Spiritual Crisis or Mental Illness Notes on the “Dark Night”

Abstract

The phenomenon of crisis on the spiritual path is characterized in the spiritual tradition of Christianity by different terms. It is clear that the crisis was understood as part of spiritual development and not as an extraordinary phenomenon or an accident. This article deals with the Dark Night, a term that was mainly coined by John of the Cross. It is not uncommon today, due to a lack of knowledge, to confuse spiritual crises with states of depressed mood or depression. We need to distinguish between and understand the various spiritual and/or psychological phenomena in order to effectively support people. In addition to this differentiation, the article attempts a theological appreciation and classification of spiritual crises.

1. Introduction

The “spiritual crisis” as a phenomenon of the spiritual path would not necessarily be classically described as an “extraordinary experience”, and yet this experience often means an “exceptional situation” for spiritual people, i.e., a difficult, sometimes disturbing and unsettling experience. The spiritual life previously experienced as positive dries up, experiences fail to materialize, what was previously no trouble becomes exhausting, the joy of the spiritual path evaporates, regular practice becomes difficult.

The spiritual tradition of Christianity is familiar with this phenomenon and describes it in various contexts as acedia (weariness), dryness, boredom, Dark Night, temptation, etc. What all these descriptions have in common is that these crisis experiences are not understood as an “accident” of the spiritual path or even as questioning it, but on the contrary, as a challenge to change and grow. Therefore, these spiritual crises are not seen as “extraordinary experiences” but as a necessary part of a person’s spiritual and human development. The dangers of failure are certainly recognized, but the positive assessment of these phenomena clearly outweighs the negative, because in dealing with them, in enduring them and suffering through them, a person’s independence, maturity, ability to relate, and freedom, develop positively.

Karl Rahner, therefore, calls for the sermon to take seriously the constant contestedness of personal faith and to take into account the mystical moment of the individual history of faith: “… would not many be helped in the experience of their individual history of faith and their ability to persevere be better secured if the existential side of faith and its history were predicted from the outset to the listeners of the sermon on faith: Faith as enduring the silence of God; the ‘night’ of faith; the apparent ‘shrinking’ of faith as a condensation; faith (despite its materially differentiated content) as silence about God; …; the permanent resurrection of faith from the grave of unbelief, etc. Where all this (and much more) is not predicted kerygmatically, the one who wants to believe experiences much in his history of faith as an impulse, temptation, even as the apparent duty not to believe, which are nevertheless only legitimate moments and phases of this history …” (Rahner 1968, p. 522).

Nevertheless, the experiences outlined above also require discernment, as it could also be a mental disorder or illness that is spiritually masked in an attempt to disguise it. This is also due to the fact, that a prejudice or expectation is almost ineradicable, namely that those who believe, really believe, are not mentally ill.

In the spiritual tradition of Christianity, for example, in addition to describing and classifying phenomena, there are also criteria for differentiating and distinguishing them from mental disorders, often referred to as melancholia.

In order not to go beyond the scope of this article, I must limit myself here to the phenomenon of the “dark night” as a spiritual crisis.

2. Dark Night

People on the path of faith, as tradition and contemporary experience testify, go through phases of darkness in which they have no idea of God or his ways—phases of drought. God seems to have retreated into the darkness.

While they may remain fully committed to seeking God and serving others, they eventually realize that their commitment is rooted in their belief in God rather than in knowing God or enjoying God.

Thérèse of Lisieux writes in her self-biography, “My dear Mother, I may perhaps appear to you to be exaggerating my trial. In fact, if you are judging according to the sentiments I express in my little poems composed this year, I must appear to you as a soul filled with consolations and one for whom the veil of faith is almost torn aside; and yet it is no longer a veil for me, it is a wall which reaches right up to the heavens and covers the starry firmament. When I sing of the happiness of heaven and of the eternal possession of God, I feel no joy in this, for I sing simply what I WANT TO BELIEVE. It is true that at times a very small ray of the sun comes to illumine my darkness, and then the trial ceases for an instant, but afterward the memory of this ray, instead of causing me joy, makes my darkness even more dense” (Thérèse of Lisieux 1986, [7v°]).

For such people, and also for Thérèse of Lisieux or Mother Teresa of Calcutta, it seems that God resides “in thick darkness”. (Cf. 2 Chronicles 6:1). They continue their journey in which they do not know God, in which they know what God is not rather than what He is.

This has something to do with an image used by St. John of the Cross: “Since the conduct of these beginners in the way of God is lowly and not too distant from love of pleasure and of self, as was explained, God desires to withdraw them from this base manner of loving and lead them on to a higher degree of divine love. … God now leaves them in such darkness that they do not know which way to turn in their discursive imaginings; they cannot advance a step in meditation, as they used to, now that the interior sensory faculties are engulfed in this night. He leaves them in such dryness that they not only fail to receive satisfaction and pleasure from their spiritual exercises and works, as they formerly did, but also find these exercises distasteful and bitter. As I said, when God sees that they have grown a little. He weans them from the sweet breast so that they might be strengthened, lays aside their swaddling bandstand puts them down from His arms that they may grow accustomed to walking by themselves. This change is a surprise to them because everything seems to be functioning in reverse” (John of the Cross 1979, p. 312).

