Beyond Stage Three: The Dark Night of the Soul
Let me apologize right from the start. This blog is way too long. But please stay the course. This one may change your life.
At the very height of spiritual success, something tends to happen that we least expect, usually between the ages of thirty and fifty. When followers are increasing, people are feeling blessed, funds are flowing in to support the ministry, and awards are being given, comes a very unwelcome guest. It is a personal crisis many have called the dark night of the soul. Past certainties suddenly become inadequate. We call into question everything we have ever believed and everything we have ever done. We feel like failures, like we can’t do anything right. We are humbled. Our world caves in. Our faith, which sustained us powerfully up until this point, doesn’t seem to work anymore. All of our answers are replaced with questions. God either vanishes from view or breaks out of the comfortable box we held Him in. We “hit bottom,” we reach “the end of our rope.” We “hit the wall” and can seem to go no further on the spiritual journey. We have saved others, but ourselves we cannot save. We feel completely alone and abandoned by God. As one person put it, “Just when I got it all together, I forgot where I put it.”
There are many examples of this phenomenon in the Bible. The classic case is Job, who did nothing to deserve it, yet went through both real-life tragedy and an inner crisis of spiritual depression almost to the point of suicide (Job 3:1-26). I think of Jonah, whose life as a prophet was going just fine until God disrupted everything with a big fish. I think of Elijah, who at the point of his greatest spiritual triumph on Mount Carmel went immediately to the deepest level of discouragement (1 Kings 19:3-4). I think of Jesus, who at the very point His glorious mission is revealed to Him ends up forty days in the desert under attack by Satan.
The dark night of the soul seems like the end of all our spiritual hopes and dreams, but it is not. It is actually a summons to deeper intimacy with God. It reveals that all of our success, all the good things we have done, were to some degree motivated by ambition and selfishness or by a desire to please others. We discover that our strong sense of purpose in stage three was driven by others and/or the church as much as by God. We realize that, while the God we have known up until this point was real, we need to rediscover Him as if for the first time.
The dark night of the soul can be precipitated by many things. It could simply be a stage of life, what some people call “mid-life crisis.” This often comes to people between the ages of thirty and fifty. It could be precipitated by an external event, such as a rebellious child, the loss of a job or the death of a loved one. Sometimes it is precipitated by an internal event, such as physical illness or the resurfacing of an emotional trauma that was buried in the past up until this point. The dark night of the soul can simply be the sense that God has withdrawn His presence from our lives. We seek Him but we cannot find Him.
A young psychiatrist once asked me, “What is the difference between the dark night of the soul and clinical depression?” I agreed that there is such a thing as clinical depression, a darkness fueled by chemical imbalances or other disorders. But the dark night of the soul is a depression that comes as a call from God to go deeper with Him. It can be combined with clinical symptoms of depression, but includes a strong dimension of spiritual crisis.
Most spiritual people feel distressed about this development. They believed that God’s presence in the life soothes the spirit, calms all fears, and brings joy to life’s journey. The dark night seems like a wrong turn, a sign that they have somehow lost their spiritual way. They are tempted to “defeat it” or back away from it. The ego rises up to resist the experience. They may feel guilt- or shame-ridden, feeling that they have deserved this experience. They may put themselves down or in some sense “enjoy” their misery.
Spiritual leaders may feel that dark nights are for the people, not for them. They are supposed to be strong and confident in God. They feel the need to hide the darkness from others, even from themselves. They may feel all alone, as if no one else is going through an experience like it. But in spite of how it feels, this darkness is actually a call from God, it is a positive sign. It is a sign that God is deeply engaged in your life. While doubt can be a negative thing for spiritual life, the dark night of the soul is a doubt that can lead to deeper faith.
You cannot deal with the dark night by working 60 hours a week or trying to ignore it. The pain is there for a purpose. God uses it to call people to drink it in and learn what needs to be learned. The best remedy for the dark night is lots of solitude in which to listen to God’s voice, to feel what He is trying to communicate, to think and reflect. A high-level mentor can also be an asset at this point, someone who has been through the dark night and survived it, who has moved on and incorporated the things God wanted to teach through it.
