One dark night
Fired with love’s urgent longings
—Ah, the sheer grace!—
I went out unseen,
My house being now all stilled.
(St. John of the Cross, The Dark Night, in St. John of the Cross: Selected Writings, The Classics of Western Spirituality, edited by Kieran Kavanaugh, 1987, 162.)
Background
The Dark Night of the Soul is a very auspicious term for a very common experience: the overwhelming sense of the absence of God which may come open the spiritual practitioner completely unaware when all seems to be going well.
Have you ever found it suddenly hard to pray? I don’t mean to ask whether you were distracted the last time you prayed. Rather, have you ever gone from a time of feeling spiritually alive and energetic, truly enjoying spiritual reading, prayer, liturgy, and religious discussion/activities to feeling absolutely dead inside? Reading the Bible become a chore (and a bore). Your prayers feel like they hit the ceiling and bounce back at you. You just don’t see any purpose in the religious side of life. What may be worse is that you can’t find any reason for it. One day you were fine, and the world was awash in the radiant colors of God. The next day…everything was grey and dismal. St. John of the Cross says it like this: “it is at the time they are going about their spiritual exercises with delight and satisfaction, when in their opinion the sun of divine favor is shining most brightly on them, that God darkens all this light and closes the door and spring of the sweet spiritual water they were tasting as often and as long as they desired.” (p. 179)
Does that sound familiar?
On the one hand, you may be depressed. If you suspect that might be the case, please consult with a therapist or mental health professional.
On the other hand, you might be entering the dark night of the soul. To consider this concept appropriately, I need to outline briefly how Christian mystics have historically viewed the spiritual life. They divided out three stages of the spiritual life – for talking purposes. In real life, these stages overlap and interpenetrate — often to a frustrating degree. Anyway, the first stage is purgation or purification in which the Christian is changing her or his life, walking away from bad habits (i.e., sin) and setting up good habits (i.e., spiritual practices). As these good habits take hold, the person moves into the stage of illumination where holiness increases and a sense of God’s presence begins to be felt. Most mystical experiences occur within this stage, but these moments are fleeting and transitory. The final stage is known as union, and it is characterized by a continual settled sense of God’s presence. One’s life and actions seem to take on the qualities of effortless goodness that are often associated with the life of Jesus Christ, as recorded in the New Testament. The recognized saints and mystics of the church are often held up as role models of this stage.
Now, before going any further, I must reiterate that I’m vastly simplifying these stages for quick description. All of life is messy, and the spiritual life is messy right alongside of everything else.
Why?
St. John of the Cross has an interesting metaphor to explain why the Dark Night happens: “…when God sees that they have grown a little, He weans them from the sweet breast so that they might be strengthened, lays aside their swaddling bands, and puts them down from His arms that they may grow accustomed to walking by themselves.” (p. 180)
In other words, St. John of the Cross noted that between the first and second stages that many experienced a time of transition that was utterly spiritually dry (he also saw an analogous period between the second and third stages that he called the dark night of the spirit). God appears to be absent…
…because he is beckoning the Christian to seek him out as he “recedes.” Think of it like a child just learning how to walk. His Papa or Mama sits a little bit away from him to encourage him to walk to them. Gradually, they move further away, maybe even all the way across the room to urge him to practice this new-found skill and let his little legs grow strong.
In the dark night of the soul, God is doing the same with us although all our feelings tell us that he is absent.
Why is that important?
I feel very strongly about communicating this concept to others. Before I read St. John of the Cross, I went through the dark night more than once. I took turns thinking I was crazy, had committed some unpardonable sin, or that God really didn’t exist. I would end up slowly, after months or years, to gain interest in the spiritual again just to have the whole process repeat itself. So, if you have recognized your own experience in any of these descriptions, take heart! This is the normal Christian life.
Also, it may seem a bit strange to read about the Dark Night as a mystical experience. After all, isn’t it really the absence of experience? I bring up the Dark Night here because I think it is vital to deal with the negative sides of mystical experience. While I plan to write a future page on mystical experiences that contain negative content (e.g., sense of the void/abyss, demonic forces, etc.), the most common negative experience in mystical experience is not to have any experience at all.