The baby, who initially lay blissfully and full at God’s mother’s breast is later set on its own feet by God. He should stand on his feet so that he can also grow up towards God.

Seen from God’s perspective, it is a process of weaning, which is natural and necessary for human development; from the infant’s point of view, however, this weaning is an unsettling and frightening process, because everything that previously provided support and security breaks away, for him “everything has turned upside down”.

St. John of the Cross is deeply convinced and is very biblical in this1 that God does not want dependent slaves, no spiritual swaddled children, but people who form a counterpart to Him as a person. This is why growing up is one of the fundamental challenges of spiritual life and involves experiences of letting go and crisis.

The aim is to overcome childish images of God in order to save God’s transcendence and his incomprehensibility, or as my friend and colleague Ralf Stolina puts it, the supra-comprehensibility of God (Stolina 2012, p. 30). Sometimes, spiritual people say that God’s ways are not our ways. But when this then affects one’s own experience, it is often also difficult to cope with and endure that God is far beyond what one has ever learned about God and beyond what has been experienced in previous emotional experiences of liturgy or private prayer.

Thoughts, ideas, and feelings of God are not God, although they are at times profound and intense, they remain only thoughts, feelings, and ideas.

Karl Rahner formulates this basic experience once again with regard to preaching: “Faith in itself has a permanent moment of contention and this up to the permanent danger of atheism. … If the preaching of the church today is to awaken and promote faith, it must be careful not to present the gospel and faith … in a false optimism too simply as a power that victoriously shapes and enlightens life. … The preacher must not speak as if his message could transform the world and the existence of the individual into vain light and harmony, if only one accepts it with faith. … Faith in God only becomes a world-changing reality if he is believed in as he really is …” (Rahner 1968, p. 521).

The first step in experiencing the crisis is to recognize the fact of being in a crisis, in a Dark Night, and to no longer push it aside.

St. John of the Cross sees two temptations in this situation. One is to give up hope of ever finding the way again and to overturn the whole project. Or to opt for the more common option of redoubling efforts to revive the old system, which only leads deeper into the crisis because it remains unsuccessful (cf. John of the Cross 1979, pp. 316–17).

St. John of the Cross described the positive effects of the Dark Night:

“Another reason the soul not only advances securely when it walks in darkness but even gains and profits is that when in a new way it receives some betterment, it usually does so in a manner it least understands, and thus ordinarily thinks it is getting lost. Since it has never possessed this new experience which makes it go out, blinds it, and leads it astray with respect to its first method of procedure, it thinks it is getting lost rather than marching on successfully and profitably; indeed, it is getting lost to what it knew and tasted, and going by a way in which it neither tastes nor knows.

To reach a new and unknown land and travel unknown roads, a man cannot be guided by his own knowledge, rather he has doubts about his own knowledge and seeks the guidance of others. Obviously, he cannot reach new territory nor attain this added knowledge if he does not take these new and unknown roads and abandon those familiar ones. Similarly, when a person is learning new details about his art or trade, he must work in darkness and not with what he already knows. If he refuses to lay aside his former knowledge, he will never make any further progress.

The soul, too, when it advances, walks in darkness and unknowing.

Since God, as we said, is the master and guide of the soul, this man, it can truly rejoice, now that it has come to understand as it has here, and say: in darkness, and secure” (John of the Cross 1979, pp. 365–66).

The Dark Night—the experience of the spiritual crisis—is therefore not the operational accident of spiritual life, but the challenge to grow, to transform, to grow up. It is important to break new ground, to be open to new experiences and not to remain attached to the old and past experiences; God does not leave our side: “In the dark and secure!”

St. John of the Cross describes a positive effect of the Dark Night in a way that is certainly provocative today: “There is another reason why the soul walks securely in these darknesses: it advances by suffering. Suffering is a surer and even more advantageous road than that of joy and action. First, in suffering God gives strength to the soul, whereas in its deeds and its joys it exercises its own weakness and imperfections. Second, in suffering, virtues are practiced and acquired and the soul is purified, made wiser and more cautious” (John of the Cross 1979, p. 366).

Boris Cyrulnik comes to a similar conclusion in his study, based on psychology and brain research: “If God is there every day in peaceful times and in a family that is intact to the point of weariness, you can no longer feel the strong bond with him. It is only when there is a loss, a rift in the family or cultural atrophy that the need to believe in him and feel his reassuring love is reawakened” (Cyrulnik 2018, p. 48).

