In these cases, I attend closely to the symptoms of the night, but do not discount the seriousness of the depression.Īs a rule of thumb, if these symptoms continue for up to a month, I always recommend professional treatment for the depression. Or a woman in her fifties who feels the deep spiritual pain of not knowing whether God really exists may also discover that she cannot get over the grief–the morbid preoccupation with life having no meaning, psychomotor retardation, and suicidal ideation–she has felt since her husband’s death from brain cancer six months earlier. A middle-aged father might concurrently be dry in his prayer and also struggling with feelings of worthlessness, losing sleep, and too preoccupied to enjoy downtime with his children or sexual relations with his wife due to a sudden and unexpected loss of employment that has placed his family’s financial security in serious jeopardy. They may be experiencing both at the same time. In these cases, I assume that, as John of the Cross observes, God’s self-communication is deepening in these persons, strengthening their spirit, transforming their customary ways of knowing and loving, and preparing them for divine union.īut we cannot always presuppose that persons are either in a dark night or in a serious depression. With persons who symptoms are clearly only those of the dark night of sense or spirit, I assist them in the transition from meditative prayer to contemplative prayer in the case of dryness and by being a faithful and empathetic companion as they journey through the ups and downs of the dark night of the spirit. It seems that the strengthening of spirit that God brings to persons through darkness is also communicated to me. In fact, at these times I feel my own self being energized. Instead, I frequently feel compassion for what persons suffer as they are spiritually purified, together with admiration for their commitment to do all that God asks. I also frequently feel deep pity for the “profound rejection and hatred of the self” that characterize persons who are truly depressed.īy contrast, I seldom feel down when I listen to persons describe the dryness of the dark night of sense of the painful awareness of God and self that accompany the dark nights of sense and spirit. After listening to depressed persons describe their suffering, I myself begin to feel helpless and hopeless, as though the dejected mood of persons with depression is contagious. Depressed persons typically look depressed, sound depressed, and make you depressed. As a disorder of mood or affect, depression communicates across personal relationships. I can usually tell whether persons are depressed or in the dark night by attending closely to my own interior reactions as these persons describe their inner experience. Thoughts of death do indeed occur in the dark night of spirit, such as “death alone will free me from the pain of what I now see in myself” or “I long to die and be finished with life in this world so that I can be with God,” but there is not the obsession with suicide or the intention to destroy oneself that is typical of depression.Īs a rule, the dark nights of sense and spirit do not, in themselves, involve eating and sleeping disturbances, weight fluctuations, and other physical symptoms (such as headaches, digestive disorders, and chronic pain). In the dark night of spirit, there is a painful awareness of one’s own incompleteness and imperfection in relation to God, however, one seldom utters morbid statements of abnormal guilt, self-loathing, worthlessness, and suicidal ideation that accompany serious depressive episodes. Here are some excerpts from his chapter that help to distinguish the dark night of the spirit, which requires prayer, and clinical depression, which demands medical treatment.
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