Shadow Series Part 3 of 5: The Dark Night of the Soul

The dark night is when your inner world goes silent. The answers stop working. The prayers stop landing. Everything that used to feel full of meaning feels empty.

The Dark Night of the Soul

Post 3 of 5 in the Shadow Series

You’ve faced the shadow. You’ve seen what’s true about you.
And now… it’s quiet. Too quiet.
Welcome to the dark night of the soul.

St. John of the Cross

The phrase comes from a 16th-century Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross.
He was imprisoned by his own religious order—locked in a tiny room for months, barely fed, beaten regularly.

In that darkness, John began to write.
What he created became one of the most profound spiritual poems of all time:

The Dark Night of the Soul.

But what he described wasn’t physical suffering.
It was something deeper. A silence. An absence.
The feeling of being abandoned by God—not punished, but emptied.
A divine loneliness that strips everything away.

And strangely… becomes the beginning of something new.

"On a dark night,
full of longing and love,
I slipped away unseen,
while everyone in my house was sleeping."

"The soul must pass through darkness—not because God is absent,
but because everything familiar must fall away before real union can happen."

— St. John of the Cross, paraphrased

What Is the Dark Night?

It’s not just suffering.
It’s not depression—though it can look like it from the outside.

It’s when your inner world goes silent.
The answers stop working. The prayers stop landing.
Everything that used to feel full of meaning… feels empty.

You wonder:
Where did the light go?
Did I do something wrong?
Is this just how things are now?

And then—nothing.

That’s the dark night.

And it’s not just a Christian idea.
Every spiritual path has a version of this.
Every great story has a version of this.
It’s the pit. The exile. The underworld.
It’s the part where you question everything.

Even your calling.

Even your God.

Even yourself.

Mother Teresa Felt It Too

Here’s what might surprise you:
Mother Teresa—yes, that Mother Teresa—lived in the dark night for decades.

In her private journals, only revealed after her death, she wrote:

“The silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see,
— listen and do not hear — the tongue moves but does not speak.”

Her journals shocked the world by revealing how much of her life was spent in her own dark night.

And still she kept going.
Still she showed up.

What Can You Do in the Dark?

Here’s the part we hate to hear:

You wait.

That’s it. That’s the work.

This whole Shadow Series could have been called the Waiting Series.

But, just like in the belly of the whale, while you’re waiting, there are three things you can do—three things that show up in the writings of both John and Teresa:

1. Lament

Cry out. Complain. Grieve.
Not to escape the dark—but to name it.
Mother Teresa wrote down her frustrations. John turned his pain into poetry.
That honesty was the cry for help.

2. Create

Make something. Write. Paint. Sing.
Not for beauty. For survival.
You’re not building a masterpiece. You’re lighting a candle.

3. Persist

Keep going.
Even when it’s hollow. Even when it feels like nothing matters.
Show up anyway.
Not because you feel like it—but because you have no other choice.
And eventually a small glimmer of light will emerge.

You’re Not Alone

If you’re in the dark night right now, hear this:

You’re not broken.

You’re not abandoned.

You’re not the only one.

This is part of the journey.
The hardest part. The loneliest part.
But maybe—just maybe—the most sacred part too.