Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Dark Night of the Soul
Reverend Darcey Laine
January 18, 2004
Palo Alto, CA

Why is it that so many cultures celebrate around the time of the Winter Solstice? Perhaps despite all their faults, our religious traditions also reflect a deep wisdom. The time when the days are shorter is a time when many people become depressed. During this period of physical and psychological hardship we notice, for example, how many friends and loved ones died just over these winter holidays. Our collective culture has evolved traditions that helps us remember that the light returns, that the harsh winter ends. The physical reality of this is undeniable.

There is a metaphoric reality here as well. The season of long nights also provides a metaphor for a pattern in the human psyche that may emerge during any time of the year. As much as light is a metaphor for inspiration, warmth, clarity or passion, the darkness has been a metaphor for the absence of these things. The Dark (in our culture) is used to represent depression, loneliness, despair, loss of meaning, confusion. Therefore the seasonal celebrations mark the loss and return of daylight in a physical sense, but in an allegorical sense as well.

When I was a child, I was taught that the “primitive” religious believed that the sun might never return, and were frightened each solstice that the sun had really left for good. Ever since I was a child this condescension disturbed me. I don’t actually believe that the priests or religious leaders of more ancient cultures were so foolish as that. It is obvious to any person who has lived through several cycles of the year that the days shorten and lengthen. But it is not merely our modern intellect that reassures us of this fact; some of that confidence comes from having data about the cycle of the year quantified and published in every calendar, as readily available as the day’s weather and sports scores. What we remember and recount with graph and table, more ancient cultures remembered with story and ritual. Yet when I hear the despair of contemporary people, it seems to me that even we who can have the exact time of a sunset predicted through wireless web to our cell phones are still afraid of the dark, and once that darkness sets in, we forget that life ever was another way, and that this darkness will pass in the natural rhythms of life.

At this point I need to engage in a semantic criticism of this dark and light imagery. These poetic and feeling images are deep and concrete in our culture; the bride wears white at a wedding, the family wears black to a funeral. We commonly use imagery like “his heart was black” or the western cinematic convention that the good cowboy wears a white hat while the villain wears a black hat. This metaphoric duality –literally that of black and white, may not seem problematic until we consider the racial implications. We use the word “white” to refer to European Americans, and “black” to refer to African Americans. Thus we metaphorically connect one race to all things pure joyful and good, and another to all that is evil, tragic and base. As we struggle to overturn this binary language of race, a raised consciousness has caused me to inquire into the qualities we associate with light and dark. I begin to look for imagery that interrupts the traditional associations, such as Wendell Berry’s poem you find at the top of your order of service. “To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.

To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
And find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
And is traveled by dark feet and dark wings

Our internalized racism breaks down when we meet people from another race and begin to know an individual beyond surface assumptions, to be in a real relationship that allows the complexity and uniqueness of each being to become evident.

So it is with all things we cluster under the metaphoric color of black white, the vocabulary of darkness and light. If we never experience true intimacy with all the seasons of the human psyche, we never understand their reality. We never know that “the dark, too, blooms and sings.”

Humans still fear the loss of light that peaks at the Winter solstice. We fear the metaphorical darkness of depression and despair. We fear the dark night of the soul. This is an image that was written about by 16th century Priest and Contemplative St. John of the Cross. He uses this term in a very particular way. Many people, he says, experience the sweetness of a spiritual life. Several of us here spoke of such experiences at a workshop led by Scotty McLennan, our community minister. Some mentioned a moment of awe standing on a mountain side looking at the special quality of light as sun set. Others described a feeling of the one-ness of all things experienced when encountering a dolphin in the wild, or when wrapped in the bosom of family or beloved community. A few lifted up the sweet peace and sense of rightness that comes to them in meditation or prayer. In my first meditation class we always began with this prayer: “may all beings experience the bliss of their true nature.” It is the best we can wish for any being; that they feel the awesome bliss of oneness with everything that is. In the words of Robert Browning “All’s right with the world.”

But then the sweetness leaves us. We return to the less-than blissful reality of war and poverty, conflict with co-workers and family. We toss and turn in bed, our meditation cushion changes from a refuge to a prison, the inner peace and sweetness we felt eludes us. It seems like the harder we try to recapture it, the more persistently it eludes us.

Visualize this metaphoric night. The sun descends behind the horizon, and the light of understanding slowly fades. The dark and cold of a winter’s night descends. I stare at the spot where I saw the sun sink, sad for the loss of light. For many hours there is no change, no sign of motion, no sign that the sun will reemerge. Eventually a faint light does emerge, but at my back, in the opposite direction from where I had been looking. This is, I believe, one of the most useful parts of the metaphor a night’s passage provides. With a global vision, we understand that the earth is rotating in such a way as to block the sun’s light to my eyes. The sun is not actually gone, but merely out of sight. However there is no indication to our senses that light will return, that our darkened condition will ever change, or that when the light finally does return it must do so in a different place than that where it disappeared.

So often in my own life, I return again and again to the point where I lost touch with my sense of meaning, with my sense of wonder and awe, with the sweetness of life. I am frustrated and confounded that these cannot be recaptured at the same source. This is a true loss, the loss of the sweetness of a particular experience, and so should be mourned. It is by mourning the loss of the previous day that one may let go of expectations based on the past, one can let go into what St. John calls “the aridity” of this dark night. St. John suggests that we lose many things in the dark night, and gain others. We lose our pride and gain humility. We lose our attachment to certain experiences and gain strength. We lose our imaginings and gain knowledge of our selves, of our world, and he would suggest a knowledge of God as well.

