Dark night of the soul

In 1577, the Spanish friar John of the Cross was seized by members of his own religious order, who opposed his efforts to reform it. They locked him in a cell in Toledo barely big enough to lie down in, with a slit of a window, and kept him there for about nine months. He escaped one night in 1578.

In prison and afterward, he wrote some of the most celebrated poems in the Spanish language. One begins on a dark night, with the soul slipping out of a quiet house to meet the one it loves. His long commentary on that poem gave us the phrase "the dark night of the soul".

Today "dark night of the soul" is often used for any terrible time. John meant something more specific. People who pray seriously often start out with a lot of feeling: warmth, sweetness, a sense of closeness to God. Then, sometimes, it goes. Prayer feels empty. Practices that used to move them leave them cold.

Most people take this as a sign that something has gone wrong: they've lost their faith, or God has left them. John's surprising claim is the opposite. The dryness can be a sign of growth. The old comforts are being taken away so that faith can rest on something deeper than feelings.

Many people in the tradition have described long dry seasons. After Mother Teresa's death, her letters revealed that for decades she felt almost no sense of God's presence, while she carried on her work and her prayer.

John was careful to say that not every dry spell is a dark night. He gave signs for telling it apart from simple slackness or from what he called melancholy. In short: no comfort in prayer or in much else; a painful worry that you aren't doing right by God; and being unable to pray in the old way, however you try.

Because those signs can look a lot like depression, modern writers add a practical question. The psychiatrist Gerald May, who wrote about the dark night, pointed out that in depression the whole of life usually suffers: sleep, appetite, work, relationships, any sense of your own worth. In a dark night, people often still function, still care about others, and keep some sense of humor, even while prayer feels empty.

The two can happen at the same time. If you're not sure which you're in, treat it as worth checking with a doctor. Getting help with depression doesn't undermine anything spiritual.

Without faith, there is a version of this too. A career, a craft or a relationship that used to feel alive can go flat for a long time. Sometimes that's a sign to leave. Sometimes it's a passage, and what's on the other side is a steadier commitment that doesn't depend on feeling inspired every day.

Grace, 58, has sung in her church choir for twenty years. Since spring, prayer has felt like talking to an empty room, and the hymns that used to move her do nothing. She still works, sleeps well, and enjoys Sunday lunch with her family. But she is ashamed, sure that she has lost her faith, and is planning to quit the choir and stop going to church so she won't be a hypocrite.