What are the signs of going through the Dark Night?
Of course, there are many reasons why spirituality and religion may suddenly seem “hard,” so how can we “test” to see if we’re really in the dark night. St. John gives us three major signs.
(1) You might be in the Dark Night if…
… you get no joy from seeking God and get no joy from going “the way of the world”
Note: Even almost five hundred years ago, John realized this could also be depression (which he called “melancholy”), so you can’t just depend on this sign. You have to have the others too.
(2) You might be in the Dark Night if…
… you still remember the golden “good times” with God and desperately play for God to return to you. (cf., Psalm 42)
(3) You might be in the Dark Night if…
…you find it extremely difficult or next-to-impossible to employ your own sense of interior imagination.
Note: Sometimes this third sign manifests as an inability to concentrate on any imagination. Your imagination can’t settle down. It’s like a swiftly flowing river, and nothing really holds your attention.
Also, it often feels like this time will never end to those who are going through the Dark Night in the same way that it may difficult to imagine the peak of the mountain when one is in the valley.
What if I don’t ever experience the Dark Night?
While the Dark Night is a common experience, it isn’t a ubiquitous experience. Don’t feel like a “failure” if this never happens. God calls whomever God wills whenever God wills to the Dark Night. Some may ever persist in the “sunshine” of God. That’s not bad, just not what we’re talking about right now.
Benefits
St. John of the Cross provides us with three major benefits and a host of lesser ones (the fruits of the Spirit, the cardinal virtues [prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance], the theological virtues [faith, hope, love], etc.).
(1) The Dark Night gives the gift of…
… “the knowledge of self and of one’s own misery” (i.e., moving past our own ego and sense of self-sufficient spirituality)
(2) The Dark Night gives the gift of…
…the interior quiet needed to fully listen to God (cf. Isaiah 28:9-10)
(3) The Dark Night gives the gift of…
…spiritual humility. “From this humility stems love of neighbor, for they will esteem them and not judge them as they did before when they were aware that they enjoyed an intense fervor while others did not” (p. 192).
True humility is not “woe is me” – true humility is seeing your neighbor and realizing you are one, that are differences are only skin deep.
So, at the end of the day, the ones who have gone through the Dark Night “No longer are they moved to act by the delight and satisfaction they find in a work, as they perhaps were when they derived this from their deeds, but by the desire to please God” (p. 196).
Spiritual Practice
If you have read some of the other pages here, then it will come as no surprise that I look for spiritual practices to recommend. Also, I like to articulate these practices in a step-by-step method. How on earth do you do that with the Dark Night? Well, the Dark Night itself is something that happens to you, so there are no exercises to do – no way to “practice” it until you’re in it. When you are in the Dark Night, every spiritual practice may seem empty, confusing, boring, and pointless. It feels like God is nowhere at all. What practice could possibly help?
Well, the truth is no practice can help, so there is only one thing that I can recommend: Breathe.
Step 1:
Breathe.
Step 2:
Keep breathing.
Step 3:
Focus on your breath.
Step 4:
Count your breaths, if you want.
Step 5:
Repeat.
Don’t try and run from the Dark Night, and don’t try to make yourself feel God’s presence. Let yourself wish you weren’t here. Be honest that you want to be anywhere but here. There isn’t a practice that can lift you out. God will do it in time, but, of course, it seems impossible to believe that too.
So, why breathing? Well, no matter how dark the night seems to be. You can breathe. In that breathing – although you can’t feel it just now – is an answer. “…the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.” (Genesis 3:7, New Revised Standard Version)
Every breath means that God is here. God is in you. God is in me. God is in every person you meet. The words for breath in Greek and Hebrew also mean spirit, by the way. When you are in the Dark Night, it feels like God isn’t anywhere. After God pulls you through – and all the external reasons we might seek God are burned away – we come back to the one thing left. Our breath. And, we realize that God is everywhere…and always was.
Then, all of creation becomes luminous with the presence of God and our eyes truly open. So, for now, just breathe – the breath that God put into your lungs – and wait.