Dark Night

In 1577, when St. John of the Cross was thirty-five years old, he was abducted by his own brothers of Carmelite monks. They were opposed to reform and broke into John’s dwelling in the middle of the night, dragged him away, and locked him up in a monastery in Toledo, Spain. His prison cell, a stone room barely large enough for his body, had formerly been a latrine. His single robe rotted from his body in the fetid heat of summer, and in winter he shivered in the rag that remained. Several times a week, the brothers brought him out to be flogged while they enjoyed their midday meal. Otherwise, he sat in the darkness, tracking the stars through the single small window, high up in the wall of his cell…

Doubt began to infiltrate his psyche and, though he clung to the life-raft of faith, it began to disintegrate in his hands and he drifted into despair. Like Jonah in the belly of the fierce fish (an analogy John later evoked when he wrote the commentary to Dark Night of the Soul), the imprisoned friar found himself suspended in the void. He was unable to move toward any kind of hopeful future, or backward to the innocent idealism that had led to his being swallowed up in this terrible emptiness. It was painful enough for him to wonder if God had given up on him, but the true agony descended when he began to find himself giving up on God.

At last, he simply ran out of energy and let himself down into the arms of radical unknowingness—which is where the transmutation of the lead of his agony began to unfold into the gold of mystical poetry...It was there, as he languished, that the caterpillar of his old self dissolved and the butterfly of his authentic being grew its wings...

The great mystics of all traditions teach us that the spiritual life is not really about consolation; it is about annihilation. It is about allowing the small self, which suffers from the illusion of separation from God, to burn in the flames of transformation so that the True Self may emerge. “In this way,” John writes, “God makes the soul die to all that is not inherently of God. When the soul is stripped bare of her old skin, God clothes her afresh. Like the eagle, her youth is revitalized. She is clothed in newness of being.”

Our prisons take many forms. Some of us struggle with very real physical incarceration. Many of us suffer from profound losses; not only the death of loved ones, but also serious health diagnoses, or loss of a job, career, or community. We may grapple with chronic mental illness, addiction, or the addictive behaviors of loved ones. Embracing our imprisonment as a chance for a direct encounter with the Sacred is counter-intuitive, but it may be the very blessing we most need for our journey home. Stripped of all sensory and conceptual attachments, freed of our own opinions on the matter, these dark nights of our souls dismantle the obstacles that stand between ourselves and our Beloved. Our only task is to say ‘yes’ no matter how tentatively; to say ‘thank you’, no matter how quietly.”

- Mirabai Starr, new translation of ‘Dark Night of the Soul, by St. John of the Cross’ and ‘The Interior Castle, by St. Teresa of Avila’. She teaches Philosophy and World Religions at the University of New Mexico-Taos.

Image - Endarkenment - Alex Grey by Morgana