The Dark Night of the Soul

I am no mystic and have little taste for poetry, nor do I well understand either.  I suspect I am too literal for both.  The Dark Night of the Soul by St John of the Cross is the Great Book discussed on the National Review podcast that dropped today. Armed with that further revelation, I tried this poem again. I still look at it almost blankly, with only a few lines evocative and not much that matches my experience.

Yet another dark night of the soul I understand better. St. Teresa had a shining vision of what God would have her do when she was a girl - and barely heard from God again nor felt His presence for decades after. 

 The two statements, 11 weeks apart, are extravagantly dissonant. The first is typical of the woman the world thought it knew. The second sounds as though it had wandered in from some 1950s existentialist drama. Together they suggest a startling portrait in self-contradiction–that one of the great human icons of the past 100 years, whose remarkable deeds seemed inextricably connected to her closeness to God and who was routinely observed in silent and seemingly peaceful prayer by her associates as well as the television camera, was living out a very different spiritual reality privately, an arid landscape from which the deity had disappeared.

That is from  Mother Teresa’s Crisis of Faith by David Van Biema, who was then religion editor of Time. It was written shortly after her death, and it is jarring and almost quaint to recognise that this was the period when the New Atheists were in ascendance and claimed to seep the field before them. The new atheists have been sweeping the field before them for centuries, haven't they? Van Biema mentions them and gives them a try at the podium, then returns to quoting the writings of the Saint of the Gutters. Her words are as solid as bricks beneath the feet.

My dark night is bright as noon compared to her experience, yet still I have a recognition.