5. Dark Night of the Soul- Purpose and Meaning

In this week’s post I want to explore the purpose and meaning of the “Dark Night of the Soul”. I’ve already talked about this in various ways, but I’d like to focus on it in a little more breadth this week. As we do this, it is important to remember, again, that the “dark night” is not dreadful and dreary, a place with no hope. As John of the Cross understood it is an exciting and possibility-filled journey.

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

The journey is one that is not to get something, but to become something and someone. A person is changed as the dark night continues, if one is willing to be open to what is happening. A website called Neomysticism had this to say:

The main purpose of it all is not to attain something. Rather, there's a certain consciousness — an awareness — that grows in the person who experiences this night. This will later lead to a full awakening — living from that 'higher mind' that Jesus refers to in his use of the word metanoia. [Often translated as repentance. Literally “change of mind."] God's presence is not something you attain, but something that's already there. You just become aware of it. You realize it... often through unlearning and getting rid of obstacles. That's why the journey of true spirituality is often referred to as a path of descent. You have to become less.

The last stanza of John’s poem presents this union with God this way:

I remained, lost in oblivion;
My face I reclined on the Beloved.
All ceased and I abandoned myself,
Leaving my cares
forgotten among the lilies.

Okay. Let’s bring this down to earth, to a way that we can understand it, not because we are less open than John, but because such poetic language needs to be unpacked. Even John wrote two books expounding on the short poem. For me, in line with what I have been writing before, I return to the Twelve Steps as developed by Alcoholics Anonymous. In particular, the concluding step, number 12:

• Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps,

• we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and

• to practice these principles in all our affairs.

So the result of the dark night’s pilgrimage is:

• Spiritual awakening

John described it as “all ceased and I abandoned myself.” A spiritual awakening is not necessarily, nor very often, a moment of blinding experience. Most of the time it is the result of the path of a spiritual journey that opens us to a new way of understanding ourselves and our world. What was important is no longer important. John can say that after abandoning himself he could leave his cares “forgotten among the lilies.”

As we lie awake wrestling with the night and the issues swirling around us and our country, the idea of being able to leave the cares forgotten feels unreachable. Yet, as John said, “oh happy chance” that this would be possible. After all this IS what started us on this journey in the first place- the wrestling with things seemingly too big and too out of reach for us mere mortals. One day we come to new understandings as a result of these and we realize that we have awakened from the night. We are more spiritually awake than we were when we began. It is ongoing, to be sure, but we are different.

It is now a new spiritual day- even if the world itself still looks dark and uncertain.

The second thing about the 12th Step is the natural continuation of the awakening. We have had a spiritual awakening. Therefore we:

• Carry the message

In the 12 Steps the people who the message is taken to are of course others with the same issue- alcoholism. It makes sense then that the message we carry is first to those who struggle with the spiritual issues we have faced. It is a message to those seeking direction or answers, hope or support in what feels like a time of being lost and alone.

The world of 16th Century Spain was one of great change, difficulty, and disagreement. The worst of the Inquisition was a still fresh memory; the expulsion of the Jews from Andalusia after the “reconquest” of Spain from the Muslims was complete; Roman Catholicism as a whole was in the midst of dealing with the Protestant Reformation and its own counter-reformation. St. John of the Cross and St. Theresa of Avila were tireless in living what they had discovered in their own dark nights. They carried the message by being who they were in spite of persecution and even time in prison.

A short biography of St. John says this:  

It was not long before the exemplary lives of the small community of reformed friars and nuns that had gathered around St. John and St. Teresa respectively began attracting vocations [i.e. others who wanted to join with them in their work.]  -St. John of the Cross

When we have a spiritual awakening, the world has not changed one iota. John says that the “heart lit me from inside':

It [the heart] guided and shone
Surer than noonday sunlight over me.

We have changed. Which means for us that everything has changed. That's why we carry the message. But how do we do that? Back to the 12th Step. The best way to carry the message is to:

• Practice this new way we have learned.

Practice these principles (the way of the soul and spirit) in all we do. Speaking is not enough. It is more important that we live these principles in all we do. A phrase that has come to mean a great deal to me in the past year captures the essence of this:

How you do anything is how you do everything.

There are many ways of saying it-

• practice what you preach; 
• actions speak louder than words; 
• I’d rather see a sermon than hear one; 
• faith without works is dead.

It has to do with personal integrity and self-awareness. (More on that in the next post.) We can’t compartmentalize our lives, living one way here and another way over there. At the worst that means we are being dishonest or uncommitted to anything. At best it is being wishy-washy.

