Reflections After a Spiritual Crisis

IN MY FIRST SEMESTER of divinity school, I experienced a spiritual crisis. For months, I woke every night at 3 a.m., plagued by unanswerable questions on life’s meaning, God’s silence, suffering, and human nature. At the time, I felt alone, but now, years on the other side of it, I see the healing that emerged from my “dark night of the soul.”

While the phrase “dark night of the soul” has seeped into secular parlance, it is specifically drawn from the Christian contemplative tradition. St. John of the Cross, a 16th-century Carmelite monk and reformer, wrote a theological commentary and a poem, both titled “The Dark Night of the Soul,” about good darkness, contemplation, and the journey of faith. These works emerged after John’s unjust imprisonment in a monastery, where he endured physical violence and extreme deprivation. There, John discovered the richness of the “dark night” for illumination and purification. Barbara Brown Taylor, author of Learning to Walk in the Dark, writes, “For [John], the dark night is a love story, full of the painful joy of seeking the most elusive lover of all.” While the dark night may feel like “oblivion,” John contends that “The more darkness it brings ... the more light it sheds.”

John ultimately names God “no-thing.” This kind of God talk is rooted in apophatic theology, which stipulates that God surpasses human understanding and is fundamentally undefinable but related to through contemplation. In the 14th-century apophatic text The Cloud of Unknowing, the unknown author advises, “Now you say, ‘How shall I proceed to think of God as he is in himself?’ To this I can only reply, ‘I do not know.’ ... Say to your thoughts, ‘You are powerless to grasp him. Be still.’” John describes this process of unknowing as alchemical, transforming “spiritual pride” into humility, ultimately making the true “love of neighbor” possible.

Taylor disentangles common associations between “darkness” and “sinister” things, but makes an important distinction between the dark night — faith obscured — and clinical depression, “a darkness designed to obliterate.” Having experienced both, I can report that each is painful but unique. To me, the dark night feels like silence, while depression feels like sinking far beneath the ocean’s surface. The medicine for each is different. The dark night demands silence, reverence, and stillness; depression requires therapy, treatment, and connection. In Taylor’s words, “Depression can take people apart without putting them back together again, while la noche oscura [the dark night] is for healing.” Though different paths, healing from depression and enduring the dark night have instilled the same kind of softness in me: deeper humility and greater compassion, for all human beings and for myself as well.