A Little about My Dark

Night of the Soul

                                                      What is the Dark Night of the Soul? (Spanish: La noche oscura del alma) Because I believe many people have experienced this real form of acedia, and have written it off as depression, anomie/alienation and/or moral decline, and many therapists, psychologists and their medical counterparts are apt to prescribe drugs for something far more profound, I would like to introduce you to a journey I have taken for most of my life, in hopes that it will change someone else’s life for the better.

Having realized that most people, or perhaps the ones I’ve encountered, have well developed lives of the mind, as well as a critical eye, I have hesitated to take you on this journey with me until now, until I could frame it in a context which explained all of what happened, and how I got from there to here and back again. I’ve been musing about this essay for a while now, so bear with me.

I want you to come away with more than a polite platitude; instead, I want you to understand the value of this condition to each person who has it, not as something to be avoided or cured, but rather as a time of deep spiritual growth, a budding in the soul, which often resembles insanity and excruciating pain, but is neither. 

You see in our western understanding of the world both "la noche oscura" and acedia can be mistaken for all of these things, but the Dark Night is very real and can last for a long time.

 It is also a treatise written by Spanish poet and Roman Catholic mystic Saint John of the Cross. The expression, La noche oscura del alma is used to describe a phase in a person's spiritual life, and is a metaphor for a certain loneliness and desolation. It is referenced by spiritual traditions throughout the world. (Wikipedia)

Rather than resulting in devastation, however, the dark night is perceived by mystics and others to be a blessing in disguise, whereby the individual is stripped (in the dark night of the senses) of the spiritual ecstasy associated with acts of virtue. Yes, there is a certain pridefulness in doing good to feel good about it. Such is the stage of moral development when a person only does the right thing in order to receive praise, or a smug awareness of one’s noble nature, or to avoid guilt.

But the Dark Night is different. More like the most highly-evolved stage of spiritual understanding M. Scott Peck described in Further Along the Road Less Traveled, where someone may, for a time, “seem to outwardly decline in their practices of virtue, when in reality, she becomes more virtuous, but in this phase, is being virtuous less for the spiritual rewards (ecstasies in the cases of the first night) obtained, and more out of a true love for God.

It is this purgatory, a purgation of the soul, which brings purity and union with God” (Wikipedia). You can find much of the history of the dark night of the soul by googling it. Previously referenced, Wikipedia will give you more of the history than most people care to know, but I have a design and purpose here. So before you read the story I want to share with you, I want you to understand the history of this noche oscura.

A journey of similar merit is told by J.R.R. Tolkien in his short story, "Leaf by Niggle." The character Niggle wastes time on unimportant things and can never finish is life's work, a painting, because he is distracted by a need to help his neighbor, Parish, which he often does, with increasing irritability. Niggle goes on a journey. I won't spoil the story here by iterating here. But I will say that it has a profound relevance to our unifying metaphor here: The Dark Night of the Soul.

Common knowledge among Catholic clerics, the phrase "dark night of the soul" emerged from the writings of Saint John of the Cross, a Carmelite priest in the 16th century. Dark Night of the Soul, the name of a poem and its theological commentary, are among the Carmelite priest's most well-known writings. The texts tell of the saint's mystical development and the stages he is subjected to on his journey towards union with God.

I do not pretend to have come close to what St. John of the Cross must have lived through. But I have practiced an ascetic lifestyle and have chosen self-denial for extended periods throughout my life. My deliberate journey has not been perfect and I have not been able for health reasons to fast for more than a day or two in recent years, and yet, to focus on that would be to miss the point of what St. John’s journey was about.

He was as frustrated, as irritable and irascible as I am sometimes, and perhaps as narrow, as understood by the phrase, the path to God is straight and narrow. Like me, he most likely didn’t understand the world, or people, any more than he could measure and obtain “a priori,” a comprehension of the mind of God. It was all too much for him.

Don’t you feel that way sometimes? I know I do more often than I’d like to admit, but a Dark Night is as pitiless as this metaphor suggests: No light. No clear path. No candles. No reason. No hope. No faith. Yes. No faith.

By now you’re asking how can a Catholic priest and mystic admit to loss of faith. Perhaps this is best understood by the words of the poet, Alfred Lord Tennyson, who wrote: “There is more faith in honest doubt than in all the creeds combined” (from In Memoriam). These lines were a part of Tennyson’s meditation on death and the loss of his best friend Hallam. But my dark nights continue.

You see, I have a life-long friend who has been battling Lupus for thirty years, who raised a daughter alone, and who has more courage to face each day, even with skilled nursing care and multiple doctor visits a week than I have ever had. Her name is Deborah and my words are also a prayer for her. Such is the love of life, but I am a wimp who can only ask God why.

