If you are in the dark, it does not mean that you have failed and that you have taken some terrible misstep. For many years I thought my questions and my doubt and my sense of God's absence were all signs of my lack of faith, but now I know this is the way the life of the spirit goes.
The task of making peace ... is not just a matter of realpolitik; it is a matter also of spirit. It requires us not only to deal with the practicalities of our place in the cosmic order of things. We must know who we are and what we are doing -- know not only with the intellect, but with our whole being, in the way that mystics have always achieved the knowledge that has given our species its deepest guidance.