Dark Night Of The Soul

 In a TIME article by David Biema, he wrote about Mother Teresa and the inner spiritual life of the saint as written in the book, Come Be My Light.  Contrary to the public image that Mother Teresa and her community had cultivated over the years, the woman herself had persevered through an emotionally depressing period, punctuated by extended bouts of spiritual 'dryness'.

 The book discusses the saint's struggle with a God who seemingly had left her for good, a God who, at the start of her ministry, was omnipresent but was now absent even as she lived through the pinnacle of her ministry's success.

David Biema, in due course, discusses how certain groups, from the atheists, to the psychologists, then to the religious scholars, have explained this paradox. He also mentions St. John of the Cross, the influential Carmelite who wrote in great detail about the stages that one had to go through towards a spiritual union with God.

St. John was the first to coin the phrase, "the Dark Night of the Soul", an intense period where, as per Wikipedia (because it defines it better), "spiritual disciplines (such as prayer and consistent devotion to God) suddenly seem to lose all their experiential value; traditional prayer is extremely difficult and unrewarding for an extended period of time during this "dark night." The individual may feel as though God has suddenly abandoned them or that his or her prayer life has collapsed. It is important to note however that the presence of doubt is not tantamount to abandonment—as there is a strong Biblical tradition of authentic confusion before God. Psalms 13, 22, and 44 display King David, the 'man after God's own heart' undergoing serious confusion before and anguish with God, yet this is not condemned or mentioned as being unfaithful, but rather as the only measure of faith that David could have in the face of such withering apparent abandonment."

Such was, according to some leading theologians, the case with Mother Teresa (although hers was a rarer variety since it went beyond several years).

In Conti's Holistic Christianity, he discusses the stages leading to and from The Dark Night of the Soul:

Active Night of the Senses: God reveals to us Himself through our senses, a period characterized by euphoria and spiritual ecstasy.

Passive Night of the Senses: God withdraws the sensible spiritual delights He had lavished on us during our earliest days of growth, to test our mettle, to attune us to subtler perception of His presence.

Illuminative Way: The ego is now well-oriented to God's will and has constructed a kind of self-made union with God - a good union, but not as deep or abiding a union as God would have us finally know.

Dark Night of the Soul: God dissolves the ego, undoing our self-constructed union with Him to make way for a perfect union.

Unitive Revelation: Peace at last, union with God, as God draws together the elements of our being around Himself who is our new non-egoic center.

Going back, Mother Teresa persevered in her works despite the all-encompassing feeling of abandonment, a fact that, among anything else, highlights her as a true saint. As Kolodiejchuk, a priest and the editor of Come Be My Light, would say, "The tendency in our spiritual life but also in our more general attitude toward love is that our feelings are all that is going on," he says. "And so to us the totality of love is what we feel. But to really love someone requires commitment, fidelity and vulnerability. Mother Teresa wasn't 'feeling' Christ's love, and she could have shut down. But she was up at 4:30 every morning for Jesus, and still writing to him, 'Your happiness is all I want.' That's a powerful example even if you are not talking in exclusively religious terms." 

Why am I writing this post anyway? That's probably because I'm one of the many who are left in the dark, looking for a God who is nowhere to be found.