Spiritual darkness and God's absence

Spiritual darkness and God's absence names the painful intervals between experiences of divine closeness, a recurring pattern in which longing persists even when God seems nowhere to be found. Across the book, absence does not cancel the possibility of faith: it is set beside moments of presence, remembered and retold experiences, disciplined prayer, and practical care for people in need.

A recurring pattern of presence and absence

The book identifies rising and falling as a standard pattern in mystical life. Religious experience may reach great heights, then give way to a desert in which God seems absent. That desert is painful and can threaten faith; it is not presented as an easy or automatically fruitful interval. The accounts of fourteen mystics are introduced as guides to how such experiences affected and strengthened faith, rather than as proof that every period of spiritual distress resolves in the same way.

The alternation also shapes the book's reading of The Song of Songs. Its lovers rejoice together and long for one another when separated; mystics found in that movement an image of spiritual life, in which God may seem clearly present at one time and known only through absence at another. The book connects the ecstasy of contemplation with the dark night of the soul, and notes that commentators found God in a poem that does not explicitly mention God. In this reading, longing is not incidental to mystical experience: it gives form to the interval between encounter and distance.

Bernard and Suso: longing through spiritual coldness

Bernard of Clairvaux recalls that, early in his conversion, he experienced coldness and hardness of heart while seeking the God he wanted to love. The search itself indicates that the coldness did not amount to indifference. At unexpected times, Bernard felt inward recovery; a holy person's presence or the memory of someone important to him could help prompt it. He welcomed these occasions, yet wondered whether the immediate stimulus was human goodness rather than thought of God. His question about when he would behold God's face gives the uncertainty a devotional form: longing continues without a clear timetable for relief.

In Sermon 9, Bernard describes favors received from God as exceeding what he deserved but falling short of what he longed for. The tension between gratitude and incompletion makes desire central to his spiritual life: even consolation does not end the yearning for a closer encounter. In Sermon 30, he turns the image of an unkept vineyard toward his own burdens as abbot of Clairvaux. Anxieties, suspicions, cares, and quarrels crowd his time and leave little room for prayer. His account joins inward difficulty to the demands of responsibility rather than treating spiritual struggle as separate from daily obligations.

Henry Suso gives absence the shape of a lovers' game. In his account, Eternal Wisdom explains that lovers may value one another more when apart, because separation creates longing. Suso calls the experience tiresome and waiting painful. This image does not erase distress; it interprets distance as a condition in which desire becomes acute. The autobiographical account of Suso's life also has a layered history: Elsbeth Stagel recorded notes from their spiritual conferences, Suso began to burn them after discovering them, then stopped when he believed God wanted him to. He later prepared The Exemplar, which may include further editing of his Life. The surviving narrative therefore presents spiritual development through recollection and instruction, not as an untouched record of experience.

Memory, attention, and the return of presence

The book also uses retrospective writing to show how experiences acquire meaning over time. Its account of Augustine describes a brief ascent with Monica beyond bodily things and their own minds, followed by a return to ordinary conversation. The encounter was short, but the book's narrator explains that reading Confessions transformed an earlier, incomplete understanding of mysticism and Christian faith. Augustine's account thus becomes both a remembered experience of touching Wisdom and a later reader's point of entry into a deeper religious interest. The framing distinguishes the event's brevity from the lasting significance assigned to it afterward.

Simone Weil's experiences at Solesmes and her later practice of prayer show a different relation between suffering, attention, and presence. While at Solesmes, she learned George Herbert's poem "Love" and recited it as a prayer when her headaches were at their worst. She described her first mystical experience during one such recitation, as Christ came to possess her without the involvement of her senses or imagination; what she felt was love's presence amid suffering. The account does not make pain disappear. It describes a religious meaning found within it, and says that her religious commitments grew more central without diminishing her concern for social questions.

Weil later learned the Our Father in Greek and made its recitation a morning discipline. If her attention wandered, she began again, seeking to complete the prayer with absolute attention. She described the words as sometimes carrying her beyond ordinary perception into a profound silence, and sometimes experiencing Christ as present with a clarity deeper than in the first encounter. Her understanding of prayer as attention gives this practice a specific answer to spiritual uncertainty: not a guarantee that presence can be summoned, but a disciplined orientation toward God. The repeated recitation also places a stable practice beside the unpredictable alternation of presence and absence.

Absence amid public life and human need

The book sets interior religious experience alongside conditions that cannot be reduced to inward states. Howard Thurman grew up in a racially segregated society; his grandmother, a former slave who could not read, inspired his faith as he read the Bible to her. During his 1935 pilgrimage, an Indian college principal challenged him over the history of Christian participation in slavery and the continuing racial oppression Thurman had experienced in the United States. Thurman answered by distinguishing Christianity from the religion of Jesus and criticizing slavery and racial prejudice. The conversation lasted more than five hours. In India, a conversation with a scholar of Oriental studies moved from an initial exchange of competing religious positions to a shared spiritual experience that Thurman described as joining two people without erasing their individuality. These episodes show religious understanding being tested and deepened in encounters shaped by injustice and difference, not only in solitude.

Weil's factory work likewise anchors spiritual reflection in material hardship. Taking leave from teaching in 1934–35, she worked in a factory because she wanted to experience the life of a worker rather than rely only on theoretical accounts. Machine breakdowns cost her production time, and repeated failures to meet the quota meant lost access to full pay. Her journal records exhaustion and the damage factory conditions did to workers' self-respect. This evidence does not equate labor exploitation with spiritual absence; rather, it places her reflections on suffering and attention beside concrete forms of human deprivation.

For Dorothy Day, the poor were a primary revelation of God's presence. Through The Catholic Worker, begun with Peter Maurin, she addressed unemployment, labor, racism, child labor, and other social concerns; the first issue appeared on May 1, 1933, with 2,500 copies offered at Union Square for a penny. The paper avoided party endorsement, while the movement's stated social aims were to be pursued without violence. Day's account of hospitality makes the connection between faith and action especially direct: people seeking food or shelter might be difficult, hostile, or in need of sustained attention, yet she understood the guest as Christ and service as a response to Christ. In that vision, divine presence is not always an elevated feeling. It may be obscured in the people who arrive at the door, and recognition must take the form of care.

Narrative significance

Taken together, these accounts refuse a simple contrast between mystical presence and a life lived in the world. Bernard's crowded responsibilities, Suso's painful waiting, Weil's deliberate prayer and factory labor, Thurman's encounters across religious and racial divisions, and Day's hospitality place spiritual life amid difficulty rather than outside it. The book does not claim that every hardship is an experience of God's absence or that service makes such absence vanish. Instead, it presents varied ways people interpret intervals of uncertainty: through longing, later recollection, repeated attention, theological questioning, or the concrete obligations of compassion.

The form of the accounts reinforces that openness. Confessions, Suso's revised life-writing, Weil's journal and recollection, and the brief diary entries in Dag Hammarskjöld's Markings preserve experience through retrospective or fragmentary writing. Merton's autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, likewise narrates the transition from an earlier life to monastic commitment; its publication history included cuts by Cistercian censors and further editorial suggestions. These works do not offer one uniform explanation for spiritual darkness. They let different lives register distance, encounter, and change in different forms, making the alternation between presence and absence a recurring interpretive pattern rather than a single doctrine or guaranteed resolution.