What Does the Dark Night of the Soul Mean Now, and What Did It Mean Before?

What the Christian Tradition Can Offer to People Who Have Been Using the Phrase Without It

There is a phrase that has been migrating, quietly, out of the Christian tradition and into the wider spiritual marketplace for about twenty years now. The phrase is the dark night of the soul. You can hear it in therapy podcasts. You can hear it in yoga studios. You can hear it on TikTok, in books on personal transformation, in conversations between strangers on planes who are trying to name what has been happening to them.

The phrase has become, for a substantial portion of contemporary spiritual seekers, the most precise vocabulary they have for a particular kind of inner experience. They use it carefully. They take it seriously. They know it is the name of something real.

What most of them do not know is that the phrase comes from a sixteenth-century Spanish Carmelite friar named John of the Cross, who used it to describe a specific phase in the Christian contemplative life. They do not know that the phrase has a tradition behind it. They do not know that the experience they are naming has been studied, mapped, and pastorally accompanied by Christians for four hundred years. They do not know that what they are reaching for, when they say I am in a dark night, is something the Christian tradition already has language for, already has practices for, and already has the witness of saints for.

This piece is for pastors, chaplains, therapists, healing ministers, care pastors, spiritual mentors, small group leaders, discipleship leaders, parents, and anyone who has heard someone use the phrase and not been sure how to respond. This piece holds two things side by side: what the Christian tradition originally meant by the dark night, because the original meaning is more pastorally generative than the contemporary use, and what Athority Ministries® research has found about how contemporary spiritual seekers are actually using the phrase, because the findings are more hopeful than the church sometimes assumes.

This piece draws on the framework of our Wounded Sovereign Paradox series and reads independently of it.

A note before we begin. The dark night of the soul, in any framework, touches mental-health territory. Some of what is named as a dark night is genuine spiritual experience. Some of what is named as a dark night is depression, anxiety, or grief that needs clinical care. The two are not always easy to distinguish, and the responsible pastoral approach holds them both in view. This piece will treat the spiritual dimension at length because the Christian tradition has rich resources for the spiritual dimension. The clinical dimension is real, the church needs partnership with clinicians, and the pastoral care of anyone in a dark night should include the question of whether professional support is also needed. I will return to this near the end of the piece.

01 · The original mapWhat John of the Cross Actually Meant

The phrase comes from a poem, and the poem is the right place to start. John of the Cross wrote The Dark Night in a prison cell, where he had been locked up by members of his own religious order who disagreed with his reform efforts. The poem describes a soul leaving its house in the night, in disguise, with no light to guide it except the burning love in its own heart, traveling to meet its Beloved. The poem is, on its surface, a love song. Underneath the surface, it is a precise description of a phase of Christian formation that John believed every soul committed to deeper union with God would eventually pass through.

John wrote two commentaries on the poem, which together form one of the most rigorous Christian treatments of spiritual experience ever produced. In them, he describes the dark night as a passage rather than a state. The soul has been growing in faith, in prayer, in love. The soul has been receiving consolations, the felt sense of God's presence, the warmth of devotion, the satisfaction of a faith that feels alive. Then, often without warning, the consolations stop. The soul prays and feels nothing. The soul reads Scripture and the words do not move. The soul sits in worship and the room is empty. God, as the soul has known God, has gone silent.

This is not, in John's understanding, abandonment. It is not God leaving. It is God working in a way the soul cannot yet recognize. The dark night is, in the tradition's language, a purgative experience. God is removing the soul's attachment to the felt sense of God, so that the soul can receive God himself rather than only God's gifts. The soul has been clinging to the warmth of devotion. The soul has not yet learned to cling to the One who gave the warmth. The dark night is the slow, painful work of teaching the soul to love God rather than to love the experience of loving God.

John distinguished between two dark nights. The first, which he called the dark night of the senses, is the loss of consolations in prayer and devotion. The second, deeper one, which he called the dark night of the spirit, is a more thorough purgation of the soul's clinging to its own spiritual self-image. Both produce, when the soul cooperates with them, a deeper union with God than the soul had before. The pain is real. The pain is also doing work the soul could not do for itself. John was clear that the dark night is not punishment. It is grace, in a form the soul does not yet recognize as grace.

This is the original meaning. The dark night is a phase of Christian formation in which God is teaching the soul to love God rather than to love the experience of God, and the teaching is painful because the soul has been clinging to the experience without knowing it.

02 · What the data showsWhat Contemporary Spiritual Seekers Are Naming

When I conducted the research for Athority Ministries® that produced the Wounded Sovereign Paradox, I had assumed that contemporary use of the phrase would have drifted far from John's meaning. I was wrong. What our research surfaced is that the spiritual seekers using the phrase have, in many cases, intuited a substantial portion of what the Christian tradition has always taught about the dark night, without having access to the tradition itself.