This metaphor reminds us that no matter what our senses perceive, we are always in motion, a constant rotation of the earth. There is a direct relationship between the setting of the sun, the period of night and the return of light in a new place. Metaphorically, we must have faith that the light will return, and that it will return in a place we may not expect to find it.

How then, shall we exist in the time between sunset and dawn? We mourn the loss of light. We mourn the loss of the sweetness of day. But if we can let go of the things from the past that no longer serve us in this arid night, St. John tells us that there is a different kind of peace that emerges in the hours when there is no work to be done, no striving. Think of a caterpillar cocooned and passive, waiting for metamorphosis to happen. When the change is complete, a transformed being breaks free of the cocoon and a returns to the light. The transitioning animal is engaged in dramatic and undeniable physical transformation, and yet is not awake; the intellect is not what facilitates the transformation. Our grasping of reason and control effort may at times only create further frustration. But change is happening none the less. Remembering such a metaphor may make the night more endurable, and help us to be ready and watching for the dawn in a new direction.

The problem that may Unitarian Universalists might have reading the work of this great spiritual director is the idea that this spiritual suffering is a gift of God, who wants to wean spiritual beginners from that sweetness to a spiritual-self sufficiency. The soul is relieved of its sensual desire for spiritual pleasure, and becomes accustomed to an aridity that brings the soul greater knowing. God is purifying the soul through this dark night, so that the soul may advance on the path toward a closeness to God. My personal difficulties with this treatise are twofold.

The first is with the mind-body duality so infused in Western Christian thought. As a panentheist, I believe that God is both one with the world, and also more than this world. Certainly a purging of the pleasure of the world would help one transcend the material world. But this denies any possibility of an immanent God. What about Gaia? What about the sacredness of birth, of bodies and commonplace things. St. John’s text provides no answers to these questions.

Second, I am concerned about a theology in which God causes suffering to bring learning. I believe with Rebecca Parker that “The spiritualizing of suffering makes God the author of all pain, who uses pain to edify or purify human beings… The mysticism of the cross teaches that violence is God’s way of transforming people and communities into greater spiritual well-being… It clouds the realities of human violence in a haze of spiritual glory.” Glorifying suffering takes away the truth of suffering, and can permit violence. Often, after a passage of time, I can look back and feel that the beauty of a new day redeems the suffering of a dark night. But when I am in the arid night of the soul, what I really need is a theology to get me through the night. Sometimes it is immensely helpful to know that as I suffer I am probably growing in knowledge and strength, but sometimes that seems like a lame booby prize. Much of the suffering in the world is too great to be balanced by the learning it may bring. Certainly that learning should never be used to justify any of the violence that has been committed in God’s name.

So I offer a scientific model, in the hope that it may offer a different perspective. What if we look at this “interstitial” period of the interior life, through the study of human consciousness and how it works. Contemporary Cognitive Neuroscience maintains that a large part of human processing happens without our conscious awareness. In a current text on the topic, Gozyaniga, Ivry and Mangren report that “The vast staging for our mental activities happens largely without our monitoring.” They say that consciousness is like a scaffolding that is used to construct new connections or to enable change to happen. Once the change is fully constructed, the scaffolding is removed. This is why when a person is learning to drive the task takes all his concentration, but once a person has learned to drive, he often give it very little thought at all.

For me this darkness could be akin to realizing the edge of ones own consciousness. What was once un-conscious enters the realm of conscious thought. Think of the last time you learned something that fundamentally undermined some major assumption or fact of your life. The process of awakening to a new truth can be accompanied by pain, fear or even despair. When I took my first Cultural Studies class in Seminary. I was enthralled by my massive textbook from the first page, amazed that such a rich, vital and transformative field could exist without my awareness. It was like I had been in a room with only 3 doors, and suddenly I noticed a 4th door that had never been visible to me before. I wondered how many more doors there were that would some day be open to my evolving mind. This new consciousness created some discomfort as I strained to see the world through a new lens, and as my eyes were opened to injustices which had previously invisible to me. Perhaps humility, the ability to make myself small and imagine there may be things I do not know, is necessary before I can learn anything at all. A contemporary understanding of how the mind works, therefore, is in metaphoric sympathy with St. John’s 16th century writings.

By moving from a language of spiritual growth to that of expanding awareness, consciousness and knowledge, we address my first concern about the duality of body and soul, because the mind is understood here at least in part through its biology. But in this model growth of the conscious mind is still a product of discomfort and frustration, and God’s lesson becomes transformed to a biological imperative justified by the end result.

Perhaps it is only the poets who dare to suggest that the night be understood not for what it accomplishes but for what it is. Wendell Berry is willing to charge us with a most difficult task:

“To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark.“

It has been historically the job of the religious leaders to remind us that after the darkness the light will return. But in this darkest time of year, I want to witness to the reality of the arid times as well as the sweet. As a religious community, one of our most important vocations is to sit with one another through periods of suffering, loss of meaning, and painful awakening. These times require a refocusing of the senses, a letting go of the expectations built in the sweet times. Today we pause together in recognition of the night, we offer our presence to one another, holding a place for the transforming self, for the cocooning night. We witness together the darkness with all its confusion and complexity that is inexorably part of life.

Please rise and join in singing our closing hymn #275 “Joyful is the Dark.” It is one of my favorites, but a little tricky. It may help to realize that each verse has 2 parts which are almost identical, but the first ends with steps, and the second with a leap. Veronika will play it for us once before we begin to sing