39th Emmaus Walk

We live in a world unrecognizable from even a year ago. Wars rage across continents, people flee their homes in desperate waves, and uncertainty hangs over the future like a storm that will not break. In times like these, the human heart naturally cries out: Where is God?

But before we look outward for answers, we must look inward — because much of the turmoil we see in our world is, painfully, self-inflicted.

We behave poorly toward one another. We fail to recognize the faces across from us — across the border, across the aisle, across the street — as our brothers and sisters. We have forgotten our shared humanity. We build walls where we should build bridges, and we wage wars where we should wage peace. The displacement of peoples, the fracturing of nations, the cruelty we inflict on one another — these are not merely the consequences of political failures. They are the consequences of spiritual ones.

Mother Teresa understood this with piercing clarity. She taught that the reason there is no peace in the world is because there is no peace within ourselves and within our homes. Peace is not first a political achievement — it is a personal one. It begins at the kitchen table, in the marriage bed, in the way a parent speaks to a child. When the interior life is disordered, the exterior world reflects that disorder. The chaos we see globally is, in many ways, the sum total of our private brokenness multiplied across billions of lives.

This is why the dark night of the soul, as described by St. John of the Cross, is far more than a spiritual concept confined to monasteries and prayer rooms. It is a physical concept and a lived reality. It plays out in refugee camps and bombed-out cities. It lives in the grief of a mother who has lost a child to violence, in the despair of a man who has lost his home, his country, his dignity. The darkness is not abstract — it has an address, a face, a body that aches.

St. John of the Cross described the soul's passage through desolation not as punishment but as purification — a stripping away of everything false so that what is true and eternal might remain. That process is happening not just in individual souls today, but collectively, in civilizations. We are being invited, perhaps forced, to examine what we have built and why it keeps collapsing.

St. Teresa of Ávila, in The Interior Castle, described the soul passing through shadowed and disorienting rooms before reaching the innermost chamber where God dwells in perfect peace. The journey inward is not a retreat from the world — it is the most urgent work for the world. Because a person who has found interior peace carries that peace outward. A home rooted in love becomes a community rooted in love. And communities rooted in love do not start wars.

What St. John, St. Teresa, and Mother Teresa all understood is this: the darkness — whether of the soul or of the world — is not the end of the story. It is an invitation. God does not cause our suffering, but He enters it. He walks in the rubble with us, closer than breath, faithful when all else crumbles.

The night of our world is long. But it is not without God. And it will not last forever. Yet waiting is not enough — we all have a part to play in ending the darkness, both within ourselves and in the world we live in. That responsibility is mutual, personal, and corporate. It belongs to each of us and to all of us together. Let us pray that in this season of penance and prayer, that is precisely what we choose to do.