Why we must go through a Dark Night of the Soul on our spiritual journey

Chris Antenucci
Aug 22, 2017 · 4 min read

Recently, I read a profound article about the spiritual phenomenon known as the Dark Night of the Soul. It explained why it’s not just important for us to grow spiritually- it’s absolutely necessary. Up til now, I’ve always thought that the primary purpose of the Dark Night is for God to purify us of our sins and weaknesses, and thus help us grow closer to Him. But this article showed me that God doesn’t use it just to get rid of the bad things in our minds and souls- He also uses it to replace those sins and bad tendencies with virtues and good habits. God feeds us with spiritual food during this time, but He also pushes us away from Him, so that we’re forced to make a life for ourselves, and learn spiritual lessons on our own. A parent can take a child by the hand and try to teach them everything by walking them through everything together, but that doesn’t work. The child wants to learn on his or her own, and in fact, that’s how he or she learns best, because when we have to learn on our own, we’re more motivated, and we make the lessons ours. In our spiritual journeys, we’re like children compared to God, who is our father. He could just give us all the knowledge we need to be holy, but then we wouldn’t have done the work necessary to gain it on our own (albeit still with His help, just indirectly rather than directly). So He hides from us for a while, so that we can learn things by making mistakes, and also by discovering how much we need Him, and how we can’t do anything on our own.

This doesn’t mean He’s not there. He’s still with us during this part of our spiritual journey every step of the way, it’s just that we can’t feel His presence with our human senses. But He’s still giving us graces, even more so now, because we need them now more than ever. He’s forcing us to develop good habits and mindsets, and to develop virtues (by repeatedly accepting His grace and applying it to situations in our everyday lives). God knows that because we have free will, we have to learn these lessons on our own. Therefore He must separate Himself from us, at least from our senses. He can’t force us to learn them, because then we wouldn’t freely learn them, and they wouldn’t be our lessons. This would make any good we do irrelevant, since we didn’t freely choose it.

Instead, he’s like a father who’s teaching his son how to swim. He could swim with him, and hold his arms, forcing the boy to swim a certain way. But then would the boy be swimming freely? No. So the father pushes the boy into the deep end of the pool, where he’s alone and forced to swim on his own. If the boy has a good relationship with his father, he trusts him, so he knows his father will rescue him if he fails and starts to drown. But he also knows he has to try to swim, because he will start to drown if he doesn’t, and it’s that fear of death and the unknown that drives him to try various ways of swimming to survive. So it is with us and God on our spiritual journey. God pushes us into the deep end of the pool, and we can’t see Him anymore. We’re faced with the choice of either sinking or swimming, and we have no choice but to figure out how to swim, because doing nothing isn’t an option. God knows exactly what we’ll do before He pushes us into the pool, so He knows that nothing bad will happen to us, either because we’ll figure out how to swim, or because He’ll keep jumping into the pool and rescuing us until we learn how to swim on our own. He makes us go through this out of love for us, because He sees the end result, which is us not only becoming a greater swimmer (becoming wiser and holier), but also trusting Him more and becoming closer to Him. We only see the darkness, and are easily overwhelmed by our fears and worries of the moment, but He sees the future.

So the Dark Night isn’t a punishment from God, it’s a blessing in disguise. It’s Him giving us the gift of freedom, and then helping us use it to become the people He created us to be, so that we’ll end up in Heaven with Him for all eternity. When we’re there, we’ll look back on those dark nights and see just how short they were compared to eternity, and marvel at how it all fit together into God’s plan for our salvation.

Through the Dark Night of the Soul, we become the best version of ourselves, the version we couldn’t be if we never left the comfortable and safe womb of our mother. God could’ve allowed us to stay there (Him being the mother in this analogy), but He loves us too much to allow us to remain in ignorance, and in a state of arrested development. He wants us to have life, and have it abundantly, and that’s only possible by walking through darkness before we’re led to the light of His presence in eternity.

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