What do people experience in dark nights? Typically, one has been feeling some degree of consolation and faithfully pursuing Christformation for several years (usually at least five) before their Spiritual life goes dry and they enter a dark night. Some will feel more pain than others because there is a continuum of severity of dark nights. In this dark night, they cannot sense the presence of God or even have confident faith that he is present with them. Their past pleasurable experiences with God are gone and they cannot get them back.
Of course, this is very puzzling. They will ask themselves: What went wrong? Have I been too lax in my pursuit of God? What is wrong with me? What doctrinal truth am I not believing? They will try to recapture past experiences with God and they may even be able to recapture a portion of them but then the feelings dissolve. Then they may become more diligent about their disciplines, but this doesn’t help. They might do some more intense searching by reading books or meticulously scouring their past but they usually do not find satisfying answers, and any discoveries they make don’t bring back God’s felt presence. They find little or no enjoyment in prayer, Scripture or fellowship. Christian activities that used to bring enjoyment now feel hollow. They may even be tempted to go back to their former favorite sins. Eventually, they become very discouraged.
Since God is mostly silent they will feel like they are traveling through life without direction, having to guess as to which way to go. This causes a pervasive feeling of insecurity. They may believe that God is good, but they are not so certain that he is good to them. They lack confidence that God is with them.
One of the most painful realizations is that they don’t feel as Christlike as they used to. However, since they may become more scrupulous about their life, they will often be more committed to holiness during a dark night. This may make them appear to be more Christlike to others, but inside they experience themselves as less patient, less kind, less encouraging, less humble, less holy, less gentle, and less trusting of God. This is because God has taken away the extra grace that supported them at an artificially high level of Christformation. Now, without that extra grace they are seeing their true measure of Christformation, which is not as impressive as they had hoped. This is tortuous because their life has been dedicated to Christformation. Now it feels like much has been lost and so they can become very discouraged.
They may get confused about the nature of their faith. They may confuse the lack of the felt presence of God with a lack of faith, which is a common error that must be consciously rejected. Sometimes people think they don’t have any faith when actually they just don’t have faith that God is good to them.
This whole process is emotionally very distressing. They will probably feel abandoned by God, so loneliness will weigh heavy on them. A degree of sadness or depression will set in because they miss God. (If one has been habitually depressed prior to this dark time then they are probably not in a dark night, but rather need to deal directly with depression which has other causes not involving a dark night.) In other words, they will experience a big change in their mood. They will feel like they are living in a desert or in a dark room. They might try to generate their old positive spiritual feelings on their own, which will have some effect; however, it doesn’t feel the same and it is not authentic. It is normal to be angry with God and then be frustrated with themselves because they are angry with God.
If some of these descriptions fit your life, then do not be discouraged. This is a great opportunity because God wants to do a deep work in you. He especially wants to develop deep faith in you. Read our posts on why we have dark nights, dark faith and purification in dark nights.
