“A Surfeit of Sweet Joy”
On March 16, 1912, Padre Pio wrote to Padre Agostino, “Sometimes I seem to be on the point of dying of a surfeit of sweet joy!” Five days later he wrote:
Only God knows what sweetness I experienced yesterday … especially after Mass…. If only now, when I still feel almost all of his sweetness, I could bury these consolations within my heart, I would certainly be in paradise! How happy Jesus makes me! How sweet his spirit is! … He continues to love me and draw me closer to himself. He has forgotten my sins, and … remembers only his own mercy. Morning by morning he comes into my poor heart and pours out all the effusions of his goodness!8
On April 18, he wrote: “Oh, how delightful the conversation was that I held this morning with Paradise! … Things impossible to translate into human language…. The heart of Jesus and my heart were — allow me to use this expression — fused. The joy in me was so intense and so profound that I was no longer able to contain myself, and my face was bathed in the most delightful tears!”9 On July 7, 1913, he said that Christ had appeared to him and “immersed my soul in such peace and contentment that all the sweetest delights of this world, even if they were doubled, pale in comparison to even a drop of this blessedness!”10
These spiritual “sweetnesses,” as Padre Pio called them, only increased his desire for God, a desire that he knew could never be consummated in this world. Because of this, he longed for death. Writing to Padre Agostino on August 9, 1912, Padre Pio declared: “My spirit runs the risk of separating itself from my body because I cannot love Jesus on earth. Yes, my soul is wounded with love for Jesus. I am sick with love. I continuously experience the bitter pain of the fire that burns but does not consume.”11 On December 29, 1912, reflecting on how many souls in the past year had “entered into the house of Jesus, there to remain forever,” he exclaimed: “Life here below is a bitter grief to me, a life of exile that is a torment so bitter to me that I can scarcely bear it. The thought that any moment I could lose Jesus distresses me in an unspeakable way.”12
In one of his most sublime descriptions, in which he seemingly describes a “near-death experience,” Padre Pio wrote eloquently to Padre Agostino:
After my poor little soul has sighed for the moment of departure, after it has come several times to the limit of life, after it has relished the sweetness of death and has suffered all the struggle and torment that come from nature reclaiming its rights, after my soul has left my body, even to the extent of losing sight of this world below, and after I have almost touched the portals of the heavenly Jerusalem with my hand, I reawaken in this place of exile, becoming once more a pilgrim, always capable of being lost, and a new kind of agony seizes me that is worse than death itself and worse than any kind of martyrdom…. Alas, dear Father, how terribly hard this mortal life is! As long as it lasts, eternal life is uncertain. O cruel life, enemy of the Love that loves us infinitely more than we can possibly love or understand him … why do you not come to an end?
He longed to enter at once into “that eternal rest, where I shall live forever, lost in that immense ocean of good … and enjoying that by which He Himself is blessed! … Ah, dear Father, when will that long-awaited day come when my poor little soul will break up like a foundering ship in that immense ocean of eternal truth, where we will no longer be able to sin, or be aware that creatures are endowed with free will, because there all miseries are ended and we will no longer be able to withdraw our eyes from the limitless beauty nor cease to delight in God in one perpetual ecstasy of sweetest love!”13
The Dark Night
Not only was Padre Pio in agony at being separated from God, but he was also devastated by his own sinfulness, as he perceived it. His letters to Padre Agostino and Padre Benedetto abound with references to his own worthlessness. This seems to be the essence of the dark night that he experienced all his life, which alternated or even perhaps coexisted with his experiences of divine sweetness.
In May 1914, speaking of the “deep darkness … thickening on the horizon of my spirit,” Padre Pio confessed:
I know that no one is spotless in the sight of the Lord, but my impurity is without bounds before him. In the present state in which the merciful Lord, in his infinite wisdom and justice, condescends to raise the veil and reveal my secret shortcomings to me in all their malignity and hideousness, I see myself so deformed that it seems as if my very clothing shrinks in horror of my defilement!14
Not only was Padre Pio horrified by his actual sins, he was filled with terror at his potential to sin. In September 1915, he wrote to Padre Agostino that “the thought of going astray and … offending God fills me with terror. It paralyzes my limbs, and both body and soul feel as if they are being squeezed in a powerful vise. My bones feel as if they were being dislocated … crushed and ground up.”15 All this at the mere thought of sinning!
Padre Pio said the agony his soul experienced in this “dark night” was so great that he could not conceive of it being much less than “the atrocious pains that the damned suffer in hell.” Of these experiences, which occurred frequently throughout his life, Padre Pio said, “Such torture does not last long, nor could it do so, because, if I remain alive at all while it lasts, it is through a special favor from God!”16 In various letters, he speaks of being “mad with anguish” and not knowing whether he is in hell, purgatory, or earth, and of being in “an endless desert of darkness, despondency, and insensibility, a land of death, a night of abandonment, a cavern of desolation, in which my poor soul finds itself far from God and alone with itself.”17
Sometime later, writing to a woman who was suffering similar trials, Padre Pio declared that her sufferings were a grace ordained by God “to exalt your soul to the perfect union of love.” Before attaining to this union, a Christian needs to be purged of her defects and her attachments to things both natural and supernatural. This is necessary because every “natural inclination and mode of behavior” must be surrendered to God so as to be transformed to “work in another way more divine than human.”18 He went on to describe how God purges the soul, totally emptying it of itself. All self-centeredness must be replaced by “a new way of thinking and wishing that is simply and purely supernatural and celestial.” In order to arrive at this state, the soul must be subjected to this painful trial whereby it is purged by an intense light that reveals faults hitherto unseen, showing God not as a loving Father but as a terrifying Judge. The soul feels as if God were casting it out. It is through this passive purgation that God unites the soul to himself “with a chain of love.” Yet this process “produces a darkness thicker than that which enshrouded the Egyptians at the time of the Exodus.” This is because the intellect is incapable of receiving the light and is indisposed by many imperfections and weaknesses. The “dark night” affects the intellect, the higher powers of the soul, and even the physical appetites.19
This “purgative light” reveals to the soul its own “nothingness, its sins, its defects, its wretchedness.” It “eradicates every bit of esteem and conceit and complacency, to the very roots of the soul.”20 It also prepares the will for the joy of mystical union with God. Moreover, the purgative light shows the soul its absolute dependency upon God for its salvation and its inability to do anything to save itself. Through this light, Padre Pio maintained, the Christian realizes that he cannot repay God’s love for him, that there is nothing naturally within him except falseness and deformity, and that God is the only fountain of truth and grace and love, the only source of salvation.
Even though Padre Pio could explain and analyze his trial in detail,