It is precisely the experience of powerlessness and helplessness that always affects a person’s vital energy, and being powerless in the face of situations and people raises fundamental questions and at the same time points people back to God.

Redemption in Christianity does not bypass helplessness, powerlessness, and death, but goes through them. “If God can be found in the one who cries out in abandonment: “God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”, then it is only logical that I encounter this God precisely where he seems to be absent” (Hemmerle 1995, p. 239).

The solution in situations of powerlessness does not lie in our own actions or in psychological tricks, but in handing ourselves and the situation of powerlessness over to God so that he can carry out his work of redemption.

“His own loneliness and abandonment itself becomes the place where he encounters the love of God. There, where man recognizes himself in all his hopelessness in such a way that he recognizes the God who has come very close to him and has found the way to him, there he learns to believe anew in love” (Hemmerle 1995, p. 229).

Suffering from the crisis means finding a truthful way of dealing with it, and this suffering also opens up the way to trusting God more than one’s own powers, to practicing virtues (i.e., attitudes) and not seeking solutions to problems, in order to become more enlightened, wiser and more prudent, in the words of John of the Cross.

In the end, it remains to be said that the Dark Night is an experience of Christians on the spiritual path. The decisive question in the crisis is whether people have the courage to suffer, to purify themselves and to faint, and whether they can track down their longing for God again beyond the images and expectations they have formed and trust it more, because they trust God more, and continue to walk safely in the dark until God gives them light again.

3. Dark Night and Depression or Depressive Mood

Basically, it should be noted that depression is an illness that may be preceded by a depressive mood (for the sake of simplicity, the term depression is used in both cases below). The Dark Night is sometimes a long-lasting crisis phenomenon on the path of spiritual transformation.

3.1. Similarities

At the level of experience, the Dark Night and depression have phenomenological similarities that can easily lead to confusion.

Both include sadness, desolation, dejection, and confusion. The feeling of inner emptiness and lack of interest are formative for both; what used to be easy, and possibly enjoyable, becomes difficult and stressful. Affected people no longer feel capable of anything and feel meaningless. They often blame themselves for this. Both phenomena are often triggered by an experience of loss.

Since many theologians working in pastoral care or spiritual counseling are not familiar with the phenomenon of the Dark Night—like most of the spiritual traditions of Christianity, it is not part of their training—they often suspect or diagnose that it must be depression or a preliminary form of depression and refer them for therapeutic counseling. As therapists are not usually aware of these spiritual phenomena, people with a Dark Night often feel misunderstood, as they often realize after a while of unsuccessful therapeutic treatment that it is not depression. Even psychotropic drugs do not have the desired effect on a Dark Night. It is therefore important to draw attention to similarities, possibilities of confusion and, above all, differences, which, with careful observation, are a very effective means of differentiation.

3.2. Differences

Even at the level of similarities, there are certain differences upon closer inspection. The feeling of guilt can be perceived both in the experience of the Dark Night and in depression. Depressed people tend to act out guilt masochistically, suicidally or in other self-destructive ways.

In the Dark Night, the feeling of guilt relates to the person before God. The believer becomes more aware of his inability to do good and blames himself or his lack of zeal in spiritual exercise for his situation. This often leads to an intensification of the spiritual life, but this only leads the person deeper into the crisis because it does not help.

The experience of loss is also experienced differently in each case: a depressed person has usually lost someone who was important to them and who gave them support, or supportive relationships, marriages or friendship break downs, or the job that provided security is lost. A person in the Dark Night experiences how everything that previously gave them comfort in faith breaks away, disappears. Access to God, to meaningful experiences or comfort in faith seems completely blocked.

A depressive disorder can affect anyone, but whether and, if so, which factors in a person’s history play a role is still the subject of many studies. In any case, such an illness is found in a relatively high percentage of people, sometimes only occurring briefly, in other cases persistently.

In order to enter a spiritual Dark Night, a person must have been on the spiritual path for some time and be in the process of spiritual growth. At different points, when it comes to change and progress, he is led into the experience of the Dark Night.

A mature approach to the Dark Night basically requires psychological stability and ego strength. Susanne Jacobowitz quotes a somewhat older study by Mallory (1977), which is certainly not representative in a scientific sense, according to which, in a study of 55 Dutch and Flemish Carmelite monks, those who had progressed on the spiritual path and had suffered through the “night of the spirit” showed normal ego strength and high psychological stability. In general, it can be said that advanced spiritual people are psychologically more stable than 80 to 90% of the Dutch population. Psychologically unstable religious people tend to be unable to withstand the tensions of spiritual growth (Jacobowitz 2017, p. 199).

Depression is accompanied by a persistent self-deprecation and therefore affects not only everyday activities but also the spiritual life. However, it is also often the case, at least in the case of non-serious depressive illnesses, that this illness provides a form of help in prayer and a regular spiritual life, as this offers a certain amount of support.

