On their path to find God, mystics like St John of the Cross, Mother Theresa, and many others from every religion have mentioned a period of confusion, sadness, fear and solitude which they have described as “the dark night of the soul”.
At some point in our spiritual pilgrimage, we have cried out to God or wondered in our deep anguish; ‘God, where are you? What is wrong with you? Why are you so distant? God, what is wrong with me? Why do I feel so dry inside? Why do I not seem to care the way I used to about you? What have I done wrong?”
The experience is typically quite confusing, particularly for struggling Christians who feel that they alone are at fault for their spiritual dryness, and their guilt feelings are often reinforced by other Christians who tell them that they are indeed responsible for their distance from God. These times in our spiritual pilgrimage often correspond to what the ancient Christian spiritual writers called a ‘dark night of the soul’ in which the Spirit secretly does a deep work in the human spirit – a work that is so profound but feels so foreign to the Christian’s experience that it is often interpreted as the absence of God. Thus, it is helpful for us to be able to understand what in fact God is doing in these times.
In this new area which is also known as “breakdown zone”, a human being feels lost and finds it difficult to think clearly. Everything around him is covered in mist and he doesn’t know where to go from here. Anxiety, fear and desperation come to the surface. The judging mind, whose only objective for us is, like a sheep, to return to the flock, starts to bombard us with interpretations and value judgments that only encourage us to give up exploring and return to our starting point.
We feel lost and confused because we are on the verge of making a discovery, of having a revelation. The reality is that behind this dark area where we sink there is an area of discovery, the place where one begins to get a deep understanding of certain things important for our spiritual growth. It is essential to keep up one’s courage, confidence and absolute belief that something of value, although now hidden, is germinating within ourselves. Our consciousness has woken up but our intellectual and rational mind dependent on our ego doesn’t know what is happening and feels its existence threatened. Just like the caterpillar undergoes the essential process of transformation into a butterfly, likewise our identity has to undergo a process so that a new being much more in line with whom we really are, emerges.
We need to willingly give in to the curing process that is so necessary for us. If we manage to escape from that mirage created by the emotions which are unfortunately at the service of our narrow selves and our limited consciousness, we will find new possibilities for our lives. It is akin to seeing things from a higher viewpoint from where one sees what is unseen from the ground level.