But there are two major points of concern that potential mentors need to keep in mind when someone is in the dark night. First, there is the temptation to back off from the experience and go back to stage three. That is the place where the individual was successful. That is the place when things were going well. That is the place where God seemed near. So there is the temptation to reject the dark night and go back to the place where we were successful. And this may seem to be a successful tack. You go back to what you did when you were successful. You do the things you did before. And most people will probably not notice the difference in your work. The problem is that you will know, deep down inside, that God called you and you said no. So the person becomes what I call a “hollow three,” a person who is going through the motions of leadership and success, but there is something missing. He or she has gotten stuck in the trappings of success, but the heart of the spiritual life is gone. From my experience teaching thousands of pastors through the years I would estimate 50-60% of pastors take this course and that may be one reason so many churches appear to be spiritually dead.
Perhaps 25% of spiritual leaders go in a different direction. They see the dark night of the soul as calling into question their entire spiritual journey up to that point. They believe the reason for the dark night is not the call of God, but the failure and the error of the religious institution that they aligned with in stage two. The shattering of spiritual confidence that comes with the dark night can bring great disillusionment regarding the confidence of stages two and three. And this is normally a healthy thing. But the dark night results in a side-step if one gives up all that one believes in or abandons one’s spiritual heritage in the illusion that some other institution will not have similar spiritual flaws. I don’t mean to imply that it is never spiritually productive to change religions, but that one must do so for the right reasons. Perhaps a quarter of pastors, in my experience, leave the church during the dark night because they can find no suitable mentor, and interpret God’s call as a call to leave one faith for another or leave the faith entirely.
Perhaps ten or fifteen percent of all who walk the spiritual journey stay the course, drink in the lessons God wants to teach them, and move on to stage four. With the help of a high-level mentor (stage four or beyond) they become increasingly aware of their own self-centeredness. They come to understand that all their spiritual efforts up until now were driven largely by self and by the expectations of others and the church. They learn to recognize the call of God in the dark night to break away from self and go deeper into the walk with God than they had ever imagined. They learn to see themselves as God sees them and accept their own humanness and limitations. They begin to learn how to forgive themselves and to forgive others. Their love for themselves begins to deepen (because of the deep love they discover God has for them) and with it an increase in love for others. They may have known these things intellectually before, but now they drink these insights deep into their soul and embrace them as persons who are becoming more and more whole.
How do you mentor someone who is going through the dark night of the soul? Very patiently. High-level mentors are a precious resource at this time. Suffering people will dump their hurt, frustrations, anger and loneliness on you. Don’t offer answers the way Job’s friends did, just be present with them. Avoid shock, just listen and empathize with them as they wrestle with traumatic memories and regret. Share your own dark night (if you haven’t been through it you probably can’t be much help). Assure them that what they are going through is normal in the walk with God. Share the stories of Elijah, Job, Peter and Jesus. Radiate your own acceptance of them as a token of God’s acceptance. Forgive them as needed and encourage them to experience the forgiveness of God. In most cases the day will come when the dark night ends and they will be able to move on. Some people may have to experience the dark night more than once in order make it through, but eventually, if they stay the course, they can move on.
What lies beyond the dark night of the soul? Stay tuned.
At the very height of spiritual success, something tends to happen that we least expect, usually between the ages of thirty and fifty. When followers are increasing, people are feeling blessed, funds are flowing in to support the ministry, and awards are being given, comes a very unwelcome guest. It is a personal crisis many have called the dark night of the soul. Past certainties suddenly become inadequate. We call into question everything we have ever believed and everything we have ever done. We feel like failures, like we can’t do anything right. We are humbled. Our world caves in. Our faith, which sustained us powerfully up until this point, doesn’t seem to work anymore. All of our answers are replaced with questions. God either vanishes from view or breaks out of the comfortable box we held Him in. We “hit bottom,” we reach “the end of our rope.” We “hit the wall” and can seem to go no further on the spiritual journey. We have saved others, but ourselves we cannot save. We feel completely alone and abandoned by God. As one person put it, “Just when I got it all together, I forgot where I put it.”