Another dear friend recently discovered that she may have ovarian cancer. She will have surgery just before Christmas. My blue rosary’s turquoise is darkening from the continuous turning between my fingers, those natural oils and sweat, my meager offering up, mostly to cope, but more because I’m scared for both friends, more scared for myself, my selfishness, my prayer existent. Not to be a cynic here, I really mean it when I say that I am, in all my fears, still more at peace than I was when my dark night began more than twenty-five years ago.

But first, I want to tell you more about St. John of the Cross, St Therese, also referred to as The Little Flower (her statue presides as one of the welcoming saints at my front door), and Mother Teresa, all of whom were known to have had “dark nights” which lasted for decades.

 But first I have to talk about my best friend, my husband Rene, who underwent a seven-hour cardiac ablation procedure a year ago to prevent him from having a massive heart attack caused by an atrial flutter that kept his resting heart-rate at 150 beats per minute. That was truly a night, no, many nights of terror, but I had been living in the darkness all alone, so mostly I was numb.

 I did pray though. That was 2007. He’s okay for now. I’m not. In 2002, another really dark night and many dark days following an incident where my college-age son was attacked, knocked down, and almost died, but saved when someone else died at someone else's hands. It’s all okay now.

But I’m not.This year, 2008, has been a good year. I retired. I am prepared for surgeries in 2009. My dark nights are with me. It’s a purification process.

"I’m getting my business right" was a favored phrase of my father who enjoyed reminding us, even when we were young, that we should prepare for the Judgment Day. Everyone would get one. I haven’t succumbed to his brand of fatalism, but I do recognize the road.

St. John’s treatise, The Dark Night of the Soul is divided into two books that reflect the two phases of the dark night. The first is a purification of the senses. This was his ascetic experience; it is what most people imagine when they think of a cloistered life. Asceticism lends itself to extreme self-denial, and I believe that many modern-day versions of this can be found among those seeking physical perfection as a form of enlightenment, but most often it is not enough, and is probably the true reason diets and exercise do not work for long. The issues and the neediness often come not from what we feed our faces or do to our bodies, but rather in our failure to cultivate and understand the needs of our souls.

There is a story about the biblical Jacob who had a dream in which he wrestled with God. The story goes that he had to wrestle with God in order to literally find a stairway into heaven. Another metaphor perhaps, but one we understand more easily than the “dark night of the soul.” You see, we often do not see our spiritual lives as a battle with God, a struggle of wills.

After all, we believe, free-will is God-given. However we understand God, we also understand that this freedom is intrinsic to human experience. What we do not understand is that while our wills are free to choose right and wrong, good and bad, we are taught to choose the lesser evil, if the choices are not in black and white.

The problem lies in our consciousness and in our ability to rationalize everything when a clear choice is really simple. Do we really trust our senses, our gut, as the Romantics believed, or should we submit to some higher authority? You see the issue here. One must purge the senses because they have been polluted by all the enticements of this world and its decadence in all times...

 I know. I know. This stuff is not palatable to the tastes of our brave new century, but perhaps it should be. Our world is corrupt. We can all agree to that, and in order to repair our world, we must work on our perceptions and revise our conceptualizations.

Perhaps the answers are in the ancient truths. Yes I do think that in order to achieve purgation, one must wrestle with God like Jacob did in his dream. And God must win. It is much more difficult than a laxative, an enema, or regurgitation. Trying this form of upheaval will leave you with many sleepless nights.Such was my first twenty years of life. I knew formal religion, but it was a faith of fear.

 Having prayed from childhood without anyone telling me to do so, I also knew self-denial, the kind that is borne of suffering. I know suffering. I lhave lived with chaos. But I did not know myself. I did not understand my soul.

By twelve, I was more than well-read for my age. I was a virtual encyclopedia of facts. I was a smart aleck. Thus my isolation and decline. Alone, because I did not like to party. How does one party with a heavy heart? Alone, because I was afraid to open up to people and make friends.

A co-dependent enabler to a functional alcoholic mother and a rage-aholic father, I had my share of problems, the worst of which was my belief  I could handle this alone for the rest of my life. My answer: God.

 Did it work? Yes. It got me though four years of college with honors, led me to marry and after five years, to become a mother. Twice. And then at 33, I cratered, lost my mind, and could no longer find God or manage alone. The lights were out for a rather long time, but like my parents before me, I was functional, could work and inadequately sustain my most important relationships.

What was really wrong? I’m not certain, but the fact is that my father died in 1984, and I didn’t mourn him then. I was too angry with him. By 1989, I knew my mother was dying too, and I knew that with her my ontogeny ended. I did not, could not verbalize this, but its finality was a cellular truth. I set out to tell her story in order to understand mine.

