On a grey afternoon in December, at the very end of the semester, I sat in my living room and cried. For months I could not bring myself to tears. But finally, the familiar stream of salty water dripped down my face as I released months of frustration and hurt in a sob that came from the middle of my soul. I told the Lord that I was so confused as to why he’d stopped talking to me. I have no idea why you’ve been so quiet lately, I prayed, but please, please stop. I don’t know if I can endure the silence much longer.
In that moment I was reminded of a quote I’d read earlier:
Redemption comes like the silent snow that falls while we sleep. You wake up and the entire landscape has changed. The dark and barren colors of winter are transformed into a bright white glory that almost blinds you. When you look out the window you see a brand new world. (Jonathan David Helser)
The landscape of my soul was terribly desolate. It was dry and quiet and grey like the world around me on that December afternoon. There were no streams flowing with milk and honey. There were no trees blooming with fresh fruit. But just like Helser says redemption comes like snow in the night, so too would the Spirit come back to me and transform the scenery of my soul.
The thing with snow is that it often does not announce its arrival. Tornadoes come crashing along, rain stomps the roof of your house, and wind rattles and whistles its way through somewhere. Snow is different in that sometimes you don’t even realize it’s happening. Softly and slowly flakes fall down, settling on the empty, barren landscape. When we wake in the morning, we realize that everything is different. That which was dark is now iridescently white.
So there I sat on the floor of my living room with this imagery in my mind. I prayed that God would let it snow in my soul.
Many months went by without even a hint of snow. I still experienced the quietness of the Lord and felt that he was intentionally distancing himself from me. Despite this, I continued to practice spiritual disciplines knowing that the Lord wouldn’t be quiet forever. I continued to go to church, I regularly read scripture, and I committed to being discipled. I did these things out of obedience, but I rarely did them for the experiential value. No longer was I experiencing God emotionally. He had become so distant that I didn’t know if he was there at all any more.
It was sometime around February when I sat in my kitchen and confessed for the first time that I was seriously doubting the existence of the Lord. My two friends patiently prayed over me, but I could tell that they didn’t understand the state of my soul. Despite their genuine interest in my well-being, they didn’t know how dark the night was.
One afternoon after six months of struggling through the silence, I met with a mentor to tell him about how God had stopped showing up in my life. I sat across from him in his office and told him about how the longer I went without feeling the presence of the Lord, the easier it was for me to doubt whether he ever existed in the first place. I told this mentor that there had to be some explanation as to why the Lord just went quiet on me. I’d searched my soul, flipped through my journals from the last six months, and tried to think about whether there were some major sin(s) in my life that were keeping me from experiencing the glory of the Lord like I used to.
Ultimately, I realized that while I’m not perfect, there were no sinful habits or idols in my heart for which the Lord was punishing me. My mentor sat across from me as I made this realization and he quietly and humbly said, “Emily, it sounds to me like you’re in the Dark Night of the Soul.”
In the days to follow I researched what exactly that meant. The Dark Night of the Soul was originally a poem penned by a 16th century Spaniard named St. John of the Cross.
O guiding dark of night!
O dark of night more darling than the dawn!
O night that can unite
A lover and loved one,
A lover and loved one moved in unison.
(The above quote is just a segment of the original poem)
The “Dark Night of the Soul” came to be the term that describes the season during which some believers experience a “spiritual crisis” on their journey to union with God. Typically, the Dark Night is marked by a purification of the senses, then an intense purification of the soul. It’s debated as to whether every believer experiences the Dark Night, or if it’s only experienced by some. Perhaps the most famous person to go through the Dark Night of the Soul was Mother Teresa, who experienced the darkness for forty-nine years – the longest recorded case.
In his book Celebration of Discipline, Richard Foster writes about the value of going through the Dark Night. Foster says that contrary to what we might think, “the purpose of the darkness is not to punish or afflict us. It is to set us free. It is a divine appointment, a privileged opportunity to draw close to the divine Center.” He continues by saying that the Dark Night involves “a sense of dryness, aloneness, even lostness. Any overdependence on the emotional life is stripped away…The dark night is one of the ways God brings us into a hush, a stillness so that he may work an inner transformation upon the soul.” (emphasis added) Essentially, the Dark Night of the Soul is a season during which a believer is stripped of all dependency on emotional or experiential occurrences in their spiritual life. Their relationship with the Lord seems dry, quiet, emotionless, and stagnant in the most intense way. It’s a season marked by silence that can lead to doubt and denial.
Through my research and reflection, I learned that the Dark Night was apparently a thing that has “happened” to many people of great faith. The things I was experiencing were in fact not unusual. I wasn’t the first person to feel like the Lord had intentionally quieted his voice. I’d lost all experiential value in my spirituality and it made me doubt the actual existence of God – but I wasn’t alone. It wasn’t all in my head.
