Dark Night of the Soul

Recently one of my Facebook friends posted that a friend of hers had attempted suicide the previous night.   The person who attempted suicide tried to reach my friend before her suicide attempt because she knew that my friend has once attempted suicide herself.  My friend, who is the queen of provocative Facebook questions, asked if anyone else had ever experienced a dark night of the soul, and, if so, would they share about it.  Lots of people had had similar experiences that they shared.   Later I spoke to my friend on the phone and she shared more about her friend who had tried to kill herself.

Today I started thinking about those posts and that conversation again.  I have often heard the term "Dark Night of the Soul,"  but I didn't know until today that it is the title of a poem by Saint John of the Cross.  According to Wikipedia, the  "main idea of the poem can be seen as the painful experience that people endure as they seek to grow in spiritual maturity and union with God."   That sounds like a pretty good definition of a Dark Night of the Soul.  For me, the definition would be "painful experiences that have the potential to teach us about ourselves and about God."  That sure describes my own Dark Night of the Soul experience.  More about that later.

I starting thinking about my friend and her suicidal friend today because of a seemingly unrelated blog published today by my son, Steven.  In his blog today, which I encourage you to read and follow, Steven questions exactly what the Good News that Jesus brought is.  He concludes with his own ideas:  "the good news, is a simple concept that can be spoken many ways:

God loves you.

You can approach God directly.

The only thing keeping you from God is you.

The gods aren't angry.

You are free from religious obligation.

There is nothing you need to do to be right with God.

You are good."

Steven's blog relates to my own Dark Night of the Soul because of what that experience taught me.  In 2005, I began to exhibit several symptoms that I did not understand.  I began to lose my appetite for food.  Indeed, very often, I could not force myself to eat.  I began to lose a lot of weight.  I lost interest in almost everything.  I remember having extremely dark imaginings about the future, such as being sure that I would someday be left all alone by the deaths of all my loved ones.   Soon I was sleeping less and less.  All of these things kind of crept up on me, so it was easy not to realize that I was having major issues.  At about the same time, I had begun  taking a new prescription for digestive issues.  I did not know at the time, but this drug is associated with feelings of anxiety in those who take the medication.  Soon I was suffering from extreme anxiety.  "Extreme" doesn't really express it.  I remember often thinking that I would start screaming  any moment.  I understood very clearly what people who have panic attacks go through.  I remember once being in church and thinking I was going to run screaming from the building any moment.  These feeling were not unusual for me during that time.  However, I managed to keep it together and never made a spectacle of myself.

Prior to these experiences, I had long been a fan of the Ballard Street comic strip.  One of my favorites, which was a single panel, showed a mildly agitated older man sitting by himself.  The caption read, "Once again, Stewart finds himself alone with his own brain."  Funny stuff, I've always thought, and I was often reminded of it when I was experiencing that terrible anxiety.  I was literally afraid to be alone, not because I thought I would harm myself, but because those feelings were always the worst when I was alone.  There were often times when I did not know how I could endure another moment.

In those moments, I would pray, "God, please make it stop."  The answer was always the same.  "I am here."  The anxiety often didn't lessen for a while, but I always remembered after God spoke that I could endure what I was going through.  No matter how dark the experience, God was always there with me.  In those darkest moments, He seemed so close to me, not in some far-off Heaven, but right there with me as I went through my Dark Night of the Soul.  In my mind, I could cut my eyes to the left and kind of see Him there.

I eventually quit sleeping altogether, so I went to my doctor.   I quit taking the prescription that caused a lot of my anxiety.  The doctor gave me some stuff to help me sleep and something else to help with the depression.  As the former Newt from Monty Python said, I got better.  I don't know why I had to go through that.  I don't know if it was caused by God to teach me what I learned, or if it was just circumstances that converged to create a really bad time for me.  Either way, it changed me forever.


For one thing, I am much more tolerant of seemingly aberrant behavior.  How do I know what someone is going through?  A lot of people dismiss depression and other kinds of mental illness as weakness, or a lack of faith, or the result of bad choices.  Those things may sometimes contribute, but we should not blame victims of  those kinds of conditions any more than we blame people who have cancer or heart attacks.

Another way it changed me is that I now realize how really frail we all are.  Life is sometimes hard and it wears us down. Sometimes simple things like not getting enough sleep, or some weird drug side-effect can push us over, or pretty close to, the Edge.  This is not something to hide or be ashamed of.  This is part of being human.

If I had never faced a Dark Night of the Soul, I might not be as confident in my own resiliency.  I might not know that God is right next to me and how much He loves me.  Those are good things to know for the next time it gets dark.