Let me give an example I have wrestled with over the last few weeks. I have often said that dialogue is important in this time and place. We need to talk with each other, not throw slogans, engage in name-calling or stereotyping. (Sarcasm can take us a long way- but in the wrong direction.) I have also said that we need to learn to find ways to express support and care for each other. Liberals, like myself, for example, can be great at standing up for the least and the lost, but overlook the least and the lost among those on the other side of the issue. We end up ignoring them, calling them ignorant or uninformed. (Note: Do not tell me that “they” do the same. I can’t change them- I can only change me.) That is NOT what I preach and say I believe. How I do anything is how I do everything.

Guilty as charged.

So, three weeks ago I was given the opportunity (by my Higher Power?) to sit next to a staunch Trump supporter. He was joyous about the new president and what was going to happen. I tried to ignore him. I’m tired of this crap. He talked about what he liked about the new president’s agenda. I tried to ignore him. I made some comments back, mostly negative. But that damn still small voice kept bugging me- how you do anything…

So I began to listen. I still heard the Trump-supporting party line. But I also began to hear the both uncertainty and hope mixed in with it. This acquaintance is best described as part of the white, male, middle class- a group easily”demonized” in these very polarized and divided times. I was able to hear, for perhaps the first time, his pain, his fear, and his reason for hoping that the new administration will do something positive.

Once I made a conscious decision to listen, really listen, things began to change. I tried not to place him in a stereotyped box, even when he made such statements about “liberals” or “Muslims”. I did challenge the generalizing and engaged in some dialogue about the issues, pointing out differences between talking points and what is happening. He began to listen to me and took in what I was saying. I hope that was because I was treating him as an equal in the dialogue. The other evening, after three weeks of this weekly conversation happening in bits and pieces, I thanked him for his willingness to talk and listen. He sat back and told me what he really hopes for in this administration, also admitting his concerns, something he would have been unwilling to do when we were on “opposite sides.”

How we do anything is how we do everything. If we spend time stereotyping others, we will not see them as individuals.If we spend time seeing those with opposing viewpoints as “the enemy” we will always be at war with them, even if we agree on more than we disagree. It took some real effort on my part to move to a point of really listening. But when I managed to do that more often than not, I found myself in real conversation about some very important things. (These are not directly related to the Dark Night discussion.  I will talk about them in another “interlude” piece in the next week or so.)

What this whole episode has done is bring to the front for me the essential work of dialogue, conversation, even mediation if needed. It means that when I stand up for certain values, I have to be willing to apply those values to those I might be in opposition to! If I believe all people are loved by God and worthy of my attention, then I cannot place some people outside that love just because I disagree with them. I can’t not love them or care about them just because I might find some of what they do as immoral, reprehensible or downright wrong. I remember when the ACLU went to court to help a white-supremacy rally occur. They value free speech and civil liberties- even when it might have been unpopular with their own constituency.

For people who are seeking a spiritual way through this time, it is always, always, always fundamental that we begin with our values. What is it that I am called to do? How am I called to do it? What are my values that guide me in all these actions? The Dark Night helps those questions become clarified and answered as we become more and more spiritually awake, these ways become clearer.

4. Dark Night of the Soul- Path of the Dark Night

A couple weeks ago I was talking with a friend about this series. I commented that the impetus to explore the role of the Dark Night of the Soul was the fear and anxiety I and many were feeling after the election of Donald Trump. His first reaction was, you don’t believe this is the worst it’s going to get, do you? Isn’t that what the dark night means- that it will get better from here on?

An article I found online addressed this issue. From Our Sunday Visitor:

The dark night of the soul is not an evil to be endured; it’s a good for which we should be grateful. Of course, it doesn’t always seem that way. The thought of plunging into a spiritual abyss and losing all the sweetness in our relationship with God strikes few as appealing.

A Protestant writing in Christianity Today put it this way:

One lesson we can learn from the ancient mystics is that dark nights are not problems, but opportunities. Grasping this reality moves us beyond "How do we fix this?" to "What might I learn in this?"
--The purpose of the dark night, of course, is to strip us of our futile attempts to find God on our own terms and awaken us to a much simpler desire for intimacy with God
--Chuck DeGroat

With the awareness that this dark night is going to be helpful let us also remember that darkness IS frightening. Think about how much we are aware of things in the dark- even things that aren’t there- except in our imagination. Every creak and bump in a dark house is multiplied. The old Celtic prayer for protection included “things that go bump in the night” right along with “ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties”. Darkness, sometimes described as “wilderness”, however, is almost always seen as the path to spiritual growth.

