Shades of Darkness

Dark Nights of the Soul
by Thomas Moore, Ph.D.

(Page 3 of 8)

We will take note of several people who went through the special dark night of imprisonment, including Oscar Wilde, the Victorian writer who was jailed for his homosexuality. After being released, Wilde wrote to a friend, "My desire to live is as intense as ever, and though my heart is broken, hearts are made to be broken: that is why God sends sorrow into the world.... To me, suffering seems now a sacramental thing, that makes those whom it touches holy.... any materialism in life coarsens the soul."

Wilde suffered loneliness and the loss of his exciting life, and in some ways left prison a broken man. But this passage shows that he learned a great deal and expresses in perfect language what I want to say here: Being unconsciously absorbed into the values of a materialistic culture "coarsens the soul." The role of a dark night might be to refine your sensitivities and show you how to make yourself into a multidimensional, fine-tooled person.

To live your particular "shade," the first thing you can do is give up clinical language that labels and categorizes. When you describe what you are going through, speak concretely from your own unique experience. Penetrate beneath the layer of language and ideas you pick up from television and magazines about your "problem." Let it show itself for what it is, not for what the therapy industry wants it to be. Medicine and psychology, like many other institutions in modern life, prefer the understandable and treatable case to the irreducible individual. They can imagine restoring you to good functioning, but they can't envision fulfilling your fate and discovering the meaning of your life.

Finally, and this may be the most difficult task of all, give yourself what you need at the deepest level. Care rather than cure. Organize your life to support the process. You are incubating your soul, not living a heroic adventure. Arrange life accordingly. Tone it down. Get what comforts you can, but don't move against the process. Concentrate, reflect, think, and talk about your situation seriously with trusted friends.

Inspiring Examples

Some people have to face enormous challenges and go through extraordinary periods of challenge. We can learn from their example to have the patience, the insight, and the courage to endure. In 1987, when he was in Beirut as the representative of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Terry Waite was taken captive as a hostage and kept imprisoned for five years. With his fellow captives, he suffered beatings, isolation, and many deprivations. He was cut off from his normal life, his family, and all supportive human contact.

Waite says that he often called to mind books he had read, and they sustained him during those long years of solitude. One day a sympathetic guard gave him a book about slavery in America. He read it slowly several times and even memorized passages. He thought about the slaves spending their entire lives in captivity, yet without losing their spirit and their humanity. The image of the slave didn't take away his pain, but it made it bearable. He was inspired and sustained by the images of others rising above even worse conditions.

There is a simple secret to dealing with dark nights. You can come through one morally and spiritually, even if to all appearances you have failed. External pressures may get you in the end, but you can still survive with your soul intact. For years, Terry Waite, and others like him, couldn't prevail over their captors and free themselves from their physical torment. But throughout their long captivity, they dominated their situation morally, in their attitudes and in the many ways they gave their experience meaning.

Throughout history, many have been overpowered by their oppressors, but they have triumphed on another level. In the sixteenth century, Thomas More sat in prison for thirteen months before his execution, writing some of his best philosophy. The Marquis de Sade, in some ways the very opposite of a saint, reacted in a similar way. He ranted against his jailers, but he wrote some of his most important fiction under duress. Nelson Mandela prepared himself in jail to be an extraordinary leader and an example for everyone in his time.

This is the secret: Even if you can't be liberated physically, you can still emerge with self-possession, vitality, and character. You can do this with divorce, the death of a child, a serious illness, or a failure in creativity. You can survive morally even if you die physically. We'll see several examples of men and women living this paradox. Your dark night is your own invitation to become a person of heart and soul.

Every dark night is unique. In this book I will tell many stories of people I have known, especially in my practice of therapy. Stories of real people demonstrate the variety of dark nights and the many ways they are resolved. I will delve into many biographies of people who have long interested me, to see how they dealt with or succumbed to their dark nights. You can learn much from apparent failure, and you can glimpse subtle ways in which tragic lives succeed. I also won't hesitate to mention my own experiences of the darkness, for I am no stranger to it.

To deal with these disturbances we also need rich, solid, and useful ideas, rare items in a world of facts and opinions. I get my confidence as a therapist from my studies in religion, mythology, the arts, and depth psychology. The best therapists I know are those who have educated themselves in the great mysteries of love, aggression, and death. They are not the ones with standard techniques and easy answers. You, too, could think through the basic questions, read the best writers, see good films, and educate yourself in the life of the soul. Then, when a dark night comes, you will be ready for it.

Copyright © 2005 Thomas Moore

About the Author

Thomas Moore, Ph.D., wrote the phenomenal #1 bestsellers Care of the Soul and SoulMates as well as many other successful books. Moore was a Catholic monk for twelve years and later became a psychotherapist, earning degrees in theology, musicology, and religion. Moore now lectures extensively throughout North America.