Dark Night of the Soul

An Unsettling Experience that Can Lead to Deep Beauty in the Lord

Mar 18, 2026

Many authors through several centuries have attempted to describe what happens when we have an interior experience that is disorienting, that feels like our spiritual sight/insight has gone dark, and the whole situation is painful. St. John of the Cross¹ named this experience the “Dark Night of the Soul.”

A true Dark Night of the Soul is different from being depressed, although if we don’t know what’s happening to us when in one, we might be fooled into thinking we’re depressed. But in this Dark Night, something deeply spiritual is happening. We are being invited to embark on a spiritual journey. Oddly enough, this journey is to a place where we didn’t plant to go, perhaps didn’t even want to go because this journey is dangerous to the ego. It’s a place of “unknowing,” when before we embark, we didn’t even know that “unknowing” was a word.

This spiritual journey is a life-transition, a time of being transformed from within. That transformation requires us to grow beyond our ego. You know what that means, don’t you? At some point we have to give up the desires of the ego, which can be profoundly difficult and painful. But the beauty that lies beyond that releasing is incomparable. We just don’t know that yet, when we’ve only received the invitation to embark on the journey. We need resources other than the ego, in order to set out and to make it through– resources that we didn’t know about before. That’s one reason it feels like we’re blind. What used to work no longer does.

I recently watched a webinar on this subject, led by Alexander John Shaia². He makes the case that there are four parts to the experience of the Dark Night of the Soul. Four parts, but only the one story. One story with millions of scripts because there will be unique bits as different ones of us undergo this journey.

So here are the four parts:

1. You receive/hear a summons to embark on a journey to growth, to which we say an inadequate yes, maybe even after a real struggle to get to the “yes.”

2. The journey will present you with many wild and woolly obstacles (your ego trying to get you to return to the way it was, while fooling you into thinking that way is actually going forward, distractions pulling you this way and that)

3. Somehow, mysteriously, a gift arrives that makes you joyful and ecstatic and thankful!

4. How will you decide to use that gift such that it becomes part of an everyday reality. How to take that gift and use it to serve family, the church, other people.

There is a pattern here, that can happen more than once to the same person. Transformation is happening at the spiritual level deep within. Transformation that leads to union with God.

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This is the fourth week of Lent. The Season of Lent is a time when we more quietly reflect on who we are as both sinners and followers of Jesus. And we reflect on the Lord’s enormous capacity to walk with us through all of life, loving us, guiding us, forgiving us, carrying us when it seems like we can’t make it. Lent can be a time of deepening our relationship with the Lord, because His vast love blows us away. Lent is not necessarily a time when we undergo a Dark Night of the Soul. But whenever we receive the invitation to enter that special Darkness, we can absolutely bank on the idea that He is with us through the entire journey and every aspect of it. Even when we can’t sense His Presence.

So let’s draw near with faith and enter the invitation to Walk with Christ Through Life, whether we experience a Dark Night of the Soul, or we don’t.

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