There are many examples of this phenomenon in the Bible. The classic case is Job, who did nothing to deserve it, yet went through both real-life tragedy and an inner crisis of spiritual depression almost to the point of suicide (Job 3:1-26). I think of Jonah, whose life as a prophet was going just fine until God disrupted everything with a big fish. I think of Elijah, who at the point of his greatest spiritual triumph on Mount Carmel went immediately to the deepest level of discouragement (1 Kings 19:3-4). I think of Jesus, who at the very point His glorious mission is revealed to Him ends up forty days in the desert under attack by Satan.
The dark night of the soul seems like the end of all our spiritual hopes and dreams, but it is not. It is actually a summons to deeper intimacy with God. It reveals that all of our success, all the good things we have done, were to some degree motivated by ambition and selfishness or by a desire to please others. We discover that our strong sense of purpose in stage three was driven by others and/or the church as much as by God. We realize that, while the God we have known up until this point was real, we need to rediscover Him as if for the first time.
The dark night of the soul can be precipitated by many things. It could simply be a stage of life, what some people call “mid-life crisis.” This often comes to people between the ages of thirty and fifty. It could be precipitated by an external event, such as a rebellious child, the loss of a job or the death of a loved one. Sometimes it is precipitated by an internal event, such as physical illness or the resurfacing of an emotional trauma that was buried in the past up until this point. The dark night of the soul can simply be the sense that God has withdrawn His presence from our lives. We seek Him but we cannot find Him.
A young psychiatrist once asked me, “What is the difference between the dark night of the soul and clinical depression?” I agreed that there is such a thing as clinical depression, a darkness fueled by chemical imbalances or other disorders. But the dark night of the soul is a depression that comes as a call from God to go deeper with Him. It can be combined with clinical symptoms of depression, but includes a strong dimension of spiritual crisis.
Most spiritual people feel distressed about this development. They believed that God’s presence in the life soothes the spirit, calms all fears, and brings joy to life’s journey. The dark night seems like a wrong turn, a sign that they have somehow lost their spiritual way. They are tempted to “defeat it” or back away from it. The ego rises up to resist the experience. They may feel guilt- or shame-ridden, feeling that they have deserved this experience. They may put themselves down or in some sense “enjoy” their misery.
Spiritual leaders may feel that dark nights are for the people, not for them. They are supposed to be strong and confident in God. They feel the need to hide the darkness from others, even from themselves. They may feel all alone, as if no one else is going through an experience like it. But in spite of how it feels, this darkness is actually a call from God, it is a positive sign. It is a sign that God is deeply engaged in your life. While doubt can be a negative thing for spiritual life, the dark night of the soul is a doubt that can lead to deeper faith.
You cannot deal with the dark night by working 60 hours a week or trying to ignore it. The pain is there for a purpose. God uses it to call people to drink it in and learn what needs to be learned. The best remedy for the dark night is lots of solitude in which to listen to God’s voice, to feel what He is trying to communicate, to think and reflect. A high-level mentor can also be an asset at this point, someone who has been through the dark night and survived it, who has moved on and incorporated the things God wanted to teach through it.
But there are two major points of concern that potential mentors need to keep in mind when someone is in the dark night. First, there is the temptation to back off from the experience and go back to stage three. That is the place where the individual was successful. That is the place when things were going well. That is the place where God seemed near. So there is the temptation to reject the dark night and go back to the place where we were successful. And this may seem to be a successful tack. You go back to what you did when you were successful. You do the things you did before. And most people will probably not notice the difference in your work. The problem is that you will know, deep down inside, that God called you and you said no. So the person becomes what I call a “hollow three,” a person who is going through the motions of leadership and success, but there is something missing. He or she has gotten stuck in the trappings of success, but the heart of the spiritual life is gone. From my experience teaching thousands of pastors through the years I would estimate 50-60% of pastors take this course and that may be one reason so many churches appear to be spiritually dead.
Perhaps 25% of spiritual leaders go in a different direction. They see the dark night of the soul as calling into question their entire spiritual journey up to that point. They believe the reason for the dark night is not the call of God, but the failure and the error of the religious institution that they aligned with in stage two. The shattering of spiritual confidence that comes with the dark night can bring great disillusionment regarding the confidence of stages two and three. And this is normally a healthy thing. But the dark night results in a side-step if one gives up all that one believes in or abandons one’s spiritual heritage in the illusion that some other institution will not have similar spiritual flaws. I don’t mean to imply that it is never spiritually productive to change religions, but that one must do so for the right reasons. Perhaps a quarter of pastors, in my experience, leave the church during the dark night because they can find no suitable mentor, and interpret God’s call as a call to leave one faith for another or leave the faith entirely.
