To be sad, grieving, struggling, lost, or hopeless is part of natural human life. In the dark night something of your makeup comes to an end—your ego, your self, your creativeness, your meaning. It asks for the surrender of the identity we won and now enjoy.
You do a disservice to yourself when you treat your feelings of despair and emptiness as deviations from the normal and healthy life you idealize. This mortification, the feeling of being overwhelmed and torn apart, prepares you for new ideas and a fresh start. You can’t be renewed unless past behavior and thinking are shredded and packed away. This can’t happen without torment.
People say they want to change, but when it comes down to the heart of the process, they resist strongly, and there is a battle. At key moments, you may have to go through painful, disturbing experiences, just to grow up, to realize who you are and how life works. The key is to understand the importance of such passages and let the initiations happen.
In your darkness, you are in the belly of a whale with nothing to do but be carried along. The dark night saves you from being stuck in your small life. It makes you a hero. It grows you into your fate and into being a responsive member of your community. In the belly of the whale you are given the chance to start over. You get another morning in your life. You are preparing for your fate.
To deal with these disturbances we need rich, solid, and useful ideas, rare items in a world of facts and opinions. The language of psychology may not say enough about the darkness and therefore may not get you through. The religious traditions of the world, full of beautifully stated wisdom, are your best source of guidance in the dark. But there is real religion and there is the empty shell of religion. Know the difference. Your life is at stake.
Keats said that being intelligent is not enough. Your intelligence has to be converted into a soul. Use your wits to avoid being led along by naïve, one-dimensional interpretations of experience. The spiritual life is not abstract. It thrives on ritual, art, good words, and symbolic acts. These concrete actions bring the transition home physically, emotionally, and intellectually. In this way, you know you have gone through a change, and you can adjust accordingly.
Many of us take a lifetime to grow up. To be an independent and mature adult, you may have to dump all kinds of things that get in the way. Find strength in yourself, no matter how private and internal, to keep from collapsing into victim-hood. You may recover your innocence, which is an essential ingredient in every tranquil human life. Without innocence you are too burdened with the guilt of past mistakes.
That spirit in you that often moves strongly against your will may be the force that leads you to your fate. The hopes and plans we have for ourselves may be nothing compared to the possibilities. As your heart expands, you learn to love a world that needs your affection and service, and, paradoxically, your sense of self intensifies. Spirituality and clarity go together.
You can’t renew life without stepping out of the pattern that is in place. Everything depends on how the dark night is handled: Will you try to overcome it and run away from it, or will you let it transform you and, “in solution,” give you new life?
This essay was composed entirely from sentences found in Dark Nights of the Soul by Thomas Moore (Gotham Books, 2004).