Most of us know the story of David and Goliath—how the young shepherd boy felled the fearsome giant with one stone from his slingshot. But do you know the rest of the story?
David was immediately a hero throughout Israel—so much that his fame eclipsed that of King Saul, which made Saul very jealous. David was invited to join Saul’s royal court and often played his harp to soothe the King’s dark moods. But it wasn’t long before King Saul tried to murder David, and then David was fleeing for his life through the desert, hounded and chased by Saul’s armies.
Hungry and thirsty hiding out in caves, David must have thought to himself, “Is this how I get repaid for trusting God?” In response, he wrote Psalm 22, which includes these words:
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but find no rest.”
Like David, we also are hounded and pursued by enemies. Most often our enemies are not literally seeking our lives, but to slander our reputations, sabotage us in our jobs, split our families apart. Or our enemies are circumstances collapsing around us—our health deteriorates, our finances go into the tank, our well-ordered life gets up-ended by the demands of a child or an aging parent.
The biblical image for feeling forsaken by God is the desert. We feel dry, barren, parched. Some famous words from Psalm 42 give voice to this feeling:
“As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God.My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God?My tears have been my food day and night, while men say to me all day long, “Where is your God?”
The Dark Night of the Soul
The Middle Ages had a Latin term for feeling abandoned by God: “Deus Absconditus.” God has “absconded” and is absent.
Also in the Middle Ages, St John of the Cross called this experience by a different name that has stuck with us through the centuries, even among non-religious people: the “dark night of the soul.”
I went through such a “dark night” two decades ago when I felt like a complete failure. I found no comfort in my faith. I felt like I was going through the motions of being a Christian but inside was a complete phony. Like the psalmist in the desert, I was in a dry and weary land. While this might sound like emotional depression, they are two quite different experiences, although I’m sure they can and do overlap at times.
St John of the Cross says that many of us experience the dark night of the soul, and, in fact, it is not inherently bad for us. Rather, he says two purifications often occur during the dark night of the soul.
One he calls stripping us of our dependence on exterior results. That was true for me in spades—any kind of exterior results or accomplishments I could claim turned to ashes in my mouth.
The second and even more painful way the dark night of the soul can purify our lives is stripping us of our dependence on interior results. The things we used to always take for granted are suddenly open questions: “Will good really win out over evil?” “Is there any real meaning in the universe?” “Is my faith just a psychological crutch?” “How can I know anything in the Bible is actually true?” “Does God love me?”
Listen to how Richard Foster in his book Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home profoundly describes this purification process.
“Through all of this, paradoxically, God is purifying our faith by threatening to destroy it. We are led to a profound and holy distrust of all superficial drives and human strivings. We know more deeply than ever before our capacity for infinite self-deception. Slowly we are being taken off our vain securities and false allegiances.Our trust in all exterior and interior results is being shattered so that we can learn faith in God alone. Through our barrenness of soul God is producing detachment, humility, patience, perseverance.”
How to Cope When God Feels Absent
Can we still pray when we feel forsaken, beaten down, abandoned by God? Absolutely! You’ll find it from one end of the Bible to the other—it’s called prayer of lament. There’s even a whole book in the OT called “Lamentations.”
Tragically, the whole notion of “lament” has been lost in our consumer-based religion today. Marketing studies reveal that people come to worship to feel better. So churches try to make everything as positive, uplifting and inspirational as possible.
Any reminder of the dark side of life may not send people away feeling good. They may not even want to come back. So, we won’t talk about those things. We’ll make sure we have all the answers, and that every sermon ends on a high note! Who wants to hear “O my God, I cry out, but you do not answer?”
But here’s the thing: reality isn’t always uplifting or happy. To entice people into a Christianity that ignores or denies the “dark nights” of the soul is dishonest.
But more than that, Richard Foster says it misses a potential benefit:
“Most surprising of all, our very dryness produces the habit of prayer in us. All distractions are gone. Even all warm fellowship has disappeared. We have become focused. The soul is parched. And thirsty. And this thirst can lead us to prayer. I say “can” because it can also lead us to despair or simply to abandon the search.”
Look at that last line again. It’s tragic how many people who go through this “dark night” do in fact give up on God. I wonder if they are also the ones who were told being a follower of Jesus means nothing but success and sweetness and light.
Isn’t it better to say that “dark nights” will come? That in these “dark nights,” we can tell God just how we feel—pour it all out as David does?
As he is dying on the cross as an innocent victim, Jesus takes up David’s cry of lament David wrote more than 500 years earlier and makes David’s words his own. “About the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi,lama sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Matthew 27:46
When Jesus prays David’s prayer—“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?—he is showing us that it’s OK to question God. It’s OK to tell God we feel forsaken because God has not come to our rescue or shielded us from heartache.
When we go through the “dark night of the soul” and feel God has absconded, we can do what David and Jesus both do and cry out to God. This is the prayer of lament.
I want to end with some final words from Richard Foster about what to do when God feels absent:
“Faith is a little like putting your car into gear, and right now you cannot exercise faith, you cannot move forward. Do not berate yourself for this. But when you are unable to put your spiritual life into drive, do no put it into reverse; put it into neutral.Trust is how you put your spiritual life into neutral. Trust is confidence in the character of God.Firmly and deliberately you say, “I do not understand what God is doing or even where God is, but I know he is out to do me good.”
None of us want to welcome the dark night of the soul when it comes. But we can recognize that God never promises it will not come.
We can open to how it might purify our faith. We can follow David, the psalmists and Jesus himself in powerfully and vocally lamenting. And, finally, we can put our faith in neutral and trust in the character of God.
Question: Have you had such a dark night of the soul? Please share it in a comment. What was your experience?
I’ve been going through one for about ten years now. I still read my Bible and other inspirational material, pray, attend church and Bible Study, volunteer. Being in a desert describes it for me.
Hi Rich! I really enjoyed reading this thoughtful article and it was helpful to me personally as I was preparing for Graveside and Memorial services following a very traumatic accident. I used Ecclesiastes 7:1-4 for a portion of that service. Verse two says that “It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting…” Identifying with Christ in his suffering is not heard very often from the pulpits, but the Christian community would benefit from recapturing the mellowing and maturing that only comes through this experience. Thanks for your wonderful article Rich.
Hi Rich, l am in St. Louis attending the 123rd GA assembly as a voting commissioner. My committee is peace and immigration. Please pray with me for all the injustices taking place in the world today
Tom link