For much of my life, I have spoken to, and heard from, the Lord. This communication is called “prayer”, of course, but over the years it’s felt far more comfortable than the formality that word contrives in my mind. At its height, it has felt like breathing, as if I only needed to think of God and there He was, talking with me as one might with a friend.
It was like that for a decade or so. Until it wasn’t.
Dark night
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St. John of the Cross penned a poem titled “The Dark Night of the Soul” while in prison and later began a longer work of the same name in which he expounded on each stanza of the poem. It appears he never finished the work, but his descriptions of what he called the “dark night of the soul” still linger in the imagination of many believers.
Let me explain, by way of example.
Have you ever been desperate for God, like, truly desperate — and He doesn’t show up? You get the feeling that your cries go unheard, reverberating off the walls of your room or the windows of your car without any answer at all. The feelings of comfort, safety, and confidence you once had in your faith seem stripped away, and in their place is doubt and the sudden feeling that everything in all the world points to the fact that God isn’t real. Or worse, that God doesn’t care.
Me too.
That experience has been called a lot of things. C.S. Lewis, in his wonderful book The Screwtape Letters, describes this feeling as when someone “looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him [God] seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken.”
In The Critical Journey, authors Janet O. Hagberg and Robert A. Guelich work to describe the stages of the Christian journey. In between two stages they describe what they call “The Wall”. It’s a time of wrestling with God that can often (though not always) be marked by the appearance, or feeling, that God has abandoned us. This season, in which we feel that we are experiencing God’s absence, removes from us whatever masks and lies we tell ourselves about ourselves and our faith.
Or, as Joshua Leventhal so elegantly put it in his song “Upholder”:
I’d like to think nothing happens in vain,
But sometimes the silence starts swallowing faith.
If I only trust You while my world’s still intact,
Is that actually trust or some thinly veiled act?
In short, a “dark night of the soul” forces us to examine whether or not we believe what we have learned about God even when no feelings are attached. Was our previous obedience to God attached to a feeling of God’s goodness? When all that is within our world tells us that God has either abandoned us or was never there to begin with … what will we do? Our actions will inevitably reveal who we are and if our faith is real.
Easy to write, hard to live
After someone very close to me passed away, I felt God’s presence intensely for the first week or so. He held me up and gave me strength to connect with and love the people around me in a miraculous way. I was deeply saddened, of course, but at the same time I could feel an inner warmth and peace that I knew was the Father holding me close.
And then it was gone. I felt nothing.
I didn’t even have enough energy to grieve the loss of the feeling of His presence. Numb, I would sit and stare at times. I did the dishes with a blank face and held my newborn son feeling love for him but no love from God.
At one point, I was walking through my home and a thought struck me: Is this depression? I’m no clinician, but I’d spent weeks feeling like some hollowed-out version of myself. I’d asked God to come close to me, but it didn’t feel like He was there. Maybe I was too broken for Him? I didn’t really believe that, but still…
Through a “serendipitous” set of circumstances, I stumbled across a teaching from John Mark Comer on “The Dark Night of the Soul”. I hadn’t heard the term before then, but it felt relatable. I poured a cup of tea, sat down, and listened. Then cried.
Throughout the sermon, words were carefully placed upon the feelings I’d been having, naming them and gently removing the loneliness I felt. Nothing was “solved”, but knowing what I was experiencing, having a name for it, helped more than I could verbalize.
What to ‘do’
There was one key takeaway, one “action item” as it were, for those of us who experience such a darkness. It’s simple, but so incredibly hard.
Obey. Or another way to think of it: Be faithful.
The key is to go back to what you know to be fundamentally true about your faith in Jesus, and to allow your actions to flow from there. Give generously. Love others. Pray. Forgive. Fast. And do it numb, if you must.
Teach yourself that you do not love God because He makes you feel good, or because He answers your prayers. “If you love me,” Jesus tells his disciples, “obey my commands” (John 14:15). When your prayers seem to go unanswered, return to what you know is obedience to His commands, and do that.
The full quote from Lewis’ TheScrewtape Letters is incredibly interesting. It goes like this: “Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do [God’s] will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”
If you haven’t read The Screwtape Letters, I’d recommend it. The context here is that we have two demons conspiring to thwart the work of God in a man’s life. And yet Lewis, when describing this condition of seeming abandonment from God, calls Satan’s cause “never more in danger” than when a Christian obeys the commands of Christ despite the outward circumstances of their life giving the appearance of being forsaken.
Perhaps that is the shift in perspective we truly need: when our prayers seem to go unanswered and a feeling of spiritual darkness sets in, we can become spiritually dangerous if only we choose to still obey.
Phillip Snyder is a Learning & Leadership Development Consultant at Medi-Share. He acquired his master’s in educational leadership while serving as an English Teacher in public education, prior to moving into his current role at the ministry. He loves spending time with his wife and three boys, building furniture, and drinking good coffee.
