How often have you been through a "dark night of the soul"?

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St. John of the Cross describes three crucial signs in the person of the arrival of the dark night of the senses. (1) They are summarized below, following a similar description given by Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange. (2)
  1. The Psychological Experience: One finds no consolation in the things of God, nor in created things. (The Theological Explanation: Activity of the gift of knowledge, showing the emptiness of created things and the gravity of sin.)
  2. The Psychological Experience: One keenly desires to serve God, with a thirst for justice and fear of sin. One finds strength in temptation. (The Theological Explanation: Activity of the gift of fortitude, with the gift of fear.)
  3. The Psychological Experience: There is great difficulty in discursive meditation, with instead a tendency to the simple affective gaze toward God. (The Theological Explanation: Activity of the gift of understanding; the beginning of infused contemplation.)
The presence of all three signs, indicating the emergence of these holy gifts of the Spirit, all present together in a person at the same time, is confirmation of God’s work and this dark night having begun. These signs must be present, this night must come, before God’s gift of Himself in infused contemplation, and advanced stages of prayer.

references:
(1) The Dark Night, Book I, chapter 9 [St. John of the Cross, The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross. trans. Kieran Kavanaugh O.C.D. and Otilio Rodriguez, O.C.D. (ICS Publications Washington, DC 1973), 313-16].
(2) Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., Three Ages of the Interior Life, vol. 2, p. 51.
 
fide said:
St. John of the Cross describes three crucial signs in the person of the arrival of the dark night of the senses. (1) They are summarized below, following a similar description given by Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange. (2)
  1. The Psychological Experience: One finds no consolation in the things of God, nor in created things. (The Theological Explanation: Activity of the gift of knowledge, showing the emptiness of created things and the gravity of sin.)
  2. The Psychological Experience: One keenly desires to serve God, with a thirst for justice and fear of sin. One finds strength in temptation. (The Theological Explanation: Activity of the gift of fortitude, with the gift of fear.)
  3. The Psychological Experience: There is great difficulty in discursive meditation, with instead a tendency to the simple affective gaze toward God. (The Theological Explanation: Activity of the gift of understanding; the beginning of infused contemplation.)
The presence of all three signs, indicating the emergence of these holy gifts of the Spirit, all present together in a person at the same time, is confirmation of God’s work and this dark night having begun. These signs must be present, this night must come, before God’s gift of Himself in infused contemplation, and advanced stages of prayer.

references:
(1) The Dark Night, Book I, chapter 9 [St. John of the Cross, The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross. trans. Kieran Kavanaugh O.C.D. and Otilio Rodriguez, O.C.D. (ICS Publications Washington, DC 1973), 313-16].
(2) Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., Three Ages of the Interior Life, vol. 2, p. 51.
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Thank you so much for taking the time to post this – great information!
 
“a period of spiritual desolation suffered by a mystic in which all sense of consolation is removed” No, never not one single time I am 56 years old will be 57 in a few more months. It has never happened and it will never happen.
 
I sometimes wonder how many of these mystics who lived before the days of modern medical treatments were actually suffering from some form of what we now call depression or other mood disorders. The descriptions can sound awfully similar.
 
It may be that the ego is indeed a factor in the dark night.

However, if every high-profile public Catholic religious figure was frowned on by God for being in the limelight, and God only valued those who went in a secret cave or cloister to worship him, we would have no Catholic leaders or heroes or teachers or preachers to the masses.

The last several Popes (including the two who are saints and the one who is about to be made a saint), Bishop Sheen, Father Peyton, and others would all be condemned by God and sent to purgatory for ages.

I know Father Peyton got some of the same criticism for socializing with Hollywood stars and the like when he was doing his ministry.

I see Billy Graham just passed away and no one is pointing to him as having a big ego because he went around the world meeting important people. They are saying instead that he brought God to so many.

Not sure why there would be a double standard for Mother Theresa. It may be that she was tormented by her own scruples about what she was doing and feeling like maybe she was enjoying it too much. She wouldn’t be the first saint to feel she was falling short of the mark.
 
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Yes mother terrisa did seem to have issues with the ministry she founded. But it is amazing that so many people joined her in that endeavor
 
Where are all y’all getting this idea that St Teresa of Calcutta was some sort of egomaniac? 🤨

I had the opportunity to meet her in 1989 when I was in the monastery and she was travelling through Denver to open a house here. Archbishop (now Cardinal) Stafford loved our little monastery and brought Mother Teresa and two of her sisters to join us for dinner.