Perhaps ten or fifteen percent of all who walk the spiritual journey stay the course, drink in the lessons God wants to teach them, and move on to stage four. With the help of a high-level mentor (stage four or beyond) they become increasingly aware of their own self-centeredness. They come to understand that all their spiritual efforts up until now were driven largely by self and by the expectations of others and the church. They learn to recognize the call of God in the dark night to break away from self and go deeper into the walk with God than they had ever imagined. They learn to see themselves as God sees them and accept their own humanness and limitations. They begin to learn how to forgive themselves and to forgive others. Their love for themselves begins to deepen (because of the deep love they discover God has for them) and with it an increase in love for others. They may have known these things intellectually before, but now they drink these insights deep into their soul and embrace them as persons who are becoming more and more whole.
How do you mentor someone who is going through the dark night of the soul? Very patiently. High-level mentors are a precious resource at this time. Suffering people will dump their hurt, frustrations, anger and loneliness on you. Don’t offer answers the way Job’s friends did, just be present with them. Avoid shock, just listen and empathize with them as they wrestle with traumatic memories and regret. Share your own dark night (if you haven’t been through it you probably can’t be much help). Assure them that what they are going through is normal in the walk with God. Share the stories of Elijah, Job, Peter and Jesus. Radiate your own acceptance of them as a token of God’s acceptance. Forgive them as needed and encourage them to experience the forgiveness of God. In most cases the day will come when the dark night ends and they will be able to move on. Some people may have to experience the dark night more than once in order make it through, but eventually, if they stay the course, they can move on.
What lies beyond the dark night of the soul? Stay tuned.
Posted by Jon Paulien at 9/16/2010 5:03 PM 
Categories: Relational
Tags: depression Fowler stages of faith spirituality dark night of the soul spiritual development
Categories: Relational
Tags: depression Fowler stages of faith spirituality dark night of the soul spiritual development
I remember almost ten years ago at camp meeting. I had a cabin and was by myself. The night was warm and dark and long. I felt the furthest from God during the whole camp meeting. I was working for the book store and had to be up-beat and I had no mentor to share my experience with at that time. I had been out of the church for 22 years after running away from my calling to the ministry. I was back at this time for only three or four years when my dark night over took me. Was I kidding myself? Was I really back in God's church and with His people? Or was this a mockery? I felt more further from God at that time than I did at anytime during my 22 years away. Was God really there with me?
I recalled Paul's words, as he re adapted Deut 30:11-13 by saying, "But the righteousness which is of faith speaketh on this wise, Say not in thine heart, Who shall ascend into heaven? (that is, to bring Christ down from above
I trusted that God was there beside me, even when I didn't or couldn't feel it. I heldon to faith, believing that the further away He felt, the nearer He truly was. While I've had my ups and downs over the years, I have never had a dark night like this one. Even in my lows, I have peace, His peace, as only Jesus can give. Jesus was with me, even in the valley of death. While we may run from God, He never runs from us.
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I think I have cycled through this a few times, but on different levels and even different topics. I wonder if we go through something like this at every major layer, or in every major area of our life.
And yes, backing off is surely one way to go. And yet, that return to Stage 3 iscompletely understandable. Of course many feel alone; they have never heard anyone talk about this kind of experience. We do not talk together about our experiences; we are not open and vulnerable; we are not transparent with our fellow Christians. So how does anyone even know that they have NOT done something horrible to deserve this “abandonment” from God? What else can they think? I think some of us make it through all alone, and sometimes by sheer will power to not give up, but that most simply don’t know what it is or what to do with it. How much easier it would be if we stopped playing church, and spoke more about REAL things and REAL spiritual life! How much easier it would be if we would dispense with the routine and the traditions and our locked-in orders of service, and instead took off the masks and shared and prayed for each other! Ok, I’ll get off my bandwagon now.
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