “yes” expresses the enthusiasm felt when reading in the past. The TV in my room can stay off: I’m alone there. I read. First, the book of Job, the righteous sufferer, and of course, the book of Tehillim (the Psalms in Hebrew). Especially Psalm 22 (21), weeping: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? » From the deepest, I cry out to Adonai* I beg. Nothing. The silence.

After a month, I was told about an operation: electric shocks to the chest, under anesthesia. What if I don’t get up from the operating table? I stay in the hospital for another month, still in bed. But my “night of faith” does not dissipate. I summon those who testified to it: Thérèse of Avila and John of the Cross, our beloved little Thérèse, the one from Lisieux, who experienced in the last months of her life “the dark night”, “the night of nothingness”; Mother Teresa of Calcutta, for fifty years; and Edith Stein, Simone Weil, the philosopher, who wrote “My God, help me to become nothing”, finally, Etty Hillesum: “I will help you, my God, not to die out in me. » The night of faith is not lack of faith.

My old Bible accompanies me to the nursing home where I learn to walk again. Slowly, in a month. At the same time as I overcome my fear of staggering, the psalms, the Torah, become tasty again. And now ? The ordeal changed me. I see everything differently. My faith was strengthened. I am experiencing a kind of resurrection. I can die, I’m not afraid.

* “My Lord”. Word used to read “YHWH” in the Bible, the unspeakable name of God.