The Dark Night of the Soul - No. 34
I heard the term "Dark Night of the Soul" for many years before I really began to understand what it was and the critical role it plays in our spiritual journey. During a challenging season, I felt led to read The Dark Night of the Soul by Saint John of the Cross. But it wasn’t until years later, after going through a very long dark night of the soul, that I learned why this often misunderstood season is so critical.
The dark night of the soul is a time when God feels very far from us. Often it seems as though the spiritual light within us and around us has gone out. The presence of God with us, guiding us and encouraging us, is no longer felt. It is in the dark night that we face trials and tribulations, abandonment, fear, and hopelessness. Sometimes it lasts for months, and other times for years. Every person I know who walks closely with God has gone through this painful spiritual initiation. Many of the great biblical figures, like Paul, Moses, David, John the Baptist, Joseph, and Jesus himself, seem to have gone through similar desert seasons.
I have been through multiple dark nights of the soul. The most intense of which lasted several years. The pursuit of God had been my central focus for most of my life, it was my passion and what drove me. Most of the time, I felt close to God and felt like I knew the direction that he had for me. Then all of a sudden I felt lost, abandoned, and God felt very distant. It was like the GPS of my life just stopped working. Simultaneously, challenges began to emerge all around me in work, relationships, and family. I thank God for mentors in my life, who guided me through this challenging season. When I emerged from this dark valley, it became clear that what seemed like one of the worst seasons of my life was actually one of the most important. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. It was in this dark night that my attachments to false identity, empty desires, and cultural lies were loosened. The years in the desert, wondering if God was still with me, was the time when I let go of the things that kept me from God and finally began to embrace the idea that I needed to go through a dying process in order to become who I was created to be.
When we are led by God into the desert and find ourselves lost in the dark night, day after day, month after month, it is easy to lose hope. Many people give up on the journey and settle. Accepting a smaller life, a level of constant nagging disappointment, and let their hunger for God turn into complacent religion. This can even lead to abandoning God altogether, deconstructing, or drifting into some form of universalism. Whether a person simply settles for milk toast religion or abandons God altogether doesn’t matter; the important question is, have they stopped the journey? Are they no longer being transformed in their pursuit of God?
The dark night of the soul is good and necessary for every person who follows Jesus. Most pop spirituality focuses on how God can make us feel better. Unfortunately, this becomes another form of self-obsession and self-gratification. We are now using God as a tool to get what we want instead of our pursuit of God leading us to abandon everything we think we want in order to embrace what He created us for. The dark night of the soul is a season when we learn to loosen our hold on the broken desires of the false man.
It is in the dark night of the soul where goals and desires that used to consume a person begin to seem insignificant and worthless. Physical desires start to feel vain and empty. While this loosening of false desires and identity occurs, a much more important transition begins to take place. They begin to cement their beliefs, or they abandon them. If a person believes God is there just to comfort and encourage them and not to transform them, then they will struggle immensely. When they enter the great refining season of the dark night, they begin to assume that God has abandoned them, that He must not be good, or worse, not real. On the other hand, for some people, their beliefs about God in this season move from ideas and thoughts to foundational realities that they build their lives on. When this happens, they emerge from the dark night transformed; their old perspective on life and way of thinking is gone, their foundation is strong, and their thinking is no longer polluted in the ways it used to be.
When a person emerges this way from the dark night, they are now prepared for their greatest battle, overcoming themselves. In the dark night, their heart and mind was refined, the false reality they once believed in is gone, and they have placed truth as their foundation. Now they are ready to overcome themselves. Before, they couldn’t clearly see what was real and worth pursuing, so they weren’t prepared to overcome themselves; now they are ready.
