Personal, collective, planetary?
This blog offers you my summary of the original book, The Dark Night of the Soul, and some thoughts on how the Dark Night process can help us in these current confusing times. La noche oscura del alma was written around 1578 by the Spanish mystic and poet, Saint John of the Cross. It offers us a striking picture of the soul journeying through darkness and loss to come closer to God.
Basic to St John’s approach is a belief that God is all-knowing, omnipresent, and that God guides every individual’s spiritual journey. The Dark Night does not befall everyone, and could be seen as a gift given only to advanced souls.
In essence, the Dark Night is a process of severance, in which God peels away from us our familiar connections and comforts, with the aim of bringing the soul closer to God, into divine union.
There are two main stages to this process, and usually an interval of months or years between them. The first is the ‘passive night of sense’, where we lose our habitual connections to the pleasures and nourishment that the senses can bring us, which distract us from our link to the divine.
He vividly describes the symptoms of this ‘passive night’, including “no comfort in the things of God, and also in created things”; “the soul thinks it is not serving God, but going backwards”; and “inability to meditate and to excite the imagination”.
In fact St John urges us “in nowise have recourse to meditations… let the soul be quiet and at rest”. By doing so, the soul can sink deeper into “the calm repose and sweet tranquillity of contemplation”.
The passive night of the spirit
This second stage is even more arduous, where spiritual connection is withheld from the soul, but St John tells us that “this purification alone disposes the soul to the highest union with God.”
In this deeply dark night, he describes how “the desires of sense and spirit are lulled to sleep and mortified, unable to relish anything either human or divine; the affections of the soul are thwarted and become helpless; the imagination is fettered, and unable to make any profitable reflections, the memory is gone, and the will, too is dry and afflicted… a heavy cloud overshadows the soul, distresses it and holds it as if it were far away from God.”
The Hermits St Anthony and St Paul – Albrecht Dürer
One of the most painful effects of all this may be the soul believing that God has abandoned it, because of its own deficiencies. Yet St John is emphatic that God puts us through all this to help us grow into divine union: “God makes the soul die to all that is not God, that, being denuded and stripped, it may clothe itself anew.”
This gives us a poignant message that the soul’s own efforts, of imagination, will, or anything else, are pointless. We have to accept a complete stripping-away of all our habits and capacities: in fact, he tells us that “the soul makes the greater progress when it travels in the dark, not knowing the way”. Put positively, we might say that God is so far beyond human comprehension that we must abandon our limited faculties in order to reach divine union.
I’ve read many books about the soul (for an overview of my favourite, see here), and an important point they diverge on is whether the soul can feel pain. Some good authorities believe the soul, being a piece of divine spirit, is above such human feelings. I lean more to St John’s view, that the soul itself suffers at times on its slow evolution.
Personal, collective, planetary?
The Dark Night is akin to the Dark Wood stage of the Hero’s Journey, the classic map of transformation by Joseph Campbell (see my summary here). In the Dark Wood, the hero or heroine feels utterly defeated, and has to let go all their self-beliefs and surrender to something greater than themselves, before they find the treasure they are questing.
Although both of these journeys are written about individual surrender and transformation, they can be applied to groups of all kinds (such as communities or work teams), and to the global crisis of our times. I’d like to explore these applications briefly.
For many years, I’ve been surprised at how few people have the interpersonal and communication skills needed for a group to function well (see blogs here and here). This means that groups often respond poorly to problems, which can include practical setbacks and poor internal dynamics, e.g. inability to resolve conflicts.
Quite often, it takes a major crisis, a Dark Night of the Soul, to force a group to drop its shallow-rooted beliefs and habits. Especially if there is some good facilitation, and/or a few skilled members who get a hearing, a crisis can enable a group to find humility, truthful ways to relate to each other, and a connection with its higher purpose. This is explored further in Chapter 5 of my book, Natural Happiness.
Turning to the global crisis, you may share my sense of pain at the suffering in the world, and like me you may struggle to see a higher purpose or upside to the state we’re in. If you look back at the description of the Dark Night of the Soul, surely a lot of that is also the way we feel about the state of the world.
The Dark Night analogy would help explain the feelings of abandonment, loss of will and imagination, which the polycrisis sometimes brings out in us. And maybe there’s a bit of comfort in the idea that darkness and lostness can open us to positive transformation.