The more I wrote, the deeper I sank into the darkness. I could not free myself. Shelled into an early 20^th century Sabine Pass, Texas marshland of chronic dissolution,that stretched into St. Martinville, Louisianna, it was inevitable that I could not bring myself back alone any more than I could cross a dimension in time, and yet I had  crossed many boundaries in my consciousness. 

In the process, I  submerged my ego, my pretentions, my illusions and my sensibilities about the world. My doctoral program faltered. No one in 1988-1989 Houston, Texas had heard my story or anything like it. (No wonder I still haven’t even attempted to finish it, much less publish it. Perhaps one day, the truth about those specifics will find my pen).

Before long, I could not face my husband, my children, my mother, or anyone else who really knew me. I was alien and wrong no matter where I turned. At school, my situation was kept quiet by some; others bullied me on my return. My husband, who loved me, did not understand my plight. I was lonely.

No matter how hard I tried, I could not unwrite my story or deny it; I was the object of amusement, the buffet of subtle innuendo and cocktail party gossip. I was plain crazy and I knew too much. It made certain important people very uncomfortable. I had to be stopped no matter what. Young and dumb, I thought everything was all my fault, when all I did was to write a story and tell the truth.

My family, what’s left of them, and especially my husband Rene, are still amazed at the accuracy of my memory and penchant for details about these times. An out-of-body experience would explain it; however, I was inside, living this torment, but it was my spirit which had taken over.

Jesus said that in order to gain our lives we must lose our lives. I believe he meant that we have to lose our egos in order for a transformation to take place. My doctor would concur today. This doctor, who was number three after two failed attempts by others, still owns the raised stone I saw in his office the first time I met him. It says: Nothing is carved in stone.

Alone on all sides, I had been wrongly diagnosed several times until in 1989, I met this most endearing Dr. Douglass Stockwell, who is now with the well-known Hauser clinic here in Houston. Instead of deciding I was psychotic, bi-polar, clinically depressed (and I was all those things), he offered to help me. Next year, (2009) I will have been in his care for 20 years. He treated me medically for depression and anxiety and for a few bouts with psychosis, resulting from extreme self-denial, issues with weight and self-image, and with my extremely dysfunctional family-of- origin dynamics.

But the cure came from being in contact with a competent and ethical doctor who possessed an open mind, someone who put his diagnoses on hold in order to allow me to trust him and the process, and someone who wisely referred me to a therapist, who in her own turn, referred me back to God.

The answer? My Dark Night of the Soul was not something I understood then, nor do I totally understand it now. It is a part of me, something which cannot be prescribed or medicated or self-medicated away. The Question? Is God Real? My answer is yes, that in my life and in all the suffering and loss I’ve endured and am still enduring, there is no reason why I am still here unless this soul journey is the purpose.

 I still voluntarily see Dr. Stockwell twice yearly for checkups. I look forward to visiting with him. We are about the same age and we have watched each other grow, although he may have a different take on this. Today after 20 years of unofficial acedia and 20 more years of a secular diagnoses, I am on the side of both my faith and my doctors. After all, the God of the Universe made the doctors and the medicine.

My life has been in the details, the daily work of being a teacher, a wife, a mother, a friend, in these quotidian mysteries, which have taught me the simplicity of just keeping up with God’s/my plan and my life routines.I am grateful for the past forty years of my darkest nights because yes, I am a sensitive soul, too sensitive at times. Also, I am observant, occasionally irreverent, not the least bit fundamentalist, nor unhappy or happy, nor content or discontent. And no, I’m certainly not catatonic either, although my rigid gait might suggest otherwise; it’s the result of rheumatoid arthritis, relentless pain and flare-ups.

And yet, my dark night and all the events of my life have not left me bitter or angry, disillusioned or alienated, even though at times I am all these things, and even in this contradiction about the truth of the dark night, one can glimpse its power, the result of all the stresses and pains of living something other than a facile reality. No, this is not the devastation of drugs or decadent living; except for some missed-steps in my youth, I have fallen lightly.

Instead, my dark nights are the cross of living, or rather trying to live a good and righteous life, one that is not easy at all. You see, keeping myself, my spirit and my body clean are keys to my peace of mind. My sanity. Yet my dark nights of the soul are still with me because it’s much easier to succumb to my innate hedonistic tendencies. We all want joy and freedom, but it all comes at a price. Though I can't keep pace anymore, I do allow myself an occasional bourbon and too much spicy food. Pricey. 

 The "dark night" might clinically or secularly be described as the letting go of one’s ego, by suppressing the psyche to make room for some form of change in a person’s natural patterns or a revealing of the true self, according to researchers with whom I do agree.  

