Dark Night of the Soul

THAT’S the title of a lyrical poem by the old Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross. There he describes a soul’s progress toward union with God through Christ’s cross.

The expression now largely means any spiritual dryness and ascetical difficulty, to the point that one may feel abandoned by God. It has resurrected lately because of some writings of Mother Teresa, who confessed she did not feel God’s presence for a long time in spite of her efforts.

People are asking how someone close to God can fail to feel God’s presence? Some others have used this development to discredit Mother Teresa, the
Church, if not the whole Christian faith.

This phenomenon is actually quite common among saints and holy men and women. It can happen to anyone of us. The quintessence of this experience is Christ himself on the cross.

In spite of his permanent union with his Father—there is no greater union than that between the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit—he said: “Eloi, Eloi, lamma sabacthani? Which is, being interpreted, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me.” (Mk 15,34)

Christ is both God and man, one divine person with two natures, human and divine. It is the inadequacy of the human nature to fully correspond to the divine that this tension and conflict can be felt. And man, called to a supernatural end, is not exempt from this.

But God actually never abandons anyone. In spite of our wretchedness, we cannot be totally separated from Him. Only in hell can we have that “definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed,” as the Catechism teaches us. (1033)

That is the objective reality about the matter. The problem arises when we consider its subjective aspect, or how one person feels in his spiritual life.

In essence God is present in everything, and especially in every person who is created in his image and likeness. He is actually everywhere. Of course, his presence in us takes place in different ways.

On our part, we have something that enables us to have God in us in a way most proper to us as his creatures, as persons and as his children. It is our heart in grace. The Catechism teaches:

“The heart is the place of encounter, because as image of God we live in relation: it is the place of covenant.” (2563)

In the “dark night of the soul,” in spite of the objective presence of God in us as well as our objective capacity to have him in our heart, we get the sensation, even the conviction, that we don’t have him.

This is due to many reasons. First, there are the limitations and the weaknesses of our human nature to cope with the “requirements,” so to speak, of the supernatural life to which we are called.

If we do not know how to handle these natural limitations because of pride or vanity, we will get the sensation that we are without God.

This is made worse by our sins, defects and mistakes, which can become stable vices, blinding us further to God’s presence in us. When we do not seek divine mercy, not only do we feel lost and separated. We can even hate God.

Besides, God allows this experience to happen for many reasons—to test if we really believe and love him, to purify and strengthen us, to conform us increasingly to him by way of spiritualizing and supernaturalizing our faculties.

Our tendency is to tie our faith with material and sensible factors, with the initial thrill of novelty. One way of maturing our faith and of detaching it from mainly human and natural considerations is to experience the “dark night of the soul.”

Many saints who experienced this had to do things with greater faith and love for God, often going against the grain of their personal preferences, immersed in all sorts of suffering, that become the touchstones of faith and love.

The “dark night of the soul”? We should not be afraid of it. We should welcome it.