This Mid-Week Edition of Ecstatic features Leighton Kennedy
The dark night of the soul, a term coined by St. John of the Cross, is one that aptly describes the season in which I’m writing these words. When people talk in real time about their experiences with spiritual warfare, existential life changes, or mental health battles, it can feel a bit murky. When it’s you, a sense of embarrassment or unease might make you regret opening your mouth; when it’s your friend, you just think, “am I saying the right thing? Am I being helpful?” There’s a darkness that hangs over those kinds of conversations—to be expected, I guess.
Low seasons are not my specialty; I’d like to say I’m not cut out for them, but perhaps that’s just because I’d rather feel the more zealous emotions: anger, joy, passion, crying-in-your-room sorrow, and hope. Oh, I love hope. But I don’t like anything in between. I don’t like feeling bummed, disappointed, bored, or lost. When I’m simply okay I want to be 100% great. And when I’m not okay, I want to feel it hard and then move on back to 100%. I want to move through the feelings quickly, and then find something to be happy about again.
But that’s not how we roll in the dark night of the soul. C’est la vie, as they say. The truth is that lately, for every 10 days of peace and self-controlled focus on my spiritual health, I get one or two days of crash and burn. For me, that feels like I lost a video game level that I worked hard to achieve, and now I have to do it all over again.
That’s how it feels as I read David’s Psalms sometimes, too. And yet I’m drawn to them like a lifeline. I’ve come to feel the rhythms of how David experienced his emotions; I can even picture the tear stains and crumpled edges of his paper. At first, one might think he’s pretty inconsistent—he begins in misery, claiming that God isn’t listening, and then talks a lot about crushing his enemies and something about the “power of the dog,” but he always ends with hopeful praises to the Lord. But then you turn the page, and he’s back to lamenting. What gives?
The dark night of the soul holds the same rhythms of David’s Psalms—in fact, they’re the theme songs. I’m learning now that this season isn’t something to overcome, but something that we must walk through with God. There isn’t a “secret chord” we can play to unlock the next level of understanding and growth from God; we can’t chart a path out of suffering. We can’t self-medicate with self-help books, and I assure you the answers cannot be found through search engine optimization.
You may be asking yourself, “So what is the dark night of the soul?” I don’t know exactly what it may be like for you or for St. John of the Cross, but I believe the basics are this: a stretch of time where God’s moving hand seems absent, where life feels void of divine intervention, where it’s harder than ever to see hope and the results of spiritual practices. A time when you feel like you’re doing everything right, and yet everything around you seems to go wrong or be fruitless. Detachment rather than abundance; silence rather than affirmation. Foundations cracking, losing control, the whole bit. Think of hiking alone in a dry, parched landscape; or treading water and hoping your strength doesn’t fail you.
Despite the sense of meaninglessness, I have found that there is a profound reason at play. C.S. Lewis says that God “leaves the creature [that’s me] to stand up on its own legs” and “it is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be.”
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