Dark Night of The Soul: The Only Way Out is Through

By Traci Hubbard

Psalm 23 The Message

In 1989, I went through a dark night of the soul, and one day, when we know one another better, I will tell you why.

I have experienced three dark nights of the soul. Each one bringing me to my knees, even on the ground on my face weeping, sobbing, hollowing me out. I shared with my soul sister, my best friend, “I feel like if I opened my mouth and you said my name, the sound of my name would echo inside me. I’m in a dark cavern, alone, and it hurts to breath,” Last night, I read through two of my journals from 1989. They revealed that I was desperate for the Spirit’s presence, my heart racing like it does when you’re at the top of a rollercoaster and it is about to drop. Something inside me dropped away, cleared out space, and the emptiness felt fathomless. I was a million leagues under the sea, there was no light above me. I couldn’t find the top of the water.

When I was five, my mother said I would sit at the bottom of the deep end in the pool, eyes wide open, and look up at the water. I loved being under water surrounded by the comforting silence there, it felt safe, it felt like home. Water, the beach and the sounds of the tide have always felt like home. But in the dark nights, the experiences of being in the dark, searching for God, searching for myself, there was no sense of home, there was no comforting light above me, there was only dead air under the waters that were covering me in shadows.

The beliefs I had been living on like a strong unshakable boulder, my solid rock, my life jacket, were dashed to pieces during these spiritual, mental, and visceral soul quakes, rip tides. It felt like a continual falling and there was no place to land because I was no longer sure of the things I was sure of. I was terrified, grasping for something to tether to. I couldn’t understand why I was being shredded.

Life was good, my daughters were healthy and happy, my ministry was going well, I was learning, people were learning, our gatherings were growing in I energy and numbers. People were receiving the spiritual nourishment they needed, friendships were strengthening in spiritual ways I didn’t know existed. We were having fun creating and offering programs and events that colored outside the lines and brought media attention. I thought we were living, experiencing what true communion with the Sacred and one another should be.

And boom, no headlight warning, no blinker sound indicating a turn of direction was coming, and certainly no street signs to point the way, I was ripped out of the peaceful and joy filled traffic inside of me and I didn’t know where I was or why I was there. I could not see a way out. This plunging of my soul was real, and I knew I was in St. John’s dark night of the soul.  Each time this happened, I knew from my studies and experience, I was on the mercy seat of the Holy, being held by the tongs of Love.

At the same time, it didn’t feel like love, it didn’t feel safe, it felt naked, exposed, filleted like a fish out of water.  And the fear, the physical pain that emerged from my spiritual and mental desperation was so overwhelming I forgot what I knew to be true, what I had trusted with all of my being. I knew I was dissolving, again, and it was messy, it was cold, it was dark, like the inside of a caterpillar’s cocoon. My deconstruction, my hollowing out, should have felt light, but the opposite was true. My evaporation felt heavy.    

How can it be that God’s love is at work and present in the tragedies around the globe right now? But knowing what harrowing circumstances John of the Cross was in when he came to experience the infinite love of God gives me hope and perseverance.

During the 16th century. Teresa of Avila was in her fifties, and Juan de la Cruz was in his twenties and crazy in love with God. St. Teresa of Ávila, the author of The Interior Castle, recognized a rare purity, bright brilliance and humility in John, so she asked him to lead her convent reformation. The Carmelite Order had grown greedy and comfortable, and Teresa wanted to infiltrate the spiritual abuse by creating a Barefoot Convent, full of humility and service to the poor, like the Desert Fathers and Mothers intended.

Ten years later, mainstream big church minded Carmelites snatched John away during the middle of the night and put him in a dungeon prison in Toledo where he stayed for eleven months. His prison cell had been a toilet – a latrine, and there wasn’t enough space to lie down, and only a tiny window way up high on the cold damp wall. Every morning and every evening, he was yanked from his cell and beaten – flogged by the friars – the spiritual leaders trapped in a retributive justice belief, and this way of shaming, beating up the souls of people so they will conform to the way a leader believes continues to this day. They screamed at him, “Denounce Teresa. Abandon the heresy of this false reform!”