This period in my own life changed my relationship with God. I realized that it was okay to be flawed, acceptable to be honest, a sign of strength to take risks, and healthy to love myself and my life in spite of and because of everything.

As a practicing Catholic, I have found that there are times when my prayer life is strong and I am enraptured with God. At other times, traditional prayer is extremely difficult and I have to ask God to bear with me and to just know what I need without my asking, much as a mother senses the needs of her children, and the children in turn expect that mother’s intuition.

This is what exists between me and God, even when I cannot voice my needs. During this time, I often cannot find God, not find my source during the worst parts of my dark nights when I am alone, and then, I doubt myself, doubt the existence of God. I turn away from religion. I distance myself, and I become the natural loner which is also a part of who I am. This too is paradox because I also crave contact, but am often disappointed when I receive it. God still has some culling to do in my soul.  

Here’s more of the Wikipedia entry. I have a few things to add about this as well. The facts are: The second and more intense of the two stages is that of the spirit, which St. John of the Cross describes in the. Dark Night of the Soul as the ten steps on the ladder of mystical love, previously described by Saint Thomas Aquinas and in part by Aristotle. (Wikipedia).

 John of the Cross was imprisoned by his Carmelite brothers, who opposed his reformations to the Order. I’ve always thought of the 10 steps on the ladder of mystical love as the same as Jacob’s ladder to heaven.

Each rung requires us to love more that which we hate most. And for me, my journey though this lifetime of dark nights has been about wrestling with God over things of great significance to me – things like divorce (I’ve wanted to at times); the rights of women to abortion (I fluctuate on this one rarely, but I don't want to be too judgmental); human rights (what is the responsibility of our government toward people -- beyond suffrage?); war and religion (I too have a disdain for unchecked ideological fervor); and ultimately, I keep asking these big questions: Have I done enough with my life? Have I done what I was put here for? When will I know how much is enough?

The next two entries are about two of my heroines. Their lives are monuments, great examples for those of us who have identified with the Journey of the Dark Night of the Soul. Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, a 19th-century French Carmelite, underwent similar experiences with dark nights. Centering on doubts about the afterlife, she reportedly told her fellow nuns, "If you only knew what darkness I am plunged into.”(Wikipedia).

 I have read much about this young, beleaguered woman who died young, but I never fully understood what her struggles were about, except that she was human and a woman. She lived and suffered. She loved. She died. Is that what we’re here for? Why isn’t it enough? What singularly profound insight is missing here? Did she see the Virgin Mary like St. Bernadette of Lourdes did? No. It is simple enough. Like Jesus, like so many of the great prophets of all faiths, she too carried a cross – the fear of the darkness, of being all alone in the dark with some kind of supernatural transformation taking place in her soul.

When you really think about this situation, it’s a lot like a nervous breakdown, but worse than that. It’s the kind of stuff we substitute in order to avoid. Instead, we opt for vampires, aliens, predators, or monstrous crimes, none of which satiates the hunger that only God can fulfill. It is easier to watch television that to face your aloneness.

My dark night of the soul is not something I openly celebrate or discuss with anyone anymore. It just is. But clearly not the stuff of small talk. How does one explain to others the journey of the soul and really tell the truth? I’ve tried to say something here about suffering, about sin and redemption, about living with grace even as we move toward death. Death has been up close and personal in my life. My mother, when she wasn't in intensive care, hospiced in my home before she died.

I miss my Momma tonight, only because she was my mother, and in spite of her failings, a source of strength and joy, and she loved me. Although he wasn’t perfect, I miss my father too because like God the Father, he took care of my earthly needs. Yes, like so many of us as we age, these nights are long, but now we can see them coming. No longer the thirty-three-year-olds blindsided by pain and loss, we are not afraid to praise the light even as we embrace the darkness. 

The "dark night" of Saint John of the Cross in the 18th century lasted 45 years, from which he ultimately recovered. Mother Teresa of Calcutta, according to letters released in 2007, "may be the most extensive such case on record", lasting from 1948 almost up until her death in 1997, with only brief interludes of relief between.

 Franciscan Friar Father Benedict Groeschel, a friend of Mother Teresa for a large part of her life, claims that "the darkness left" towards the end of her life (Wikipedia)

Perhaps after a lifetime of purgation, we are finally free enough at death to willfully join with God. Others may call it something very different, but in my Catholic Christian world, St. John and Therese, "The Little Flower," and Mother Teresa make the most sense.

It was Mother Teresa who said, "every day we are called to do small things with great love," and so I offer up to a world robbed of faith and angered by religion, this little bit of love.

What has your journey been like? Please share.