Let me show you what the data actually says.

In our Multi-Pathway Meaning-Making Model study, we identified seventeen threads in which the dark night narrative was explicitly named by the spiritual seeker. We then asked a series of questions of those threads. What precipitated the dark night, in the spiritual seeker's own telling? What was the dark night doing, as they experienced it? How did it resolve? The answers were telling.

The most common precipitant the spiritual seekers named was spiritual practice or growth itself. Twelve of the seventeen threads. The dark night was not, in the experience of the people having it, a response to relational rupture or to general life crisis. It was something that began once they had been doing serious spiritual work for a while. The work of meditation, prayer, contemplation, study, had brought them into a phase that the work itself produced. This is, almost exactly, John's diagnosis. The dark night does not come to those who are not seeking. It comes to those who are.

The most common interpretation of what the dark night was doing, in the spiritual seekers' own framing, was transformative and purgative. Ten of seventeen described it as transformative. Six of seventeen described it as purgative. Only one described it as something that needed to be filled or fixed by external resources. The dominant framing was not that something was wrong and needed to be repaired. The dominant framing was that something was happening, the something was working on the spiritual seeker in ways they did not fully understand, and the work was leading somewhere. Again, this is John. The dark night is not breakdown. The dark night is formation that hurts.

The most common resolution, in the spiritual seekers' own telling, was peace and acceptance, or deeper union with whatever they had been seeking. Five of seventeen named peace and acceptance as the outcome. Four of seventeen named deeper union. Zero named retreat into private faith. The dark night did not end with the spiritual seeker giving up on the spiritual life. It ended with the spiritual seeker arriving somewhere fuller than where they began. This is John again. The dark night, in the tradition's understanding, produces deeper union. The pain is doing the work the work could not be done without.

There is a separate finding from our Felt Commons poll data that deepens the picture. When we asked spiritual seekers whether they expected to experience multiple dark nights, eighty-five percent said yes, as many as they needed. They did not understand the dark night as a single catastrophic event. They understood it as a recurring phase in an ongoing process. The Christian tradition has taught this for four hundred years. The contemporary spiritual seekers have arrived at the same understanding without the tradition's help.

I want to be honest about what this finding does and does not mean. It does not mean that the contemporary use of the phrase is identical to John's use of it. It does not mean that the spiritual seekers using it have the full theological apparatus the Christian tradition provides. It does not mean that the framework inside which the phrase is being used is the same framework. The contemporary spiritual seekers are using the phrase inside a framework that has relocated authority to the self, that lacks the doctrine of the Trinity, that does not have the sacraments, and that does not have the long Christian witness to anchor the experience theologically. The phrase is being used inside a thinner theological house than the one John built it in.

But here is what the finding does mean. The contemporary spiritual seekers using the phrase are not, in the main, naming the wrong experience. They are naming the right experience. They have intuited, from inside the experience, substantial portions of what the Christian tradition has always taught about the dark night. This changes the ministry leader’s starting point. The church does not need to teach them that the dark night is real. They already know. The church does not need to convince them that the dark night does spiritual work. They already believe it. The church does not need to argue that the dark night ends in something good. They are already expecting it to.

What the church can offer is the structure their intuition has been reaching for without finding. The doctrine of the Trinity, which names God as eternal mutual self-gift, gives the dark night its deepest meaning, because the soul that is being purged of its attachments to the gifts of God is being prepared to receive the Giver. The sacraments give the soul a place to stand when the felt sense of God has gone silent. The body of Christ gives the soul witnesses who have walked the same road and can name what is happening. The long Christian witness, including John's own poems, gives the soul language that does not have to be invented in the dark. The tradition gives what the intuition has been hungry for.

03 · Hold both questionsThe Mental Health Question

I said at the start of this piece that the dark night, in any framework, touches mental-health territory. I want to return to that now, because the responsible pastoral approach requires it.

In our Felt Commons research, when we asked spiritual seekers whether the dark night was a spiritual process or a mental health issue, about four in ten answered that it was a spiritual process, not mental illness. Another two in ten answered that it was specifically a spiritual crisis, not mental illness. But almost four in ten acknowledged a mental health dimension, with some saying it could become mental illness if left untreated and others saying it has psychological impact that should be addressed alongside the spiritual work. The community is not naive about mental health. The community is, in its own data, taking the question seriously.

What this means pastorally is that the dark night cannot be reduced to either category alone. The pastor or healing minister or small group leader who is walking with someone in a dark night needs to hold both questions at once. Is this person in a phase of spiritual formation the Christian tradition has been mapping for four hundred years? It may be. Is this person also experiencing depression, anxiety, grief, or unresolved trauma that needs clinical care? It may also be. The two are not the same, but the two can coexist in the same person at the same time. The responsible pastoral move is to honor the spiritual dimension while not assuming that the spiritual dimension is the whole of what is happening.

