Night Fall

When our spiritual path suddenly darkens and our conflicting emotions battle for supremacy, finding language for the disorientation helps us plot our course. If we can make the tiniest semblance of sense in what feels senseless, then we can stretch our legs out in it, explore a bit. Like knowing your coordinates on a map, if you can locate yourself even when you feel lost, you can get your bearings.

And bearings are the difference between survival and overwhelm.

So what is the dark night of the soul?

The dark night is a season of spiritual difficult-to-see-ness. It’s an experience of God removing the “felt sense” of his presence from you—and doing so on purpose. The dark night is not something we choose. Rather, the dark night descends. Night falls.

The phrase the dark night of the soul, or la noche oscura, is credited to St. John of the Cross, a Spanish priest who was deeply influenced by his spiritual mother and mentor, St. Teresa of Ávila. According to both John and Teresa, the dark night is something God does deliberately—and not only deliberately, but lovingly. The dark night is intended to bring us freedom from our false attachments and idols, and deepen our intimacy with divine love—to help us know our unshakeable identity as the beloved*, while helping us better love others.

The dark night’s goal is all about that: love and loving.

Why would the God you have communed with your entire life suddenly seem absent or distant in the most fragile of circumstances? What sort of loving God pulls his presence from you, right when you need him? And how is that supposed to draw you closer? Isn’t that just a childish game of hide-and-seek?

Scripture promises that God neither leaves us nor forsakes us. So in the dark night, that must mean God never removes his actual presence. But sometimes, in some seasons, we are invited to wait on God, as he is shaping something new in us. Read today’s passages and note the promises from God. What do you need most from God today—his strength? His rescue? His presence? Where are you struggling to sense these things? Take a moment to be honest before God about what you need, and remind your soul that God will never abandon you.

*May writes, “As John [of the Cross] makes clear, it is not God who disappears, but only our concepts, images, and sensations of God. This relinquishment occurs to rid us of our attachment to these idols and to make possible a realization of the true God, who cannot be grasped by any thought or feeling. At the time though, it seems like abandonment, even betrayal.” May, Dark Night of the Soul,146–47.