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The “Dark Night of the Soul” has mutated in its meaning over the centuries since St. John of the Cross wrote this masterpiece in the late 1500’s. Our modern reductionistic mind lacks the foundational skills and any sort of will to create spiritual works of such detail and structure as this famous work, so sadly, there is little capacity to truly appreciate the largess beneath and between the stanzas. An example is how moderns have explained the Dark Night of the Soul as merely a crisis of faith. This is like saying a classical master of the violin is a guy who plays the fiddle.

I do not say this to be insulting of our short attention span, “meme-centric” generation, nor do I say this as if I am somehow fully capable of the same sort of composition, because I clearly am not. I highlight this disparity between the dumbed down summary of the Dark Night and the treatise of the Dark Night in order to help us avoid confusing our unhappiness, disappointments, and dissatisfaction in life, with the Dark Night of the Soul. The exposition of this poem was not intended for all readers, but only those who are in the valley of the shadow of death (Psalm 23), and that is the main reason it cannot be understood today.

Any survey of the modern world and we can observe that most people are completely given over to their impulses for food, drink, drug, sex, sleep, comfort, and ease. Most people’s lives possess little if any restraint or discipline with regard to health, money, relationships, and their time. This foolishness consumes days, weeks, and years and over time, people’s bodies, bank accounts, and lifestyles all move into conformity to the captivity to their appetites. This is where people’s lack of concern for their own health, financial well-being, relationships, vocations and self-awareness all catch up with them and create prisons of suffering, isolation, depression, sickness, and poverty. Our modern world promulgates these forms of human suffering, and thought they are horrible and ubiquitous, they are not the Dark Night of the Soul.

A person with little self-awareness, or a soul with no enduring love of God, cannot experience the Dark Night simply because they would not be able to perceive it in the first place. The true Dark Night is a graced loss of Divine consolation only for those who know something about divine consolation in the first place. Going through a tough time in life, as hard as that can be, is a walk in the park compared to the experience of God withholding Himself in our walking with Him. An unanswered prayer is disappointing, and even devastating to our temporal life, but that hardly compares to the soul who is being purged of his or her sense experience with God. Until the soul has tasted and knows the sweetness and bliss of this divine union between the Lover and the beloved, the Dark Night remains misunderstood.

The Dark Night purges our soul of its darkness. The darkness removes any part of our life that doesn’t say: “Thy will be done.” It is a weening process whereby God, who has graced us with a sense of his love, presence, and power, withdraws these affectations, causing a temporary disorientation as we can no longer perceive and relate to God through such benefits. Songs don’t work. Prayer falls flat. Silence is illusive. Friendships cannot reach us. Ritual and practice are seen as the empty shells they are. Self doubt sets in, but unlike an Atheist who has always doubted God, the Dark Night does not bring this kind of doubt. It brings rather the fear of abandonment. It is to experience firsthand Christ in his prayer which says, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). As our experience with God moves from feeling into knowing, a new depth of “Knowing and being known” replaces the “coddled toddler” experience of before.

A contemporary church service may never satisfy you again.

The Dark Night produces an experiential knowledge that is uncommon to man, but as it comes, there is nothing in the universe more treasured. Such knowledge invokes a faith which cannot be concocted by man, it is not coerced by our merit, rituals, or effort. It’s a form of seeing so clearly that it scares and overwhelms us. We are purely passengers into this realm of experience and it reorients everything we value in life by comparison. Nothing is held back, it is the pearl of great price, and it comes on the other side of the Vally of the shadow of death…because it is the death of our shadow. So complete is this experience, that our physical death may, in the moment, seem preferable to the experience of purgation in this dark night.

When God brings us to the Dark Night, and to the austerity and aridity which desiccates the religious false self, when all the questions converge in what seems like a logical basis for unbelief, just remember that is the purpose of this chastising grace. God is ridden us not of unbelief, but of belief, which is like baby teeth in compared to the incisors of adult faith. We discover that our denomination matters very little afterward. Our doctrinal position papers are laughable. Our religious distinctions are utterly flimsy. And all the belief and allegiance we placed in them was ultimately misplaced. The mission we were on is altered forever. On the other side is a knowing and being known which rewrites every atom of life, and re-orients our hunger and appetites toward God and every word He says. The world will forever see us as a weirdo, and we could care less.

“If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you.” (John 15:18)

If this seems desirous to you as a sort of merit badge of spiritual growth, or if you would be willing to undergo this Dark Night, please know, there is nothing any of us can do to make it come. There is no speed reading St. John of the Cross, there are no cliff notes, memes, or short cuts, and no program, religion or group can usher it in or see us through faster. The Dark Night doesn’t come at the end of our self, it IS the end of our self and our darkness which clings desperately to our pseudonyms. A soul who thinks them self ready, likely is not. The purgation of the dark night cannot come by addition, it arrives when the deconstruction of our illusions and delusions are underway. If we desire this in the same way we would desire some sort of spiritual superpower, then our desire is still ultimately for ourself and the ruination of our pride has yet to begin.

The context for the Dark Night is steeped in religious power plays and oppression. John was leading reform with Theresa of Avila and religion doesn’t like reform. John’s fidelity to the inner work of God and the way that was to be lived out would be seen today as a denominational difference, but in his day, it meant prison, public lashings, and near starvation in the prison of those holding institutional religious power.

The dark night is the experience of the dark night of Jesus’ passion. This Christoform pattern is seen in every institution which seeks to control its constituents. Reform challenges the status quo and speaks truth to power. Should God lead us into the dark night, it is because the wineskins of our traditions, denomination, and institutions can no longer contain what is expanding within. The divine union between the Lover and the beloved is ultimately the only thing which will allow the reorientation of authority within our hearts.

It is that space where literally nothing else matters!

To be in the dark night is to know that we do not belong on the throne of our own life. It is to finally see the incubators of religious structures which shaped our belief, are at last too small and we must graduate from its insular gravity and captivity, unto a free and mature faith.

“Therefore let us leave the elementary doctrine of Christ and go on to maturity…” (Hebrews 6:1)

The Dark Night pries off every finger which clutches to religious form, feeling, external measures, and certainty, until all that is left is our soul, our true self, transparently grounded in God.

Oh, night that guided me,
Oh, night more lovely than the dawn,
Oh, night that joined Beloved with lover,
Lover transformed in the Beloved!