Ever heard of the ‘dark night of the soul’?
La noche escura de alma
It was a poem originally written by some Spanish dude around the 16th century - another Catholic poet and mystic - St. John of the I-have-to-bear-this-Cross-for-the-rest-of-my-life.
And it has since been coined, written about, analyzed and even turned into few songs by the same title. It’s about loneliness and desolation. Generic translation?
“Where the HELL is God when I need him?”
If you’ve based your whole life on the notion that the Big Guy exists and you’ve basically been a good egg all along, but sometimes it still feels like someone’s been killing chickens and working your look-a-like voodoo doll like it’s a pin cushion, then you too have experienced the dark night of the soul.
And if you haven’t - either you’re in denial or you’re too young. Give it time. No one escapes it.
And get this. The dark night of the soul is suppose to be a blessing in disguise. Uh huh.
And my name’s Mother Teresa.
Speaking of which, MT's letters revealed she had spent the last 49 years of her life, in the dark night of the soul.
That's right. MT had seen so much suffering, she wasn’t sure God even existed. How do you like them apples?
And if He did exist, maybe he wasn’t such a good guy after all. Or maybe he had an evil twin. Or he was on vacation. Oh yeah, Mother Teresa was skating on the thin ice of doubt for a long time.
I think she came around in the end, but then again, there’s an old saying: Nobody dies an atheist.
And why bring this up?
Because as I was reviewing some of the principles contained within this little Six Month Experiment, there is one component I had sorely neglected to address:
In order to make significant changes in your life you have to kick some shadows first.
If you don’t, they will come up and kick you first and usually at the most inopportune time. Like when you get the phone call that might change your life for the better but you’re still in a funk from past issues so you accidentally sabotage a change for the better.
Or when you get into a relationship that is finally right, but because you’re stuck with old patterns of behaviour you can’t believe it’s not going to be different this time so you create the drama that repeats your past.
We are experts at screwing something up so we can remain comfortable struggling - if that’s what we’re used to - because we wear those uncomfortable patterns like an old shoe that finally has a hole in it and makes our bare feet scrape the cement. But it doesn’t matter if it's stupid. It’s what we know.
So the dark night of the soul, as uncomfortable as it is, can be a blessing in disguise. It depends on how you take it and what you do with it.
Wallow in it if you must - that in itself holds the comfort of justifying hot baths, eating chocolate until you break out and watching escapist movies - but it won’t get you anywhere.
Mystics thought the dark night of the soul was man’s perfect opportunity to show the stuff he was really made of.
It’s easy to be kind to people when you’re in a good mood, (or where there is recognition) or be virtuous when you think there are heavenly rewards, or write when you know someone is paying you to do it.
But if the quality of your existence remains regardless of your guarantees (or lack of them) then on some level, you’re in the same head space as Mother Theresa was when she spent almost fifty years helping the poor and depraved when the bottom was falling out of her devotional mindset.
She no longer performed tasks on behalf of God, but on behalf of herself in her attempt to ease the suffering of other human beings - with no condo or time share in paradise to look forward to.
And that, is how it should be...
NEXT: October is for kicking shadows.
