The Christian meaning of the dark night of the soul, as it first appeared in literature in the form of a poem by John of the Cross, is a time in the believer’s life where he or she is in great spiritual pain. It’s a season of spiritual travail that culminates in a renewal for the believer in their life. As John of the Cross writes, it’s a God-led time when the believer is purified and the soul lets go of its attachments to be more fully united with God in his will. While pain always accompanies this season, so does spiritual growth.
What Does Dark Night of the Soul Mean Spiritually?
Googling the term “dark night of the soul” brings up a slew of results ranging from the original Christian writer, John of the Cross to the new age spirituality of authors Ekhart Tolle and Thomas Moore.
I am writing this from the perspective of a born again Christian’s experience where it’s a time in the believer’s life characterized by difficulty that leads to spiritual growth.
What Causes the Dark Night?
The causes of the dark night of the soul are varied, but they have one thing in common: difficulty, hardship, and pain.
It could be the loss of your livelihood, failure in your career, circumstances that change on a dime leaving you without anything familiar, the death of a loved one, an illness or a disease that brings it on.
In her book The Night is Normal, Alicia Britt Chole speaks of the night as disillusionment with God, first and foremost, but also with yourself or another person.
Feeling disillusioned with God was the beginning of my own dark night of the soul. I would never have admitted I felt that way toward God, but in hindsight, I felt incredibly disillusioned with him. I thought if I obeyed, living a good life doing all the good Christian things, that my children would experience the blessings of being raised in a Christian home and follow after us.
In my heart, I was desperate for my children to live a different life than I had before becoming a Christian at 28. But they made different choices, and it was heartrending and confusing to watch. I had attempted to do all the religious things I knew I was supposed to do. I studied my Bible, devoured Christian “fix-it” books, prayed, and attended church faithfully. When my prayers went unanswered I questioned God, my faith, and myself. My feelings terrified me because I was afraid of being a “bad” Christian.
One day, while reading a biography about George Mueller and his enviable prayer life, I cried out in utter despair and disgust. I knew my life didn’t look like his. It felt like it was all about my behavior and my effort, and God was nowhere to be found. I didn’t want to read my Bible. I didn’t want to pray anymore. Church was a chore.
In desperation, I stood in my bedroom after 18 years of being a Christian and cried out to God, asking him to grant me real faith. I desperately wanted a real life of faith like I read in the Bible and in the pages of Mueller’s biography. I told him if he was real, I needed him to show me, because this didn’t feel real to me anymore. It felt rote and dead. And if this was Christianity, I didn’t want it.
Talk about terrifying! But I can see now that God heard the cry of my heart and answered it through the dark night of my soul.
Is it a Dark Night of the Soul or Depression?
Maybe you are wondering if what you are experiencing is a dark night or depression. That is a reasonable question because both experiences are full of a sense of darkness and they are both extremely trying to endure.
The main way to differentiate between the two is that the dark night is rooted in your spiritual experience. It has sometimes been called a crisis of faith or spiritual depression. But it is always spiritual and leads to seeking spiritual answers.
Depression is a mental/emotional/physical (the soul) experience where you can feel down, disengaged, disinterested, low energy, and just generally without joy in life. In the dark night, you can feel hard pressed, and it can be brutal at times, but there is a sense of joy (not happiness) because you know the season has a deeper purpose. You’re going somewhere, you just don’t know where. And you have a sense of expectation that there’s going to be light on the other side.
If you suspect what you are experiencing is depression, with no spiritual root, I urge you to seek counseling. Depression is a symptom of larger, deeper issues that may not have been adequately addressed. If you aren’t sure, I would still urge you to seek counseling or therapy. It may be both depression rooted in a disrupted soul and a dark night, as was the case with me. God used immense pain to lead me to EMDR therapy to deal with unresolved trauma. In doing so, I came out of the dark night emotionally healed, free of depression.
The Christian meaning of the dark night of the soul is a spiritual experience where you feel a sense of dryness in your relationship with God. In fact, John of the Cross says “we find no comfort in the things of God and none also in created things.” And while that’s true, it’s also true that God himself leads us through this dark night to wean us “from all comfort so as to leave us with no other support than God himself.”
References:
“Poem: The Dark Night of the Soul,” John of the Cross
The Night is Normal, Alicia Britt Chole
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