Midway this way of life we’re bound upon,
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.

Ay me! How hard to speak of it – that rude
And rough and stubborn forest! The mere breath
Of memory stirs the old fear in the blood;

It is so bitter, it goes night to death;
Yet there I gained such good, that, to convey
The tale, I’ll write what else I found therewith

Dante’s Inferno, Canto I 1-10 (Trans. Dorothy L Sayers)

I had this idea that I wanted to write about the dark night of the soul. So much Christian writing seems to revolve around triumph and victory, so much Easter Day, not much Good Friday, that we are in danger of losing sight of the painful, dark side of life, devaluing it completely, whereas I think that it has great value in presenting a real picture of life.

However, as I begin to write, I don’t know where to start. What is this “Dark Night of the Soul”? I find I can’t give a pat answer to that, but nonetheless it is a good way into talking about an area of life I find myself interested in these days.

The best resource I have found for this whole area is a book by Thomas Moore, called “Dark Nights of the Soul”, where he explores it in a great deal of depth, much more than I can in a short blog entry. I will quote and paraphrase him frequently, often without attribution.

And still I avoid the question. What is the dark night of the soul? The easiest way to answer that, though not the most helpful, is to say: you know it when you’re having one. A day’s bad mood is not a dark night. The experience that is often labeled Depression may well be. Depression is a medical concept though, pathologizing – a thing from which, like any illness, we want only to be healed as quickly and as painlessly as possible.

When I arrived back in Australia, after spending the best part of a decade overseas, I had this real sense of leading. It seemed profoundly the right thing to do. But when I arrived, I managed to carefully time it to be in the middle of an IT recruitment slump, so I was out of paid work for much, much longer than I had ever been before. As well as that, my sense of calling, that I had been selected by God for specific activities, completely vanished. My wife became chronically ill. We began to realize that pregnancy wasn’t going to come easily to us, if indeed it was going to come at all. On top of that, we seemed to be deluged with a series of disasters – among other things, we were in a serious car accident, a tree fell on our house, demolishing quite a lot of it.

This, for me, was my dark night. Heaven seemed closed, my prayers, when I could motivate myself to pray at all, which wasn’t often, seemed to float off into the aether, and if God heard them, he certainly wasn’t letting on. I was, in the terms of Ignatian spirituality, thoroughly in Desolation.

I don’t think, by the way, that it dark nights need only result from such serious external circumstances – after all, the external circumstances here weren’t as bad as they could have been. Neither of us has cancer, nothing caused by violence and crime. This isn’t to downplay my situation, but to emphasize the internal nature of it. For other people a divorce, or a nasty breakup short of that, or that moment of leaving university and not knowing what to do next (is that the Quarter Life Crisis I hear about?), or unemployment could well be the trigger.

It is, to quote Moore, “a period of sadness, trial, loss, frustration, or failure that is so disturbing and long-lasting that it may be called a dark night of the soul.”

What renders an experience, or set of experiences, into a Dark Night is the effect it has on you. You feel set apart from other people. Things feel… different. You are changed by it.

I heard about a pastor who described it thus: every Christian gets it, it happens about two years in, and lasts about a fortnight. I wonder if the he had every really experienced it?

Rather than try to find a propositional way to define it, it is better to get at it through stories, much as it pains the rational, scientific part of me: Stories which are deeply rooted in our culture, from the Bible, and from myth.

The most famous of these is the story of Jonah and the Whale. Jonah flees from God’s call to preach to the people of Ninevah. He tries to flee to Tarshish (probably Spain.) On the way, there is a great storm, and the sailors toss him overboard, where he is swallowed by a great fish (the whale is from the King James), where he sat for three days and three nights, before being spat out on the shore.

This is the archetype Night Journey. You are being taken… somewhere. Not somewhere where you necessarily want to go. Not somewhere over which you have much control. It is dark, you are all alone. It probably doesn’t smell too good.

But, on the other hand, it is like being in the womb, like being a planted seed

There is a conflict here: my western, problem solving, success oriented self wants to get out of it as quickly as I can. As Moore said, “If your main interest in life is health, you may quickly try to overcome the darkness. But if you are looking for meaning, character, and personal substance, you may discover that a dark night has many important gifts for you.”