The effect of the Night of the Soul
The purpose of the night, as I indicated earlier, is to separate us from the remaining vestiges of attachment to self or those things that are not God, even those world-views and assumptions about God, religion, and the world that shaped us from our youth and that have formed the framework for our thinking. God is total mystery, unlike anything we have ever experienced, or ever could experience, that is not God. To leave behind our cherished notions of what and who God is, or even how to love God, is painful, perhaps devastating, but it is necessary to bring us more completely into the all-passionate and all-mysterious life of the one who St. John of the Cross described as todo y nada, all and nothing. Whether we think of God as darkness or as light, the night strips away all our concepts and paradigms.
The Night of the Senses teaches us to separate ourselves from sensate and emotional consolations and rewards as God leads us into the knowledge of God through faith alone. With the Night of the Senses we begin our journey out of what our natural capabilities can give us into the experience God in freedom, peace, and love in a manner that only God can accomplish. The pinnacle of this union with God is spiritual marriage, which very few achieve in this life. Through the Night of the Spirit, one becomes a sacrifice of love to God. Listen to the beautiful prayer of Teresa of Avila:
In order to live in one single act of perfect Love, I offer myself as a victim of holocaust to your merciful love, asking you to consume me incessantly, allowing the waves of infinite tenderness shut up within you to overflow into my soul, and that thus I may become a martyr of your love.
Gone are any images of God, any dependence on consolations, in a sense any framework in which one’s world is fixed. God draws the soul into the infinite darkness of God’s mystery. The soul desires nothing more and can live with nothing less.
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