Oh, and by the way, for someone who has enjoyed the awareness of God (I’m not speaking of the sweetness of God, although any awareness is sweeter than no awareness) to be suddenly deprived of this awareness and even victim to what seems like His spurning, is enough to make a person depressed, seriously depressed.
Here is an excerpt from the Divine Mercy Library:
The ‘Dark Night’ — That “dark night” remained almost to the end of Faustina’s Novitiate. What is the “dark night of the soul?” The phrase, today almost a spiritual cliche, was coined in the 16th century by Spanish poet and Catholic mystic, St. John of the Cross. The phrase is both a title to a poem he wrote and a book that contains his commentary on the poem. The Carmelite priest’s work examines the stages of development he underwent on his journey to holiness.
Most of us have heard the term “dark night” in reference to spirituality. We associate it with spiritual progress and may idly (and always when we are not in one) wish for our own “dark night” experience. If, however, one truly knew what the dark night is like, he or she wouldn’t wish for it. To sum up in a few words what properly takes a book: the dark night of the soul is the feeling of utter abandonment, an interior suffering that seems as if it will never end.
One writer described it as a “lengthy and profound absence of light and hope.” When you’re in this interminable state, there’s nothing you can do with the mind or body — no thought or action, no idea or motion — that can “get you out of it.” You feel trapped and can’t find the exit. No one can help you. You want nothing more than to escape and get out of the “night.” You’d even give your own soul, and so you do.
You’re stuck.
No One, No Where, with No Thing — It comes as no slice of relief to realize that this “dark night” is actually a literal form of contact with a field of higher consciousness. It is matter meeting antimatter, the relative making contact with the Absolute, the tenuous brushing up against Omniscience and Omnipresence.
The seeker in the midst of the dark night is not in a relationship with God any longer but experiencing an immersion in Him. One’s ego begins to dissolve, willingly or not. All previous ways of defining the self vanish, leaving you feeling like no one, nowhere, with nothing. The phenomenon then takes on urgency. You are No One, No Where, with No Thing. **You question your sanity and may think you are losing your mind.
**
The loving and merciful God has you just where He wants you.
Traditional prayer is useless. Ritualistic worship becomes agony. All the “safe” ways you knew of praying disappear, giving way to a transitional phase of contemplation before morphing into an utter inability to pray. Spiritually, God is making room for Himself in you, but “knowing” this provides no comfort. You believe the opposite is true. You believe God has abandoned you. All you can do is wait, feeling alone. That is one frightening space to be in.
For all you know, your prayer life has collapsed and God has left you. You are, in poet Andre Gide’s striking image, like a moth inside a cocoon trying to know itself. The moth that tries this will never become a butterfly. All it can do is let the transformational process happen. So is the soul caught in the midst of the dark night, in the Experience of No Self. God begins to take over. You begin to change and the old “you” is no more. You dread every minute of it.
