Saying 'No' to God, The Journey of Love

Dark Night of the Soul
by Saint John of the Cross, Mirabai Starr

(Page 6 of 7)

Saying "No" to God

Fr. Matthew describes evil as the saying of an absolute "no" to God. Sin, then, would be any act that engages the "no." Perhaps hell, then, is the consequence of the "no" in the life of the soul trapped in denial of God. And the devil might simply be that aspect of our selves that most stubbornly refuses God.

In this translation, all references to evil, sin, hell, and the devil, as states and entities, have been replaced with terms that reflect a false sense of separation from God. If the divine is truly divine and ultimate reality truly ultimate, then there is nothing but God. Where John spoke of El Diablo, the term "fragmented self" has been chosen to describe that shadow side of our own being so lost in the illusion of separation from the Beloved that all it can do is rebel against merging. The terms "Spirit of Evil" and the "Fallen One" evoke the perils that result from this delusion.

Islam means "the peace that comes with utter surrender to God." The primary declaration of Muslims is "There is no God but God." The first part of this prayer is negation: there is no God. But it is only out of this absolute emptiness that the affirmation of truth can rise: but God. The fragmented self John calls El Diablo can be seen as that aspect of our being that has become disoriented by the negation and has lost the thread of the affirmation.

It is the fragmented self that is terrified of annihilation. And with good reason. Its suspicion is well-founded that if it were to allow the soul to follow through with its intentions and attain union with the Beloved, the result would be its own death. The soul cannot enter into the fusion of divine love with its shadow clinging to its skirt. It must strip itself of identification with the small self and step naked into the garden where the Beloved is waiting.

The closer the soul approaches on its journey home to God, the more ferocious is the resistance of the fragmented self. Divine union is about wholeness, and the fragmented self does not want to be made whole. But because only God is real, the "no" ultimately disappears in the radiance of divine love like a broken heart that heals the instant the dreamer wakes in the night to feel the arms of her true love holding her close, just as he has always held her.

The Journey of Love

The road to the divine encounter is not for the weekend adventurer. It will quickly disappoint the spiritually curious. If you crave ecstatic visions and spiritual comforts, do not bother to walk this way. The dark night of the soul is for the seeker so on fire with love for God that she will get to him by any means necessary. This includes being willing to plunge into the abyss of the Unknown, of the Unknowable. It is a path for the spiritually desperate. And yet it is a state over which the soul has absolutely no control.

Before the soul even begins this journey, she will already have suffered acute disillusionment with the world. Plagued by an unquenchable thirst for the sacred, she has lost interest in material security and social recognition. She has dedicated herself to the cultivation of spiritual practice. Her only hope is that by blowing on the coals of intuition of the divine with the breath of prayer, it will burst into flames and reveal the Beloved. But the spiritual life turns out to be not at all what she thought it would be. The radiance she anticipated looks exactly like impenetrable darkness.

John describes this darkness as being of two kinds, which correspond to the two aspects of the human soul: the sensory and the spiritual. And so there are two successive nights: the night of sense and the night of spirit. In the night of sense, the soul is stripped of all perceptions of God. In the night of spirit, all ideas of God fall away.

Early in her spiritual life, the soul could not help but wallow like a happy baby in the juicy feelings evoked by spiritual practices. In the night of sense, these juices dry up and the soul is left baffled and bereft. This, John assures us, is a good thing. It means that God sees that we have grown strong enough to endure a light burden of aridity. He has removed us from the spiritual breast and set us down on our own tender feet.

Many souls lose faith at this point. They conclude that they must not be suited to the spiritual life and they give up. They have mistaken a state of purity for an impoverished one. Yet there is no question of returning their energies to the world, which has lost any allure. And so they engage halfheartedly in spiritual practice, resigned to aridity, coming to some small peace with emptiness.

Every once in a while, the tree of prayer, which had been long dormant, bursts into blossom and the seeker feels momentarily connected to the divine sweetness he has always craved. Maybe someone he loves is dying, and he slips into the hospital chapel to call out for God. Or a sunset or a kiss or a sleeping infant may rend a hole in the curtain of illusion, and he glimpses the perfect beauty of the Grand Design behind it all. The winds of sensory purgation soon blow back through, however, and the garden is again laid bare. The soul sits helpless amid the spiritual wreckage and simply breathes in the darkness. There is nothing else to do. The seeker in this state may be shy about disclosing his inner struggle to anyone for fear it will reveal nothing but his own deadly doubts and spiritual failures.

The soul who perseveres without the motivation of sensory satisfaction moves beyond what John refers to as the state of the beginner and into the state of the adept. This is the dreadful night of the spirit, where not only is the soul denuded of divine feelings but any ability to conceptualize the Beloved collapses. The seeker is confronted with the terror of formlessness.

Where the night of sense requires some active participation on the soul's part, in the night of spirit God takes over. In fact, John warns, any effort the seeker might make to further his spiritual progress not only fails to produce results but might actually hinder the work the Beloved is secretly executing deep inside the soul. All the seeker can do is surrender to the darkness and take humble refuge in the ineffable stillness of what Fr. Iain calls the soul's "spiritual meltdown."

The soul in the dark night cannot, by definition, understand what is happening to her. Accustomed to feeling and conceiving of the Beloved her own way, she does not realize that the darkness is a blessing. She perceives God's gentle touch as an unbearable burden. She feels miserable and unworthy, convinced that God has abandoned her, afraid she may herself be turning against him. In her despair, the soul does not recognize that God is teaching her in a secret way now, a way with which the faculties of sense and reason cannot interfere.

At the same time that the soul in the night of spirit becomes paralyzed in spiritual practice, her love-longing for God begins to intensify. In the stillness left behind by its broken-open senses and intellect, a quality of abundance starts to grow inside the emptied soul. It turns out that the Beloved is longing for union with the lover as fervently as she has been yearning for him. In the night of spirit, he is calling it home to him and, like the song of Krishna's flute luring the gopi to the divine embrace, God will whisper to the soul in the depth of darkness and guide it through the wilderness of the Unknown until it is annihilated in the flames of perfect love.

Copyright © February 2002, Riverhead Books, a division of Penguin Putnam, Inc. Used by permission.

About the Author

Saint John of the Cross (Juan de la Cruz) was a major figure in the Catholic Reformation, a Spanish mystic and Carmelite friar born at Fontiveros, a small village near Ávila.

Mirabai Starr is a professor of philosophy, religious studies, and Spanish at the University of New Mexico who has studied a wide variety of religious traditions including Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, and Christianity. Mirabai is an accomplished translator and fiction writer who brings the sensibilities of both seeker and scholar to her translations. Her most recent work is the translation of St. John of the Cross's mystical writings, Dark Night of the Soul.