This might sound abstract, so I'd like to share a word picture that comes to mind when I think about the dark night of the soul. The great battle of overcoming self could be compared to climbing a mountain. Most people are carrying far too much baggage to be able to ever physically make it up the mountain. The baggage is their pain, brokenness, shame, but it is also, more importantly, the false desires and beliefs that have driven their life. Fundamentally, it is the belief that they deserve to have what they want when they want it. I envision a young man loaded down with a giant backpack, pots and pans strapped to the side and every other manner of nonessential gear. But before he gets to the mountain, he must pass through a desert. It is very long, very hot, and very dry. Day after day, as the young man trudges through this desert, he begins to really evaluate the gear that he's carrying with him. Does he really need the pots and pans, the iPad, the drinks, the treats, and extra clothes? Slowly, the young man sheds his unnecessary gear. He lets go of the comforts and assurances that come from having more than you need. Each time he offloads some of his gear, it feels painful. Things he thought he really needed and thought he really wanted are now being left behind him in the desert. This is a dark and hopeless season for him. But then, after this very long walk through the desert and being stripped of so many of the things that he thought he wanted and needed, the boy finds himself at the foot of the great mountain. Now, instead of being burdened down by his previously unmanageable load, he has only the absolute necessities. The mountain is hard enough to climb in of itself, even with the lightest of packs. The young man never stood a chance of making it up the mountain if he hadn't first gone through the long desert and been stripped of all the nonessentials that he was carrying with him. This is why the dark night of the soul is a necessary place of preparation for real transformation.
I wish that I'd understood years ago that the dark night of the soul is a good thing, it's a gift. Instead of a place where I questioned God, His guidance in my life, and His goodness towards me, it might have allowed me to recognize more quickly that this was a time to let go of the desires, expectations, and beliefs that would keep me from becoming who I am called to be. Fortunately, I had mentors who continually reminded me to stay the course and that God was still guiding me. They shared stories of their own dark nights and the process God led them through, and how He brought them out of those seasons as new people. I could clearly see the goodness of God in their lives, His blessings, and the transformation these men had gone through. Without that, I could've easily taken the path that so many people do. Deconstructing their beliefs about God and drifting into a universalist worldview that allowed them to maintain their self-obsession and repackage God to fit their broken narratives. It is very hard to make it through the dark night of the soul without a mentor to guide you.
Another way that people get lost in the dark night of the soul is by accepting a broken narrative of life and God's intentions towards them. These people start to assume that God doesn’t really love them and that their lot in life is simply suffering. In other words, they stop believing that God has good things for them. These people stop the journey, they stop moving forward towards the mountain and the promised land, but they do not retreat fully back into the bondage of self-obsession. They just embrace the lie that the desert is the life they were made for.
The dark night is something we can go through multiple times, just like overcoming ourselves is not a one-time journey. But once we have been through it, we can recognize it for what it is. It’s an important and beautiful season of stripping away the unnecessary baggage we are carrying. Many people, however, go through the dark night of the soul over and over because they never walked all the way through it the first time, and afterwards they didn't climb the mountain and overcome themselves. Therefore, God in His graciousness invites them again and again to be stripped of what is unnecessary so that they can walk the journey they were born for. If man does not allow God to lead him beyond his self-obsession, he will spend the rest of his life wandering in and out of that dark desert, attempting to get to the mountain, but then turning back when the price seems too high to bear. It appears that most people's "walk with God" is like that of the Israelites wandering through the desert for 40 years because they didn't have the courage and faith to follow God into the promised land. I think just like the Israelites, we are all faced with the same opportunity. Are we willing to trust God, walk through the dark night, be stripped of the things we once held most dear, and then die to ourselves? Or are we like the Israelites, choosing to turn away and say, “It's too hard, the price seems too high.” When the Israelites heard that the inhabitants of the promised land were formidable, many of them begged to go back to Egypt. They decided they would rather live as slaves than trust God to deliver the promised land to them. Are we not the same?
A friend of mine always likes to ask, "Compared to what?” It's his way of clarifying that every decision is a choice, and we need to understand what the other options are before we can know if we're making the right choice. Most people fail to ask this question. They say no to the journey God has for them because the price is too high, but they fail to fully evaluate the other options. The “compared to what” is a life of self-obsession where our desires are never fully quenched, and our dreams are not fully realized. In other words, the other option is the shadow land. If we don’t follow God into the promised land, then we are choosing a life in the shadow lands, where instead of peace, we chase good feelings, instead of hope, we chase excitement, instead of love, we chase acceptance, and instead of joy, we chase temporary happiness. One thing is abundantly clear: the shadowland leaves people purposeless and lonely, with broken hearts and broken minds. We all must walk through the dark night of the soul and overcome ourselves so that we can find the promised land. A way of living filled with peace, joy, hope, love, and purpose.
- John Walt
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