If I ever become a saint—I will surely be one of “darkness.” I will continually be absent from heaven—to light the light of those in darkness on earth. Mother Teresa

As I liberally apply sunscreen in preparation for a session of weeding and mulching, it’s hard to remember that just a few days ago, I was one of many who mourned the delay of spring. It was a long winter, many lamented, a season that seemed to have no end in sight, a cold, dark season that stubbornly held on and on. I was one of those lamenters, zipping my jacket (I refused to wear a winter coat in April regardless of the temperature!) and turning the heat up in my car. I was one who’d increasingly begun to regard the months since Christmas as a dark night of the soul, a noche oscura that St. John of the Cross described as a forlorn feeling that God has abandoned you. I could only muster a sigh of resignation as I woke to yet another dreary day and heard the furnace kick on.

Several years ago, I recall reading about Mother Teresa and was stunned to discover that the woman who’d dedicated her life to the poor and sick, the disciple who’d literally lived as Jesus’s hands and feet through the slums of Calcutta, this saint of all saints, suffered the dark night of the soul for most of her life. In 2007, Come Be My Light, a collection of her private correspondence and personal writings revealed that–with the exception of one short period–she’d suffered from an intense feeling of God’s absence. How could this be, I thought. How could a woman who so completely and devotedly dedicated her life to God have lived for decades without feeling his presence? After all, I reasoned, Mother Teresa is the gold standard of Christian witness, the saintly role model. And yet, the more I read about her life, the more I understood that, like her namesake St. Thérèse de Lisieux (the Little Flower) who decried that God hides, is wrapped in darkness, Mother Teresa sorely felt God’s abandonment.

In her personal writing and correspondence, we can hear her sorrow:

The place of God in my soul is blank—There is no God in me.

I want—and there is no One to answer—no One one Whom I can cling; no, No One. Alone. The darkness is so dark—and I am alone.

Before I used to get such help and consolation from spiritual direction—from the time the work has started—nothing.

To feel a blankness in your soul, a darkness so deep and so profound that God can’t be found, can’t be heard or felt, is perhaps as apt a definition of the dark night of the soul as we’ll ever get. The scandal–yes, scandal!–that her posthumous writings caused is telling, I think, of our unwillingness to acknowledge and accept these feelings of spiritual abandonment. Atheist and longtime critic Christopher Hitchens argued that her personal revelations testified to the fact that Mother Teresa was simply a confused old lady who’d lost her belief in God, a sad woman who served others only as a part of an effort to still the misery within. Hitchens also contended that attributing the title of dark night of the soul to her feelings of abandonment was the Catholic Church’s perverse piece of marketing that sought to spin despair as faith. 

A perverse piece of marketing by the Catholic Church? Really? So many others have written about the authenticity and power of this dark night. Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung warned of the danger of the descent into the dark night of the soul, of the risk of taking the sunset way because it is a sacrifice which daunts even the gods, Yet like so many others who’ve lived and written about this dark night, Jung acknowledged that every descent is followed by an ascent; the vanishing shapes are shaped anew, and a truth is valid in the end only if it suffers change and bears new witness in new images, in new tongues, like a new wine that is put into new bottles. American writer, Joseph Campbell, wrote about the universal functions of mythology and is best known for his work with the Hero’s Journey, which also illuminates this pattern of desent and ascent, suffering and return with enlightenment. We know this pattern and these truths; we’ve lived them in one way or another, though many of us have hidden our feelings of abandonment, ashamed that revealing them would also reveal our spiritual weakness. We often fear that our critics will call us out as hypocrites: See, even the believers despair. What good, then, is their faith? In spite of our fear and our pride, though, when the night seems endless and the emptiness eternal, we can’t help but cry out, bereft and alone.

