The Dark Night: Psychological Experience and Spiritual Reality

 

The Dark Night: Psychological Experience and Spiritual Reality by Mark Foley

C.S. Lewis once made the observations that Christians, no matter how much they might be enjoying life in the present, will never quite feel at home on Planet Earth, and will never be able to experience the full joy of their faith until Heaven.  He mentions that the best a Christian could hope for are temporary “inns” from time to time where such joy can occur during one’s lifetime, albeit briefly.  St. John of the Cross (who lived during the 16^th century) takes this notion and goes a bit further.  He made the observation that there are times during a Christian’s life when they feel spiritually lost and hopelessly unloved despite being a child of God. This is now commonly referred to as the “Dark Night of the Soul”.

What this book essentially is, is a study of the writing of St. John of the Cross where he first revealed such a notion.  Also included here are studies upon the reflections of St. Teresa of Avila and St. Therese of Lisieux who famously experienced such reversals during their lives as well.  Author Marc Foley is essentially taking these writings that are now several hundred years old, and putting a bit of a modern spin to the sentiments with latter day examples.  The purpose here is to aid the modern reader who might not be able to fully comprehend the original musings since the style of writing is now a bit ancient and may not be as easy to comprehend.

Most sincere Christian’s dismiss the notion of a “prosperity” gospel, which is the notion that believing in Christ will lead to riches, wealth, and happiness.  Still, though, there’s a need for those in the flock to know that, not only will they not be blessed abundantly with material riches, but there will be times where Christians will feel empty, unloved, and neglected by God.  These instances will happen out of the blue and can last an awful long time.  Why is God doing this to me?  Why are my beliefs shaken?  Why do I find it so hard to be joyous?  What is happening here?  It should also be pointed out that these “dark night” feelings don’t occur because of illness, death of loved ones, nor other calamities. They simply ‘happen’.

So this book, like the writings it’s based on, is attempt to tell us why.  There are a lot of good points that the author makes; I found myself going crazy with my e-highligher as I came across a multitude of relevant statements and examples.  Essentially what this book tells us is that God is doing to us the opposite of what we think God is doing to us.  Yes, we feel somewhat abandoned by God at times, but doing so forces us to deeply reflect.  It never feels good when going through this time, but with prayer, patience, and an awful lot of perseverance, God will pull us through.  This is essentially a needed purification of our hearts and ultimately an invitation from God to a stronger relationship with a renewed maturity.  One just wishes that these nights didn’t have to be quite so dark and quite so lonely.

As far as this book goes, I confess that I didn’t quite find it as linear as I would have liked.  In other words, the material was very good as I was reading, but I didn’t feel as though I could easily connect the dots from one chapter to the next.  Maybe that was the point.  I felt like there were great messages throughout, but had I “shuffled” the chapters as I was reading, I’m not sure my overall understanding would have been diminished.

Perhaps this is because this book is actually a “study” of another book.  Whereas the lack of continuity didn’t bother me so much, the fact that the author was constantly referencing St. John throughout the book was a bit of a distracting nuisance.  It felt as though the author wanted to make sure his readers knew that these thoughts aren’t his initially, and is somehow afraid of plagiarizing.  So what we get throughout this book are snippets that say things like:

“So then John tells us that….”
“What John is trying to teach us here is…..”
“What John wants his readers to understand is…..”
“We then have John go on to tell us that….”

And on and on and on.  Many times I felt like I was reading a student’s term paper where the instructor requires the student to add a reference after every sentence.  This was just too distracting.  I would prefer the author just acknowledge his source in the introduction and then leave out the multitude of references.

So overall a good book that I thought could have been a tad better.  I’m pretty sure I would have gotten lost had I try to read the original work of St. John of the Cross.  Since the message is a pretty important one since dark nights are quite common, one should feel pleased that the author manages to ‘modernize’ such an important piece of work for modern readers to digest.