A hymn we sing in Advent, which in the northern hemisphere is always the season of the longest nights, is about possibility--a counter-intuitive possibility of learning to trust darkness.
In the winter's early darkness,
through the days of failing light,
travelers may delay a journey
or may learn to read the night.
Turning on a steady axis,
cold and burning, black and bright,
heaven tells a faithful story
of the coming of the Light.
As we recognize the patterns
and we turn a certain way,
even when the path is darkest,
we are faced to greet the day.
Advent isn't the only season of long nights--it's just the one on the calendar. We all enter a long darkness at certain points in our lives. Gerald May writes about the long darkness in his book, The Dark Night of the Soul--part biography and part exploration of the theology of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross.
What follows is one of his many helpful descriptions of what is possible in this Dark Night.
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Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection, a Carmelite
mystic, lived in seventeenth-century France. At one point in his famous
treatise, The Practice of the Presence of God, he says, “People would be
surprised if they knew what their souls said to God sometimes.”
Centuries
before Freud “discovered” the unconscious, contemplatives such as Brother
Lawrence, Teresa of Avila, and John of the Cross had a profound appreciation that there is an active
life of the soul that goes on beneath our awareness. It is to this unconscious
dimension of the spiritual life that Teresa and John refer when they use the
term “dark.”
When we speak of darkness today, we are often referring to
something sinister, as in “powers of darkness” or the “dark side.” ...This is not what Teresa and John mean when they used the Spanish word
for dark, oscura. For them, it simply means “obscure.” In the same way that
things are difficult to see at night, the deepest relationship between God and
person is hidden from our conscious awareness.
In speaking of la noche oscura, the dark night of the soul,
John is addressing something mysterious and unknown, but by no means sinister
or evil. It is instead profoundly sacred and precious beyond all imagining.
John says the dark night of the soul is “happy,” “glad,” “guiding,” and full of
“absolute grace.” It is the secret way in which God not only liberates us from
our attachments and idolatries, but also brings us to the realization of our
true nature. The night is the means by which we find our heart’s desire, our
freedom for love.
This is not to say that all darkness is good. Teresa and
John use another word, tinieblas, to describe the more sinister kind of
darkness. There is no doubt about the difference. Teresa uses oscura in saying
that the spiritual life is so dark she needs much patience “in order to write
about what I don’t know.” But she uses tinieblas when she says, “The devil is
darkness itself.” Similarly, John says it is one thing to be in oscuras and
quite another to be in tinieblas. In oscuras things are hidden; in tinieblas
one is blind. In fact, it is the very blindness of tinieblas, our slavery to
attachment and delusion, that the dark night of the soul is working to heal.
For Teresa and John, the dark night of the soul is a totally
loving, healing, and liberating process. Whether it feels that way is another
question entirely! Nowadays most people think of the dark night of the soul as
a time of suffering and tribulation—redemptive perhaps, but entirely
unpleasant. This is not always the case.
The only characteristic of the experience of the dark night
that is certain is its obscurity. One simply does not comprehend clearly what
is happening. Some dark-night experiences may be quite
pleasant. One friend of mine, driven by unrelenting perfectionism, had
dedicated his adult life to doing everything right. He had a sense of humor,
and we had good times together, but it hurt to see the pain his self-judgment
was causing him. Then, gradually and inexplicably, he felt himself relaxing. He
was delightfully liberated from his burdensome sense of responsibility; he was
“free just to be,” as he put it. Although he wasn’t sure what was going on and
at times wondered if he might just be getting lazy, his overall experience of
the change was joyful.
For another person in another situation, the same kind of
liberation might be very painful. When I was practicing psychiatry, a woman
came to see me for depression. She had spent her life taking care of her
family, frequently neglecting her own interests in the process. She felt guilty
about anything she did for herself. She struggled with a sense of emptiness
after her children had grown up and was later devastated to discover that her
husband was having an affair. The experience was beginning to ease her
caretaking compulsion, but it certainly did not feel like liberation. All she
felt was pain, loss, and abandonment. Glimpses of her growing freedom made her
even more depressed at first, because in relinquishing her total dedication to
her marriage and family, she felt she was losing her only source of worth.
Gradually, however, she began to enjoy time for herself. And in ways so subtle
as to be almost unnoticeable amidst her pain, she began to feel a sense of
meaning and value not for things she did, but just for who she was.
Liberation, whether experienced pleasurably or painfully,
always involves relinquishment, some kind of loss. It may be a loss of
something we’re glad to be rid of, like a bad habit, or something we cling to
for dear life, like a love relationship. Either way it’s still a loss. Thus
even when a dark-night experience is pleasant, there is still likely to be an
accompanying sense of emptiness and perhaps even grief. Conversely, when a
dark-night experience leaves us feeling tragically bereft, there still may be a
sense of openness and fresh possibility. The point is, no matter how hard we
try, we cannot see the process clearly. We only know what we’re feeling at a
given time, and that determines whether our experience is pleasurable or
painful. As one of my friends often says, “God only knows what’s really going
on—literally!”
The obscurity of the dark night is so constant that I
sometimes say, “If you’re certain you’re going through a dark night of the
soul, you probably aren’t!” The statement is flippant, but in my experience people
having an experience of the dark night almost always think it is something
else. If it’s a pleasant experience, they may call it a mysterious
breakthrough, a moment of unexplainable grace. If it is unpleasant, they tend
to see it as a failure on their part: laziness, lassitude, resistance, or some
other inadequacy.
If, as John maintains, the night is such a gift, why must the
process remain so obscure?
Since the night involves relinquishing attachments,
it takes us beneath our denial into territory we are in the habit of avoiding.
We might feel willing to relinquish compulsions we acknowledge as destructive,
but anyone who has made a New Year’s resolution knows how self-defeating such
attempts can be. And what about the attachments we love, the ones we honor and
value? Would we willingly cooperate in being freed from drivenness to do good
works or to care for our family, even though we know it comes from compulsion
rather than love? Would we willingly join God’s grace in relinquishing
attachments to the beliefs and images of God that give us comfort, security,
and meaning, even if we recognize how they restrict and restrain us?
If we are
honest, I think we have to admit that we will likely try to sabotage any
movement toward true freedom. If we really knew what we called to relinquish on
this journey, our defenses would never allow us to take the first step.
Sometimes the only way we can enter the deeper dimensions of the journey is by
being unable to see where we’re going.
