Embracing the Dark Night

“You will learn that all I have written of these two signs and their wonderful effects is true. And yet, after you have experienced one, or perhaps all of them, a day will come when they disappear, leaving you, as it were, barren; or, as it will probably seem to you then, worse than barren. Gone will be your new fervor, but gone, too, your ability to meditate as you had long done before. What then?”
—Privy Counsel Ch. 20

This is an extremely important instruction in meditation practice, but one that is not often addressed in more basic introductions. This is what St. John of the Cross called “the dark night of soul.” Once a contemplative has made some progress on the path, and has experienced some of the pleasant side effects of meditation, suddenly the benefits seem to vanish. The practice becomes stale, boring, difficult and completely devoid of any joy.

This is when most people give up, or worse, develop an outright hostility toward spiritual practice. But according to St. John, and to the anonymous author of Privy Counsel, this is a sign of great promise. It means that the spirit is purifying the heart of all need for a result, which is the ultimate prerequisite to entering the “cloud of unknowing.”

A central quality of contemplative living is, then, a simple, quiet equanimity—the gift of accepting all things as they arise and pass away, even the unpleasant, the boring, the seemingly painful. Because as long as we wait for some circumstance to make us happy, whether internal or external, we miss the real point: that genuine happiness lies in receiving the gift of what is, just as it is.