The Dark Night Returns

“So many unanswered questions live within me afraid to uncover them … because of the blasphemy … If there be God … please forgive me … When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives & hurt my very soul. I am told God loves me … and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul.”

“As for me—The silence and the emptiness is so great—that I look and do not see;—Listen and do not hear.”

Mother Teresa, the nun who spent her life caring for the most destitute people in the most destitute city on earth, wrote those words. They were part of series of letters she wrote to her confessor over her lifetime. Published a decade after her death, they sent shock waves through the Christian community. How could a women who epitomized the love of God write such things, not once or twice, but over and over for decade after decade?

Such sentiments run directly counter to the message on a typical Sunday morning in churches everywhere. Come to church, meet Jesus and experience the Joy of Christ. Draw closer to God and be happy. If you are feeling distant from God, the problem is not that God has moved; the problem is obviously that you have wandered away. Come back and be happy. If tragedy strikes do not despair. God is there. Be happy.

That message is misleading. Knowing God is not one long experience of joy and feeling ever closer to God. This is not a new thought. St John of the Cross, a 16^th century Spanish monk, described in excruciating detail the agony that comes to some Christians as they follow Christ. The book: The Dark Night of the Soul. When your soul is in that dark night, you would write things exactly like Mother Teresa’s thoughts above. This dark night, according to John, is not a wandering away from God; it is rather something that God brings to some Christians in order to help them draw closer to Him.

How to describe the Dark Night? It is hard, if not impossible:

We may deduce from this the reason why certain persons—good and fearful souls—who walk along this road would like to give an account of their spiritual state to their director, are neither able to do so nor know how….But this capacity for being described is not in the nature of pure contemplation, which is indescribable, as we have said. For the which reason it is called secret.

This is a general problem with discussing the work of the spirit. Paul notes that such communication happens in “groanings too deep for words.” Eliot repeatedly laments the failure of words to describe deep thoughts. Our language fails us.

Nonetheless, John does grapple with what is going on in the Dark Night. “God leads into the dark night those whom He desires to purify from all those imperfections so that he may bring them farther onward.” What is happening?

And when the soul suffers the direct assault of this Divine light, its pain, which results from its impurity, is immense; because when this pure light assails the soul, in order to expel its impurity, the soul feels itself to be so impure and miserable that it believes God to be against it, and thinks that it has set itself up against God. This causes it sore grief and pain, because it now believes that God has cast it away…For by means of this pure light, the soul now sees its impurity clearly (although darkly), and knows clearly that it is unworthy of God or of any creature. And what gives it most pain is that it thinks that it will never be worthy and that its good things are all over for it.

Again, there is a strain of Christianity that instantly rebels against descriptions of the Dark Night, insisting that we should never feel separated from God. And yet, we have a very reliable account of someone experiencing exactly this Dark Night. I don’t mean Mother Teresa.

And when the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour. And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Why does Christ scream out about God forsaking Him? It is not that Christ Himself has wandered away from God; God forsakes Him because He bears our sin. All of it. Christ walks into the Dark Night of the soul because He bears your sin and he no longer believes that God is there when He feels in his own Being the enormity of your sin.

What is the advantage of enduring this Dark Night?

But there is a question which at once arises here—namely, since the things of God are of themselves profitable to the soul and bring it gain and security, why does God, in this night, darken the desires and faculties with respect to these good things likewise, in such a way that the soul can no more taste of them or busy itself with them than with these other things, and indeed in some ways can do so less? The answer is that it is well for the soul to perform no operation touching spiritual things at that time and to have no pleasure in such things, because its faculties and desires are base, impure and wholly natural; and thus, although these faculties be given the desire and interest in things supernatural and Divine, they could not receive them save after a base and a natural manner, exactly in their own fashion. For, as the philosopher says, whatsoever is received comes to him that receives it after the manner of the recipient. Wherefore, since these natural faculties have neither purity nor strength nor capacity to receive and taste things that are supernatural after the manner of those things, which manner is Divine, but can do so only after their own manner, which is human and base, as we have said, it is meet that its faculties be in darkness concerning these Divine things likewise. Thus, being weaned and purged and annihilated in this respect first of all, they may lose that base and human way of receiving and acting, and thus all these faculties and desires of the soul may come to be prepared and tempered in such a way as to be able to receive, feel and taste that which is Divine and supernatural after a sublime and lofty manner, which is impossible if the old man die not first of all.

Suddenly the problem Christians have is evident. Someone comes to have faith that Christ is indeed Lord and Savior of all. The next step is to learn more and draw closer to God. Eventually, the person becomes a “mature” believer, someone who has grown up and is no longer like those people in the hour they first believed. Mature believers starts to feel good about their walk with God. They feel close to God. Indeed, they become a bit proud of how much they have grown in faith.

The Dark Night, the terrible and awful and nearly unendurable Dark Night, is a purgation of that pride. God feels distant; the Christian feels abandoned. To endure the Dark Night, you must keep going, humbling yourself before God, continuing to follow the path that God has set forth, climbing what John calls the ladder of love which begins with the first rung when the soul “can find no pleasure, support, consolation or abiding-place in anything soever.” Having hit that point, only then can the soul proceed to the second rung of seeking God without ceasing, without distractions of any kind. And even at that point, there are still eight rungs to go before becoming “wholly assimilated to God.” Few reach this last rung. Yet, in the Dark Night, there is nothing to do but steadily go up.

The Dark Night of the Soul is, at its root, a devotional book, but it is nothing like the modern day examples of books in that genre. Christians don’t talk much about the Dark Night. Perhaps they should. The Dark Night has no easy answers; it may well last the rest of your life; it is a place of spiritual agony. It is a place where there is nothing left but faith.