The dark night of the soul

The dark night of the soul is the painful experience of seeming to know God through absence rather than felt presence. In the book, it belongs to a larger rhythm of the spiritual life: moments of contemplative ecstasy alternate with periods when God seems distant, and the way through them is perseverance rather than the pursuit of a guaranteed experience.

Scriptural Image and Meaning

The book finds an image for this rhythm in The Song of Songs. On its surface, the biblical poem portrays two lovers who rejoice in one another’s company and intensely long for one another when apart. Christian mystics read that alternation as a pattern of spiritual life: God may seem clearly present at one time and known only by absence at another, an absence that can be painful. The dark night is set against the ecstasy of contemplation, not as an unrelated exception but as part of the same movement of longing and encounter.

Although God is never actually named in The Song of Songs, mystics wrote commentaries and homilies that found God throughout it. In the Middle Ages, the poem was treated as a textbook of mysticism and was commented on more often than any other book of the Bible. Its lovers’ changing nearness offered a language for spiritual experience without reducing it to uninterrupted consolation.

Alternation, Dryness, and Perseverance

The book presents spiritual life as changeable: God’s presence can feel very real, while at other times God seems known only through absence. Richness and dryness alternate, and falling and rising belong to the process. The dark night therefore describes more than a single striking episode; it names a condition that spiritual seekers must be prepared to meet without concluding that the search has ended.

That counsel is practical as well as interpretive. Prayer, meditation, study, and silence can feel useless or dry on some days and rich on others. Their value lies not in producing one particular experience, but in their cumulative effect over years: regular practices can foster growth and new insight. The book recommends beginning simply, perhaps with a Psalm and the Lord’s Prayer, then adding silence or Gospel reading, and adapting the practice as needed. On a visit to the Abbey of Gethsemani, the author heard a monk advise a student seeking a deeper prayer life to pray the Psalms; the author made that counsel a steady personal practice.

Gift, Attention, and Ordinary Life

The book cautions that spiritual experience cannot simply be manufactured. Douglas Steere places the weight on experience as something given, while the practical disciplines of prayer help a person become more open and receptive. The distinction matters to the dark night: practice is not a mechanism that forces God’s presence to return, but a way of continuing in the search through both felt nearness and dryness.

Nor does the book reserve spiritual meaning for spectacular experiences. It urges readers to look for God in the ordinary and simple aspects of life, and notes that events once attributed to chance or coincidence may later appear to have been occasions of divine action. Read in that context, the dark night does not cancel the possibility of encounter. It belongs to a life of patient attention in which spiritual understanding develops over time, and in which the absence of felt presence is not a reason to give up.