So we had the Archbishop, two priests, Mother Teresa, and two of her sisters as our guests. We had about 19 sisters at the time, and our tables were arranged like a horseshoe.

Because I was the second youngest in the community, it was expected that I would be an observer rather than a participant in the conversation.

So I observed.

Mother Teresa was gracious, but she also seemed tired, not just in body but in spirit. One got the impression that wanted none of this attention, but would rather have just walked the monastery grounds alone, or spent some time in the chapel.

When it became apparent that we wanted to hear about her work, she obliged, but even that seemed like a sacrifice for her, although she was all smiles.

It was strange watching her that day – the way she interacted with us from the moment we met her with hugs and smiles, all through dinner, and afterwards through Compline – she seemed almost fragile. There was absolutely a holiness about her, but it wasn’t flamboyant in any way. It was in her resignation to do whatever was asked of her immediately and without complaint.

She asked the same of her sisters, which is an extraordinary level of humility and surrender.

I saw absolutely no enjoyment of the limelight in her – quite the opposite in fact.

Watch some videos of her speaking to groups. She prepared nothing in advance, ever. She spoke off the cuff, and sometimes gets a little derailed in her train of thought. She cared nothing about coming off as a polished public speaker.

If she met with the powerful and famous, that was never of her doing. She once said, “Serve God where He puts you. If you puts you in the street, serve Him from the street. If He puts you in a palace, serve Him from the palace. You don’t put yourself in a palace, but you serve Him from the palace.”

She lived that for decades in surrender and darkness.
 
evangelical said:
Yes mother terrisa did seem to have issues with the ministry she founded. But it is amazing that so many people joined her in that endeavor
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They saw the good in what she was doing, and the good in her, and they followed the example and went to help.
We have sisters from her order right in my US communities now, helping here as well.
 
They would have run from it either way. As they ran from the wordly knowledge of their times.
Communists used to treat Christians as insane and give them strong drugs. Faith was considered in terms of medical conditions as a mental illness.
 
I resonate to your experience. Many times, I feel as though the walls of the present are closing in on me. They are cold, a cage made of memories, shadows of the past. Alone I sit in silence as the demons of yesterday clutter round me. They convict and restrain me and I am allowed no penance, no redemption. Each night I hear a thunder of war in the distance. But it is only a memory. I see a vision of countless crosses. Endless crosses stretching over the freshly dug fields. But it is only a memory. I feel the pains that were given. That I gave on so many days of loss. And, there is no light to free me from these shadows which cage me. I know I should have been dead long ago and suspect that perhaps I did indeed die, long ago. I cry out to God. I seek his consolation. But I know that he cannot help me. I have created my own prison in which I am the only prisoner and the only guard.
 
When I was in my teens, I went through something that I would describe as a dark night of the soul, separate from the usual teen angst. I didn’t realize that it was what was going on until after it was done with, but with the gift of hindsight, I can see that it was a part of the maturation process of faith - going from having a very simplistic, childlike conception of the nature of God to truly, personally experiencing that relationship in real terms.

To me, it felt like the spiritual equivalent of the vacuum of space. Growing up in a religious family, God was just a part of the background of my life, like the air. Then, over the span of a difficult month, it was almost like all the air had been sucked out of the room. Before that, I had been happy to just sort of parrot my way through prayers without thinking about it much, but at the point that praying really started to mean something to me because I was going through something hard, it seemed like there was only yawning silence. No answer, no feeling either positive or negative, just nothing at all. I kept on going because I knew that was what I was supposed to do, but with the wonder if it was just all for nothing or if I was just not good enough to experience what other people around me seemed to experience. It was suffocating.

It took about a year to pass. Without going into all the details, I feel like basically I had to learn to talk to God rather than at God. Instead of just bopping along with the idea that God was always just kind of there for me, I needed to learn to seek God instead.
 
It has never happened to me. I have never felt that God has abandoned me. I been through some rough times but have always known I could handle it.
 
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Dont know if youre replying to my post, but luck has nothing to do with it. I dont have control of everything that happens in my life. I do have a lot of control how I react to it.
 
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