This is one of the places where the church needs partnership with clinicians. The pastor who can name the dark night theologically, and who also knows when to refer to a counselor or therapist, is the pastor doing the work the moment requires. The healing minister who can offer the tradition's resources, and who can also recognize when those resources are not sufficient on their own, is the healing minister honoring both the soul and the body. The small group leader who can sit with a person in a dark night, who can speak the language of the tradition, and who can also ask whether the person has someone clinical they trust, is the small group leader being faithful to the full reality of what the person is carrying.

The Christian tradition has rich resources for the spiritual dimension. The Christian tradition has historically been less developed in its understanding of mental health. The contemporary church does not have to choose. The contemporary church can hold both. The work in front of us is to be the kind of body of Christ that takes spiritual experience seriously and takes mental health seriously, and that knows the difference between the two without dismissing either.

04 · Pastoral accompanimentCompanioning the Night

The contemporary use of the dark night of the soul is one of the clearest examples in our research of a pattern that should give the church both hope and pause.

The hope is that the spiritual seekers around you are reaching, often without knowing it, for something the Christian tradition already has. They are not in a different conversation than the church is in. They are in the same conversation, with a thinner vocabulary, looking for the depth the church can actually provide. The dark night, the discernment crisis, the longing for transformation, the hunger for community across time, the search for meaning in suffering, all of these are not opposites of Christian formation. They are the questions Christian formation has been answering for two thousand years.

The pause is that the church has not always recognized this. The church has sometimes treated the spiritual seekers using these phrases as if they were in a different country, speaking a different language, in pursuit of a different kind of spiritual life. They are not. They are using the same vocabulary, often the church's own vocabulary, inside a framework that cannot give them what the vocabulary points toward. The church has the answers their intuitions have been reaching for. The work is to make those answers available, in ground where they can actually take root.

A few things to take from this piece.

The first is that when someone in your care says they are in a dark night of the soul, do not assume they are using the phrase loosely. They may be using it precisely. Take them at their word. Ask them what they are experiencing. Listen carefully. The chances that they are describing something John of the Cross would recognize are higher than the church has sometimes assumed.

The second is that the Christian tradition has rich resources for what they are experiencing, and these resources are largely unknown to them. They have not, in most cases, read John of the Cross. They have not been formed by the contemplative tradition. They have not been given the doctrine of the Trinity as the ground of the dark night's deepest meaning. They have not received the sacraments as a place to stand when the felt sense of God has gone silent. The pastoral work is not to convince them that the dark night is real. They know. The pastoral work is to introduce them, slowly and patiently, to the structures the tradition provides.

The third is that the mental health question is real, and the responsible pastoral approach holds it alongside the spiritual question. The dark night and clinical depression are not the same thing. The dark night and unresolved trauma are not the same thing. The dark night and the anxiety the framework produces are not the same thing. Some people in a dark night need a contemplative companion. Some need a therapist. Some need both. The pastoral work is to be the kind of body of Christ that can recognize the difference and partner appropriately.

The fourth is that the dark night is good news, in the framework John gave us. It is grace, in a form the soul does not yet recognize as grace. The pastoral work, finally, is to hold this with the person in front of you. The Lord who is sovereign over them is also the Lord who is working in them. The silence in the prayer is not abandonment. The dryness in the worship is not God's absence. The losing of the consolations is, in the tradition's language, the soul being prepared for something deeper than the consolations themselves. This is the gospel offered to the person in the dark night. The Christian tradition has been offering it for four hundred years. The church can offer it now.

05 · What to read nextWhat to Read Next

If the discernment struggles described in this piece sound familiar, our piece When Your Gut Becomes Your God: The Quiet Crisis of Christian Discernment takes up the related question of how the framework's collapse of the Holy Spirit into intuition produces ongoing burden, including in dark-night seasons.

If you want to understand the deeper framework that produces the conditions under which the dark night is now being lived, the eight-post Wounded Sovereign Paradox series is the foundational synthesis from which this piece is drawn. The first post, Your People Are Spiritually Seeking. So Are You., is where the map begins.

If you are working with someone whose dark night is connected to a wound from a previous Christian community, our piece What Does Trauma Have To Do With Spiritual Seeking addresses the relationship between religious trauma and spiritual experience directly.

If you want to understand how the spiritual seekers around you experience faith engagement as something happening to them rather than as something they are doing, our piece What Does Divine Initiative Look Like for People Who Don't Call It That? names the dynamic that runs underneath much of what gets described as a dark night.