As we hear the gospel read, "the place of outer darkness", a place of anger and sadness, may, at first, sound devastating. We know that God is Love, and from our perspective today, this doesn’t sound very loving. I wonder, however, if desolation was the message that Jesus intended with this parable.

Could this so-called outer darkness be what John of the Cross called the “Dark Night of the Soul” when he experienced it in his spiritual journey on his way to the wedding feast? Might it be a time for letting go of our attachments to the world around us, a time for being stretched to come to know God in intangible absence as well as tangible presence, a time to awaken to a new level of spiritual growth?

Could this outer darkness symbolize the time of gestation, of womb-time, where the seed planted in the darkness begins its slow journey to fruition in the light of God’s Love? Could the outer darkness be what the mystics through the ages have tried to describe for us with words we find too hard to understand without having had their experience? Could it be that in the outer darkness we will find the wedding robe prepared for us to wear to the wedding banquet?

The feast celebrating our eternal union with God awaits our being ready and willing to participate. I suspect that taking a leaf from Paul’s epistle and thinking on whatever is true, honorable, just, pure, pleasing, commendable, and anything worthy of praise will ease the way through the outer darkness, whatever it may be for each of us.