Traditionally, spiritual directors identify three primary stages (or ways) of growth in holiness.

• The first is the purgative way, where we break habits of vice, acquire habits of virtue and learn to live a Catholic life.
• The second is the illuminative way, where we grow in virtue, charity and the life of prayer.
• And the third is the unitive way, where our wills and hearts move in perfect harmony with God’s.

In the dark night of the senses, God purifies us of our attachments to the things of the world — physical comfort, physical pleasure, material success, popular acclaim — as well as even the comfort we seek in prayer. Sorrows afflict us, and things that used to ease us — food, sex, shopping, compliments, even the liturgy — no longer do. Through this dark night, God prepares us for the illuminative way and a deeper, more contemplative life of prayer.

The dark night of the soul occurs at the end of the illuminative way, as we prepare to enter the unitive way. During this dark night, God roots out our deepest attachments to sin and self, and the desolation that accompanies that rooting out is overwhelming and crushing. - Our Sunday Visitor:

Let me talk about these stages of moving through the dark night. As we walk these steps it is important to remember the wisdom of Winston Churchill:

If you're going through hell, keep going.

It is tempting to stop, to "give up", or "give in" to fear, cynicism, anger, or reprisal. We have seen all that and experienced all that in many different ways over these weeks since the election. Those are not the ways to get through the dark night; they do not help us- or anyone- move forward. We easily get stuck in these and don’t move anywhere helpful or healthy.

What then do we go through? As in that quote from Our Sunday Visitor the first part is the purgative way. Purgative means cleansing, intense purifying, even liberating. We are talking about the path of the dark night moving us away from our attachment to things of our own doing and making; we are realizing that we are powerless over people, places, and things; we become aware of how we cling to things that are not helpful or productive in order to gain fame, fortune, or even at times a sense of calm and peace. Does it really make us feel better when we revert to angry, nasty comments? Does it help us- or anyone- when we lash out at those who differ from us? These are all the ways we act when we don’t know what else to do. “Well, they started it,” is not a good reason.

But in the dark night nothing positive seems to be working either. As John of the Cross describes it, even the deepest and most sincere prayers and rituals seem to lose their effectiveness. God seems to have abandoned us. We may cry, “How can God let this happen?” We feel lost and lonely.

At that point we have two choices.

• Admit we are lost and nothing can help us or 
• decide there has to be a power greater than ourselves who can get us through this. So we go searching in a sense of desperate hope. The Catholic Dictionary says we discover that as we detach from the things we have trusted we move closer to God and

the will becomes more firmly attracted to God and more securely attached to his divine will. This purification, however, is only a means to an end, namely, 1. to give greater glory to God, who is thereby loved for himself and not for the benefits he confers; 2. to lead the one thus purified to infused contemplation and even ecstatic union with God; 3. to enable the mystic to be used more effectively by God for the spiritual welfare of others, since the more holy a person is the more meritorious are that person's prayers and sacrifices for the human race. -Catholic Dictionary

This is the seed of the illuminative way- the second phase on the path. Down in the depths of that dark night, as we struggle and wrestle and seek beyond our deepest longings, we also discover some light. Enlightenment. In Twelve Step language, we come to believe that there is a power greater than ourselves. This is a power that can make sense of what is happening to us, that can lead us into new understandings of the world we inhabit- as well as the inner life we each can develop. We can be restored to sanity. We do not need to “give up” or “give in” to the world, our fears or desires, even our personal ideologies, political or religious positions, institutions. In our search for comfort and release of fear we have often relied on these. It is time to move on. We need to “surrender” to the Higher Power.

One would think that such a surrender would be the start of something wondrous and bright. And at first it does seem so. It is like a “pink cloud” where everything is hopeful. That is but the beginning. We are so used to hearing that all one must do is “trust God and all will be okay” that when it doesn’t happen that way we get upset, angry, or lose faith. What has happened is that we have experienced part of the joy of cleansing of the senses and physical issues. We must then, as John of the Cross guides us, also be cleansed of the spiritual issues.

It may be necessary for us to give up warm and fuzzy religious feelings, or have them taken from us by God so we can draw closer to Him. Catholics United for the Faith

The action of surrendering is not as easy as we would like; we are not done with the cleansing. Or more to the point, simply coming to believe is not the end. Much still can block us from the light at the end of the dark night. As part of the spiritual growth ahead of us we must also take a serious look at who we are and what has led us to this point. In the Twelve Step programs this is the “housecleaning” stage.

