“For a moment I hid my face from you, but with everlasting love I will have compassion on you” Isaiah 54:8.

The dark night of the soul is the phrase running through my mind – the sense of the Light having left. An Absence is present. And perhaps that is the way to see what I cannot see: as if there is an obstruction confounding my senses and telling me God has vanished, when all along he remains. The starless night is the alternative, one where stars had only been imagined and never were real at all.

That is a dark night indeed and one I’ve wandered into for moments, or days, or do I dare admit, even longer? That is the night where God has never existed at all, where light is an illusion and only darkness is real – more like a black hole of the soul, that is.

Whatever it is, I fear I have been made thin. I had thought faith and perseverance would reap meatier stuff. Not that I have walked in perfect faith and all-resolute perseverance, but steadily and with good will. Entering such emptiness, entering such a sense of abandonment, at this point along the journey is, well …it is unexpected.

I still pray. I still incline my ear. I still read the words he gave us and play them over in my mind when the darkness is its greatest and envelops more than just my mind, but my heart, too. There is a torture in these moments and I still run to the only Father I’ve ever known to be faithfully present. But the room where he and I would meet feels empty now. His chair has grown cold.

At times my eyes, the ones that truly see, feel as if they are closing. It’s as if a sleep is overwhelming them. The call for rest entices them. They have strained to see in the dark night for so long and they are tired.

But the thought occurs to me just now that the dark night of the soul is to some degree a falsity. The feelings associated with it are not false, but the darkness itself perhaps is. The reasoning which leads me here is this: even if God has abandoned the soul, for whatever reason and for whatever period of time, I do not believe the soul to be inherently darkened, as some do. Some say we are born full of evil; sin embodies us before we breathe our first awkward breath. We are the personification of darkness, in the eyes of some, until we find the light and love of God. I do not believe that.

If what I believe about our natural state is true, that we are created in the Imago Dei, and therefore are “good,” or even on those days when I can hardly fathom the reality of a deity and my perspective on man is as humanistic as it comes, then how can I seriously entertain the idea that my soul offers no light? I cannot. Because even the humanistic perspective, with its ever-evolving, always promising bias, shines man in a good light.

The dark night of the soul at some point must surrender to light, even if it is the soul emitting its own.

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