Laurie CASSIDY and M. Shawn COPELAND, editors. Desire, Darkness, and Hope: Theology in a Time of Impasse: Engaging the Thought of Constance FitzGerald, OCD. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2021. pp. xii + 463. $44.95 pb. ISBN 978-0814688014. Reviewed by Christopher PRAMUK, Regis University, Denver, CO 80005

In her now-classic 1984 essay, “Impasse and Dark Night,” Carmelite theologian Constance FitzGerald set herself a task that would occupy her for the next four decades: to mine the classic resources of the Christian mystical tradition in order to illuminate “the integration of contemplation and social commitment” (77). As the book jacket suggests, FitzGerald has long been “a well-known secret” among Catholic spiritual writers and theologians. I first heard her speak at the Catholic Theological Society of America’s 2009 meeting. Her address, “From Impasse to Prophetic Hope” (425-53), had the assembly mesmerized. This volume brings together that powerful address, the seminal 1984 essay, and five other articles by FitzGerald, plus constructive responses to her work by theologians M. Shawn Copeland, Colette Ackerman, Laurie Cassidy, Maria Teresa Morgan, Susie Paulik Babka, Roberto S. Goizueta, Margaret R. Pfeil, Alex Mikulich, Bryan N. Massingale, Andrew Prevot, and Mary Catherine Hilkert.

Whether beating our fists against the walls of white supremacy, patriarchy in the church, the COVID-19 pandemic, or climate-change denialism and the impinging horrors of a burning planet, FitzGerald and her interlocutors dare to counsel that the hard path to liberation—the way into the mystical-prophetic encounter with God—resides precisely in and through these dark spaces. “It is only in the process of bringing the impasse to prayer, to the perspective of the God who loves us, that our society will be freed, healed, changed, brought to paradoxical new visions, and freed for nonviolent, selfless, liberating action, freed, therefore, for community on this planet earth” (94). Following the “dark night” theopoetics of John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, FitzGerald reminds us that there is a death involved here, not least a dying and radical rebirth in our experience of and prevailing images of God.

Indeed, I was especially moved by FitzGerald’s development of the biblical Wisdom-Sophia tradition, the identification of Jesus from the New Testament writers forward with loving Sophia, the merging of Christ crucified with a suffering God in the throes of human anguish. Crucial to this identification is a “participatory epistemology” (417-18) in which women’s experiences of the divine presence in impasse—a deep feeling for God over against the rapacious gods of patriarchy—take center stage as locus theologicus. “Trying to chase that old [white] man out of my head,” says Celie, in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. “But this is hard work, let me tell you. He been there so long, he don’t want to budge” (97). Numerous contributors’ essays build from FitzGerald’s thesis that the hidden movements of God in the world, known most vividly to the tradition as Jesus-Sophia, are “the crucible in which our God images and language will be transformed and a feminine value system and social fabric generated” (99).

FitzGerald is not alone, of course, in developing this line of thought, feeling, and re-imagining of God’s relationship with human beings from within the dance of all creation. She joins her vision of Sophia to that of many others, some named, others unnamed in this volume—Sandra Schneiders, Elizabeth Johnson, Dorothee Soelle, James D. G. Dunn, Marcus Borg, Melissa Raphael, Thomas Merton, Louis de Montfort—to arrive at what may be, for some readers, a surprising conclusion: that “Sophia is the one clear, significant God gestalt emerging out of a long dark night of broken symbols.” (423) The tradition of Wisdom-Sophia, “so long muted and marginalized but embodied with such prophetic power in the mysticism of John of the Cross, will reassure us and enable theology to speak anew about Jesus Christ.”

In her introduction to this remarkable volume, M. Shawn Copeland notes that theologians for decades have lamented the gap between theology and spirituality, or what we say in our faith statements about God and what we sense of God’s palpable nearness in the deepest contours of human experience. Bridging this rupture must begin, as Copeland observes, in “the minds and hearts and prayer and lives of theologians” (14). If theologians are to speak, write, and teach credibly of God’s abiding presence in the spiritual journey of humankind, they must travel that stumbling journey themselves, “in that country of the heart whose native language is prayer” (14, citing William Hill). Rarely have I seen a book that so courageously engages God in the darkest nights of human experience as does this collection, where personal, societal, and planetary impasse meets the anguished human desire for a way out, a way forward into hope, the realization, if only through a glass darkly, of the seemingly impossible.