• We take a searching and fearless moral inventory and share it with a trusted mentor. (Twelve Steps, Four and Five)
• We discover our shortcomings and ongoing character defects and become willing to surrender them. (Twelve Steps, Six and Seven)
• We become aware of those we may have harmed or had difficult relationships with and make amends. (Twelve Steps, Eight and Nine)
• We learn how to take a regular self-inventory and be quick to make amends when we have hurt another. (Twelve Steps, Ten)

These are deeply spiritual steps.

• These force us to look inside and be honest about ourselves. 
• They make us confront the ways we may still cling to the old ways of self-centeredness, anger, resentment. 
• They lead us into finding new ways to relate to the people in our lives and the world around us. 
• They are preparing us to be awake in our spirit and in the Spirit of our Higher Power.

This may seem like a long way to get to what is happening in the world in these early days of 2017. We now have a new president, one who has arguably been the most controversial and disliked candidate-now-president in modern politics. Many remain fearful of what he is going to do. Many have seen him do things that they find unacceptable and promote values they have difficulty accepting. Many are ready to stand up to him and challenge him in the face of his supporters who tell us to “get over it.”

I believe what we are facing is an ongoing spiritual journey. We have only been at this specific journey since early November. It took many by surprise. Too many of us were complacent, almost sluggish. The election was a shock to our system. It told us that we didn't know our country as well as we thought we did. It told us that there is more going on here than we were paying attention to. Many of us have felt like we were swimming in quicksand, being pulled down and out. That is how, for me, the dark night began this journey.

Spiritual can be a confusing term. I am using it here in both the traditional "mystic" sense of becoming unified with a Higher Power (being part of something greater than ourselves) and in the awareness of being connected to those around us- our fellow human beings. These must always be together no matter what spiritual tradition, or lack of one, we may have come from. The journey will be unique for each of us, based on who we are and what we have experienced. It must also be in connection with others.

Marks of the spiritual can take many forms:

• love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control
• humility, forgiveness, and acceptance
• honesty, openness, and willingness.

to name but a few.

For us to be prepared for a spiritual journey, one must have been spiritually prepared. That is where we are now. We are at a beginning. These stages of the journey, or the Twelve Steps as a paradigm, or your training and direction and how that happens. We are less than 90 days into this particular journey. We are preparing.

Dark Night of the Soul #3: An Earlier Experience

My only previous experience of a dark night-type experience was over 30 years ago now. Details have become foggy, but it all began with a premonition. I envisioned a war in the Middle East during August of 1982. About two years earlier, in 1980, I had been asked to choose hymn verses and write prayers for our denominational devotional, The Daily Texts. I was assigned August 1982. As I read through the daily scriptures for the month I found myself growing afraid. They seemed to indicate that a war was coming in the Middle East. This idea got planted firmly in my conscious and unconscious mind.

This was only enhanced in November 1980 when I hosted a trip to Israel. Among the group who traveled with me were several people who believed that the Second Coming was imminent. An important part of that view is war in the Middle East. They spent a great deal of time talking about that as we toured the country. They almost seemed more interested in that than in the religious and spiritual aspects of the trip. The visit to Har Megiddo (Armageddon) was particularly difficult!

One afternoon I had some free time and I went to one of the hills on the outskirts of Jerusalem and sat there meditating, contemplating and praying. I could envision fighter jets flying over the walls of the Old City. My overactive imagination did its thing. It cemented the fear and uncertainty I was feeling. It remained there when I returned home. A few months after the trip our daughter was born. Now there was more reason to fear and worry.

I lost many nights sleep over the next 18 months. I didn’t talk about it to anyone for months. It was a constant presence in my thoughts, under the surface at times, but always bubbling up in the night. I became interested in St. John of the Cross and his writing at that point, but was unable to truly connect it with what I was going through. Nothing I did seemed to ease the tension. I began trying to figure out how to survive the coming war. It was no longer located in the Middle East in my imagination. It had become World War III. We owned a vacation place in the wilds of northern Pennsylvania so I decided that this would be as good a place as any to survive such a war. I planned that we would go there for the month of August. I never explained why.

I did go to see a pastoral counselor at one point. All he did was make it worse. “It must be something to have that ability at premonition,” was the only comment I remember. Not a help. I don’t think he was being sarcastic. Ironic, maybe. I did finally talk to my wife about it, but by then I was overwhelmed and just looking forward to getting past August. I knew it was crazy, but it was still alive.

