Forgotten Among the Lilies

WHAT IF WE GOT IT WRONG and the “dark night of the soul” is actually about the end of suffering? It’s become commonplace to call a painful time in life a dark night of the soul. But what if the metaphor points to the moment of breakthrough rather than to the suffering?

This metaphor comes to us from the 16th century Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross. What seems to be passed over by many is the fact that John first expressed his mystical experience in poetry. Then he attempted to make sense of his ineffable experience by interpreting it within the conceptual frame of his Catholic Christianity.

When I read the poetry behind the theology, however, I sense there’s something more transgressive in play here. Although my Spanish is both rusty and quite limited, my sense of something more is even stronger, when I read (or try to read) John’s poem in the original. Here are a few stanza’s of Noche Oscura (The Dark Night) as translated by Kieran Kavanaugh, O.C.D., and Otilio Rodriguez, O.C.D., published in The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross.

One dark night,
Fired with love’s urgent longings
—Ah, the sheer grace!—
I went out unseen,
My house being now all stilled;

In darkness, and secure,
By the secret ladder, disguised,
—Ah, the sheer grace!—
In darkness and concealment,
My house being now all stilled;

On that glad night,
In secret, for no one saw me,
Nor did I look at anything,
With no other light or guide
Than the one that burned in my heart;

For those whose Spanish is much better than mine (but for the rest of us too) here are those same stanzas in Spanish. Even if your command of Spanish is nonexistent, you’ll be able to see a few things of note in these lines.

En una noche oscura
Con ansias en amores inflamada
—¡Oh dichosa ventura!—
Sali sin ser notada,
Estando ya mi casa sosegada.

A oscuras, y segura
Por la secreta escala disfrazada
—¡Oh dichosa ventura!—
A oscuras y en celada,
Estando ya mi casa sosegada.

En la noche dichosa
En secreto, que nadie me veía,
Ni yo miraba cosa
Sin otra luz y guía
Sino la que en el corazón ardía

Look at the first line of the third stanza and the third line in both the first and second stanza. In the Spanish, each line has the word, dichosa. In the translation, we find the phrases “sheer grace” and “glad night” — which could be translated, simplistically and awkwardly, as “happy luck” and “happy night.”

Do you see? The dark night St. John experienced was wonderful, joyful, happy, even blissful. He describes it as “sheer grace” and a “glad night” and later as a “night more lovely than the dawn.” Clearly, this is not a night of pain and suffering. St. John’s poem tells us a dark night of the soul is a blessing, not a curse.

If a dark night of the soul is not a time of suffering, then what might it be? I think the last line of the first stanza, repeated in the second stanza, gives us a clue. St. John says his “house” is “all still.” If we take his “house” to be an image of his soul, his psyche, its stillness suggests a state of emptiness. Darkness — no sights, no sounds, no sensations, no thoughts — in secret, concealed, neither seen nor seeing a thing (“Nor did I look at anything”). Sunyata, the Buddhist metaphor of a full emptiness or empty fullness, seems to point toward a similar experience.

When you read St. John’s extensive (but not exhaustive) commentary on his poem, you see how much he suffered on a spiritual path that goes beyond all his beloved ideas, devotional images, theological concepts, and even his cherished sense of self. The suffering, however, was not his dark night. The dark night was his breakthrough into ecstatic union.

What John feels in the darkness is a love burning in his heart. The rest of the poem tell us how he unites with his beloved in this darkness and forgets himself. “All things ceased,” John says in the final stanza, “I went out from myself, / Leaving my cares / Forgotten among the lilies.”