But John would not betray the calling he and Teresa knew to be from God, from Love. Their vision was to a create monastic life of voluntary simplicity, solitude, and silence. It was to be a contemplative life based on the Gospel teachings of poverty of spirit and selfless giving of the heart. This life was to be one of stripping away rather than adding or hoarding. This way of being was a surrendering of power that sought nothing in return. The core of their vision was nothing but loving friendship with the Holy while providing kind love and service to all people and creation. Sounds like a good thing, right? They were doing good work and then boom! John is on the dark night rollercoaster, in prison where the mental and spiritual life and connection with the Spirit was literally being stripped away from him. He began to question if God existed because he could not feel or remember who God was to him. His soul dried up. There was no divine cell phone connection, his prayers weren’t getting through. The more he prayed, the emptier he felt, and he cried out, “Where have you hidden, my beloved?”

His cries became echoes of poetry that poured out of him, like many of my journals reveal. Like John, I called out to the one who created me, sustained me, breathed in me…Love, LOVE please help me, where are you and what am I missing, I cannot find the why – the answer. John’s cries caught the attention of a prison guard who empathized with him, and he allowed John to make an escape, where he found refuge in a sister’s convent and history records, he fell even deeper in love with God in a crazy ecstatic way from which he never recovered.

Father Richard Rohr writes, “A deeper enlightenment and wider experience than mine is necessary to explain the dark night through which a soul journeys toward that divine light of perfect union with God that is achieved, insofar as possible in this life, through love. The darknesses and trials, spiritual and temporal, that fortunate souls ordinarily undergo on their way to the high state of perfection are so numerous and profound that human science cannot understand them adequately. Nor does experience of them equip one to explain them. Only those who suffer them will know what this experience is like, but they won’t be able to describe it.”

The love of God was the source of the riptide rollercoaster that John, me, and countless others have experienced. When one is on a rollercoaster, except for the bumpy ride up to the top, it is going so fast, whipping, ascending and descending, we cannot see the pattern, the systems, that are running it. This happens in congregations where the leader is unknowingly trapped in a stale way of being, even while things are running smoothly. Right before one of my dark nights of the soul’s experiences, someone told me, “You’re like a sweet neon light that draws people to your energy.” I remember smiling, saying ‘thank you’ while thinking, “You have no idea how tired I am, how bored I am. This place, me, I have become a pinwheel in the wind, and I don’t know who I am anymore, I don’t know where God is in all of this. I knew at the beginning, but the love has been poured out of me. My bucket needs to be filled.” Boom! The rollercoaster. The dungeon. The stripping away during darkness and silence.

I was deconstructed by Love – and my journals – hindsight is 20/20 – prove that I was never alone. I was being held during my messy transformation, during my necessary losses so my spiritual, mental and physical energy could reconstruct in a new way that would deepen my connection with the Sacred and myself. The certainty I possessed before the dark night learned how to be – how to live in the uncertainty of life, causing me to daily, sometimes many times per day, to completely surrender who I think I am to the I am Mystery was constantly reshaping me to be.

When I read my dark night journals, the poetry and music feeds my soul, and I quake in gratitude for a love that loves me enough to place me in a dark cocoon, where it is safe to dissolve and become something I could have never imagined on the inside, changing the way my energy shows up on the outside. The Lord is my shepherd…I lack nothing… nothing… my bucket is full, whether I am surfing with joy, or watching the world from under the water.

In the darkness, if we can be still – wait…. listen… cry out, we connect with the darkness of Jesus and begin to understand what Easter echoes… what Tomas Merton wrote during one of his dark nights, every day, in some way, I am beginning again and again.   

I leave you with one of my dark night prose and one of St. John of The Cross.

Read mine, then…

To reach satisfaction in all,

Desire satisfaction in nothing.

To come to possess all,

Desire the possession of nothing.

To arrive at being all,

Desire to be nothing.

To come to enjoy what you have not,

you must go by a way in which you enjoy not.

To come to the possession you have not,

you must go by a way in which you possess not.

To come to what you are not,

you must go by a way in which you are not.   

—St. John of The Cross

Love goes – infiltrates in ways, on paths, that are higher ways than our own. To be connected to this love, to surrender to becoming LOVE by relinquishing control of the journey, that’s where space is created for the Light to shine through. I’m not ashamed of my cracks. I have scars tattooed on my soul, like Jacob’s limp after wrestling with the Spirit. Thanks be to Love who will not let me go. Amen