I do not describe the grief.

Everyone who has lost a child understands that grief and those who have not cannot be adequately prepared for it by description.

I will only say that the grief of losing Carlo was the largest thing that has ever happened to my interior life.

and that the person who emerged from the first years of it was not the same person who entered.

Approximately 2 years after his death in 2008 in the period when the immediate intensity of grief had passed and the long strange project of continuing without him had fully begun.

I entered the first night.

I recognized it immediately.

The dryness, the mechanical quality of prayer that had previously been alive.

The mass attended faithfully, producing nothing detectable.

The rosary set on schedule, words into air.

The growing insistent suspicion that something fundamental had broken.

And because Carlo had told me on a Tuesday evening in 2005 what this was and what it was not, I did not panic.

I did not conclude that my faith was false or that my grief had severed something irreparable.

I sat with the dryness the way he had told me to sit with it.

Continuing the practice, refusing the desperate search for new consolations, accepting the sequidad as the purification it was.

The first night lasted nearly 3 years.

I want to be honest about this.

3 years of dry, empty feeling prayer.

Three years of attending mass with the faith that what was happening in the altar was real regardless of whether it reached me.

Three years of praying a rosary that felt like words spoken into a room from which someone had recently left.

And then gradually something shifted.

Not the consolations of the early years returned.

Carlo had told me they would not simply return.

And they did not.

Something different came.

A quality of prayer that was quieter, less dependent on feeling, more like a relationship between adults than the warm, vivid experience of the early years.

I knew God was present, not because he felt present, but because I had continued showing up for three years in his apparent absence and discovered that absence was not the right word.

I am currently in the second night.

I say this plainly because Carlo asked me to be honest when the time came to tell this story.

The intellectual clarity that was once a feature of my faith is not what it was.

There are aspects of doctrine I sit with in confusion.

There are homalies that do not reach me.

There are passages of scripture that produce questions I cannot answer.

I hold them.

I do not relinquish the faith.

I do not paper over the confusion with false certainty.

I say, “I don’t understand this right now.

I trust the person rather than my current capacity to understand the arguments about the person.

” And I wait.

The third night I have not entered.

I anticipate it with a fear that is not quite fear.

more like the specific gravity of a climber who can see the most difficult section of the route from where she currently is and understands what it will require.

Carlo told me that most souls do not survive the third night spiritually.

He told me what it would take to survive it.

Naked faith, hope against hope, love without consolation.

I am preparing.

Before I tell you about what Carlo’s teaching has meant to the communities where I have shared it, Chef Evan on days with Carlo is in the description below.

I created it specifically to give people a framework for inhabiting each day the way Carlo inhabited it with the practices that sustained him through both consolation and darkness with the approach to prayer that does not depend on feeling.

Seven days one practice at a time.

the right moment to mention it because what I am about to describe is what happens when people understand that their darkness is not abandonment.

I began sharing Carlo’s teaching about the three nights in 2022.

First at a small retreat in Rome and then gradually as the response compelled me more widely, the response has been unlike anything I have experienced in 19 years of speaking about my son.

Not because the teaching is comforting in the conventional sense, it is not.

Being told that you are in a specific stage of spiritual purification that may last for years is not comfort in the way that devotional books with bright covers offer comfort.

It is something more useful than comfort.

It is accurate information about what is actually happening.

A priest in Buenosire told me that in 30 years of pastoral work, the most common form of what he called silent apostasy, the gradual quiet disengagement from faith that happens not through crisis but through attrition occurs in people who have entered the first night without understanding it.

They stop praying because prayer stopped working.

You know, he said they don’t announce they are leaving the church.

They simply stop coming gradually and explain it to themselves as finding more authentic ways of living.

When I explain to them what they were actually in, some of them weep.

They left during the purification.

They left right before the dawn.

A woman in S.

Paulo, I will not name her.

She has given me permission to describe her situation without identification, was in the second night for 4 years, interpreting her intellectual confusion as evidence that she had finally honestly seen through the faith she had held for decades.

She was preparing in her mind to leave.

She attended a retreat where Carlo’s teaching was discussed.

She wrote to me afterward, “I had been doing exactly what your son described, concluding that I had discovered errors rather than understanding that I was being prepared.

I am staying.

I don’t understand everything, but I understand now that not understanding is not the same as being wrong.

” A religious brother in Portugal wrote, “In our formation, we prepare noviceses for many difficulties.

We do not prepare them for the nights.

We expect them to have already navigated the first night before entering.

Many of them have not.

They arrive at the monastery having experienced rich consolation in their prayer life and expecting that religious life will intensify the consolation.

When it doesn’t, when the rigor of the schedule and the structure actually precipitates the first night, they interpret it as evidence that they have made a wrong choice.

We lose many vocations this way.

Carlo’s framework is exactly what formation should include.

What I notice across these years of sharing the teaching is that people recognize it not abstractly specifically.

They recognize their own situation in Carlo’s description, and the recognition itself produces something valuable.

The understanding that what they are in has a name, has a structure, has been navigated before by souls whose lives we venerate, and has a purpose that their darkness could not reveal to them without the map.

Carlo gave me the map in 2005 because he knew I would need it and because he was at 14 years old already thinking about what the people he loved would need when he was not there to tell them in person.

I want to say something directly to every person who is in one of the three nights right now.

If your prayer has gone dry and empty and you have been attending mass faithfully for months or years feeling nothing and you have been telling yourself that this means something is wrong with your faith or with you, you are in the first night.

What is happening to you is not disaster.

It is the specific purification that God performs on souls he intends to take deeper.

Continue the practice.

Do not search for the consolation.

Trust that what is being built in the dryness is a faith more durable than the one that required warmth to sustain it.

If your intellectual clarity has dimmed, if doctrines that were once clear have become confused, if you find yourself holding questions you cannot answer and sitting with a faith that feels less certain than it once did, you may be in the second night.

Do not conclude that you have discovered errors.

Hold the confusion with humility.

Maintain the practice.

Trust that the person is not the same thing as your current capacity to understand the arguments about the person.

And if you are somewhere deeper, if God seems not merely distant but absent, if prayer meets not silence but void, if you have been crying into a darkness that offers no echo, if you are in the third night and do not know it, naked faith, hope against hope, love without consolation.

These are not platitudes.

They are the specific costly acts that the mystics say are the only things that carry a soul through.

They are what was on Calvary and they are what Carlo at 14 years old understood with a clarity that took the great mystics decades of interior life to articulate.

Darkness is not abandonment.

It is purification.

And the God who permits the darkness is present in it working in silence precisely because silence is what the work requires.

Leave me a comment.

Tell me which night you are in.

You do not need to explain.

You can simply say first or second or third or I’m not sure.

I will read it.

The community that gathers here is I believe partially composed of souls in these nights who do not know what they are in and who need to know that others are in them too.

Share this with someone who has grown quiet about their faith, whose prayer life you know has dimmed, who has stopped talking about God with the same ease they once had.

They may be leaving during the purification.

Tell them what Carlo told me.

The dawn is coming.

Stay.

St.Carlo Audis, who read San Juan de la Cruz at 14 and understood what he was reading, who sat across from his mother in the living room of their apartment in Milan on a Tuesday evening and gave her the map she would need for the years she would spend without him.

Pray for us who are in the nights.

Pray for those in the first night who believe the dryness is failure.

Pray for those in the second night who believe the confusion is discovery.

Pray for those in the third night who are learning to love in the dark.

You knew what the dark was even before you lived it.

Teach us what you knew.

Amen.

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