I’ve read about spiritual seekers who cloister or leave for the wilderness, so that they might claim and suffer through their dark nights of the soul. Most of us, however, experience our darks nights in the midst of our ordinary lives and suffer through them in ordinary places. In his book, A Hell of Mercy: A Meditation on Depression and the Dark Night of the Soul, Tim Farrington writes:

You don’t need to retire to a cloister or the desert for years on end to experience a true dark night; you don’t even have to be pursuing any particular “spiritual” path. Raising a challenged child, or caring for a failing parent for years on end, is at least as purgative as donning robes and shaving one’s head; to endure a mediocre work situation for the sake of the paycheck that sustains a family demands at least as much in the way of daily surrender to years of pristine silence in a monastery. No one can know in advance how and where the night will come, and what form God’s darkness will take.

Farrington understands what Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung insisted: the dark night of the soul is a universal experience that manifests itself in very particular ways. Each dark night experience is the same–and uniquely different. It might be argued that we should find solace in a community of fellow dark night sojourners. And while it may be true that some do, many, I fear, don’t.

There are those who can’t find solace in community because they’re wrestling with aspects of their faith that they don’t yet understand and may not know how to express. The solitude of their suffering, then, may be necessary–and ultimately beneficial. Their dark night may be a period of reckoning, of looking into the wormholes of their souls where the truth of their spiritual ailments has taken root. American writer and devout Catholic, Flannery O’Connor, understood this well:

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally. A higher paradox confounds the emotion as well as reason and there are long periods in the lives of all of us, when the truth as revealed by faith is hideous, emotionally disturbing, downright repulsive. Witness the dark night of the soul in individual saints . .

O’Connor has given us characters who, in wrestling with their faith, uncover things about their souls that are hideous, emotionally disturbing, and downright repulsive. Some wrestle their way to redemption, while others are consumed by the fight. When a reader wrote her and complained that her book had left a bad taste in her mouth, O’Connor promptly responded: You weren’t supposed to eat it. In her novels, short stories, and personal writing, O’Connor fearlessly confronts those, including herself, whose dark nights are brutally and necessarily ugly and difficult.

Like Flannery O’Connor, Dutch priest, professor and writer, Henri Nouwen testifies to the necessary role that loneliness often plays in the dark night of the soul. Even as he lived and worked in community at L’Arche Daybreak Community, a home for disabled people, he confessed to loneliness, a feeling of separation from others and from God. He writes:

In community, where you have all the affection you could ever dream of you feel that there is a place where even community cannot reach. That’s a very important experience. In that loneliness, which is like a dark night of the soul, you learn that God is greater than community.

We find it relatively easy to attribute our feelings of loneliness and darkness to the isolation of lingering winter. In confessing this, we may find absolution in a community of others who’ve also struggled to keep the faith during the long, cold months. Truthfully, we find it much harder to attribute our feelings of loneliness and darkness to spiritual matters that have little–if anything–to do with the weather. These feelings are the unmentionables, those you uncover and probe only in the privacy of your own thoughts.

It’s significant to note that after decades of darkness, Mother Teresa began to regard her feelings of abandonment differently than the dark night of the soul described by John of the Cross and experienced by Thérèse de Lisieux. Her dark night, she came to understand, was a necessary part of her vocation. In experiencing her own inner poverty and by sharing the suffering of those she served, she ultimately came to believe that she was sharing the suffering of Christ himself. In recalling the oath she’d made in 1942, a pledge to never deny God anything he’d ask of her, she finally accepted that this meant deferring to feelings of God’s abandonment. I think her deference was, ironically, an ascent from darkness.

Mother Teresa continues to serve as a powerful example of one who lives and works as though God is present, even when he might seem so far away. She was light, in spite of her own spiritual darkness, and sought to light the light of those in darkness on earth. Our own dark night of the soul may be quick and temporary or long and permanent. It may be redemptive or aspiring-to-be-redemptive. It may be necessary or seemingly unnecessary. Regardless, it is human, perhaps one of the most universal human experiences. As such, it shouldn’t be scandalized but accepted and valued.