Needless to say nothing happened. August 1982 came and went. I went back to “normal” life- or so I thought. Looking back from 35 years later I see that something else happened. It was but the beginning of a longer dark night that took another six years to finish. During this time my use of alcohol increased significantly. I would go up to our vacation place by myself. I would spend days alternating between drinking myself drunk at night and working on sermon and worship planning during the days. Days were productive; nights were hell. I would find renewal in the daylit woods and writing but the darkness would bring the demons. It is not an unusual pattern for a deepening alcoholic. I didn’t realize it was happening and even had trouble describing it several years later when faced with the outcome. But I tried something- in July 1984 we moved from Pennsylvania to Wisconsin.

Geographic escapes don’t work any better than any other actions of denial. The darkness was deepening and I was oblivious to the problems. A number of other personal and emotional storms began to develop. I began to question my own direction, desires, calling. I was outwardly doing well; inwardly I was falling apart. And no one knew it. Least of all myself. Can I blame it on the inability to identify the dark night of the early 1980s? Could it have been avoided if I had taken a different approach before it reached these stages?

No, I don’t think so. One of the difficulties of becoming spiritually mature and insightful is that you have to be old enough to have had the necessary experiences. Premature maturity is truly an oxymoron. The darkness at the beginning of that decade was the start of the dark night. It was setting the stage for what was to come. Through the mid-1980s I struggled with an inner darkness. I thought there had to be light shining somewhere in there; in truth I was fooling myself since I was looking for answers in my own understanding. I was refusing to allow the spirit touch my soul, although I knew that I wanted it.

My drinking expanded. It was a classic binge drinking pattern. It was easy to binge when I was away from home. I would go to conferences and hide in my room at night. I would visit friends in New York and make sure I had enough to drink when I was alone in what I called my “monk’s cell” in their apartment. I would walk the streets of New York with loneliness in the midst of eight million people. I was lost in my own darkness and unable to see the dark night St. John talked about.

Until finally, in late 1988 I had my own epiphany. I had become an alcoholic. I needed help. I entered treatment. Part of me expected it to be an escape. It turned into freedom. I thought it would be a way out of the inner hell I had created. Instead it became a way through that hell. It was a true dark night for in reality the night that John describes is an awareness of- and acceptance of- powerlessness and personal unmanageability in all areas of one’s life. Which is, of course, the First Step of Alcoholics Anonymous. I wouldn’t have used the words from John’s first stanza at that time. I do now!

On a dark night,
Kindled in love with yearnings
--oh, happy chance!--
I went forth without being observed,
My house being now at rest.

John describes this first stanza of the dark night as purging the lower self- the sensual self. In my years of sobriety and work as a substance abuse counselor, I would say that this is a good way to describe the work of the first three steps of AA. That purging or “housecleaning” is then described in steps four through nine. It is necessary. Most addicts and alcoholics have been hijacked by the senses and feelings of the “pleasure center” of the brain. Or rather, their chemical use has hijacked that area and turned their lives into hell. There is a constant search in the bottle or the pills, the weed or the next line, to get rid of the thoughts and feelings that seem to never go away.

—Oh, happy chance!— 

 that I was able to go forth and discover, in the midst of darkness, the light that shines in that darkness.

I could spend many days putting the dark night and early recovery together, which is not the purpose of this particular series. When I started this discussion of the dark night and how I have come to approach the current political and cultural issue I did not expect it to go this direction. I did not- and do not- have the whole thing outlined and ready for “prime time.” It is through my times of writing that these things work out. As I wrote the first two posts I realized that, for me, this is part of a longer and more profound journey. In putting this together I am describing my pilgrimage and its present location. I do not believe that this is unique to me. The language I use in the telling is mine but the experiences are far more common than not.

Within the next week we will have a new president. The divisiveness, anger, fear, and even hatred shown in the campaign and transition period was what spurred this series. There are times when I see a post on Facebook or a news story about some particularly difficult event that I get this awful feeling in the pit of my stomach. Anxiety builds; darkness seems to be more prevalent. It doesn’t appear as if that is going away any time soon. For today, and at least the next few weeks, the question is how do I live and grow through this? The Dark Night remains the best paradigm for me to work from.

In the next post I will delve more deeply into the path the dark night takes us on. John is very clear about what that is and why. I will utilize my experience of the Twelve Steps in that, but it is not about alcoholism or addiction. It is about the spiritual journey. John states that the goal of this journey into the dark night is

the state of the perfect, which is that of the Divine union of the soul with God.

I don’t think it is a coincidence that the purpose of the twelve Steps is the same, though in different words-

Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps… and to practice these principles in all our affairs. [emphasis added]