The experience of a Dark Night may also initially be associated with self-questioning and insecurities, but this spiritual sadness usually has little noticeable effect on everyday interpersonal relationships. G. May points out, for example, that the sense of humor as well as empathy and compassion remain (May 1992, p. 109). In the Dark Night, the spiritual life becomes a problem area, because any consolation, any joy in it is absent; here, regular everyday life and work often have a stabilizing effect. A prominent example of this observation is Mother Teresa of Calcutta, because it was only after her death that it became known through the publication of her letters that she lived in dryness and darkness for long stretches of her spiritual life, which did not detract from her energy and outward impact (Mother Teresa 2007).

In a deeply depressed person, there is a risk of suicide in order to end the condition. If thoughts of death arise in the Dark Night, they are usually associated with the fact that separation from God is perceived as painful and a meeting with Him is longed for, but this does not lead to suicide.

An important, if only indirect, criterion is revealed in the personal perception of the companion. G. May points out that the presence of a person who is in the Dark Night generally does not make them frustrated or morose, whereas this is usually the case for a depressed person (May 1992, p. 110). The depressive state spreads to the companion in terms of mood.

3.3. Gottesfinsternis (Divine Darkness)

In the present, which in our latitudes is no longer characterized by Christian faith, there may not be a Dark Night of faith, but a divine darkness: “A darkening of God, in which God’s face and reality sink into invisibility. … For John Tauler, John of the Cross and Luther, the unquestioned basis of human existence in relation to God, which man cannot get rid of, even if he wants to and tries to escape from it, is largely absent today. Thus, the plight of our time is more the lack of relationship, the loss of God” (Stolina 2010, p. 42). The experiences of Thérèse of Lisieux certainly hint at this development, as she describes atheistic thoughts in the context of her experience of the Dark Night: “When I want to rest my heart fatigued by the darkness that surrounds it by the memory of the luminous country after which I aspire, my torment redoubles; it seems to me that the darkness, borrowing the voice of sinners, says mockingly to me: ‘You are dreaming about the light, about a fatherland embalmed in the sweetest perfumes; you are dreaming about the eternal possession of the Creator of all these marvels; you believe that one day you will walk out of this fog that surrounds you! Advance, advance; rejoice in death which will give you not what you hope for but a night still more profound, the night of nothingness.’” (Thérèse of Lisieux 1986, [6v°]).

Thérèse remains a believer in the darkness of God but can empathize with those who have lost their faith.

3.4. Dark Night and Depression at the Same Time

However, it is not always possible to clearly and definitively decide what the specific case is. It is also conceivable, as St. John of the Cross points out, that both a depressive illness and a Dark Night are present: “Yet, because the want of satisfaction in earthly or heavenly things could be the product of some indisposition or melancholic humor, which frequently prevents one from being satisfied with anything,… Even though the dryness may be furthered by melancholia or some other humor—as it often is—it does not thereby fail to produce its purgative effect in the appetite, for the soul will be deprived of every satisfaction and concerned only about God. If this humor is the entire cause, everything ends in disgust and does harm to one’s nature, and there are none of these desires to serve God which accompany the purgative dryness. Even though, in this purgative dryness, the sensory part of the soul is very cast down, slack, and feeble in its actions, because of the little satisfaction it finds, the spirit is ready and strong” (John of the Cross 1979, pp. 313–14).

For St. John of the Cross, the focus on God and the longing to serve him is the decisive criterion for a Dark Night, even if it is accompanied by melancholy, i.e., depressive mood.

In my opinion, a prominent example of how a Dark Night and depression can be mixed is Henri Nouwen, who looks back on a dark time in his life in his work, “The Inner Voice of Love” (Nouwen 1999). He had the advantage of having a spiritual guide and a therapist at his side during this phase. If in doubt, he would therefore be advised to seek additional therapeutic advice despite spiritual guidance. In addition, a person suffering from depression can of course also receive spiritual support alongside therapeutic treatment and this is not mutually exclusive but, as the example of Nouwen shows, complements each other well (Plattig 2010).

3.5. Conclusions

These experiences make it clear that care and restraint are required when identifying a Dark Night. Private experiences of loss, shocking events such as natural disasters or terrorist attacks can of course also trigger doubts of faith and cause sadness, anger and rebellion against God in people, but these are usually developments in the context of a grieving process and not already Dark Night or depression.

Particular caution and skepticism is required with people who come to a meeting with a self-diagnosis, be it that they suspect depression or a Dark Night. The motivation behind this statement could also be that you do not want to miss out on a trend, a (spiritually) modern tendency or illness in order to draw attention to yourself. At the same time, this is often an indicator that the person making the statement is not experiencing or suffering the deep depressive meaninglessness or the pain of apparent abandonment by God and the associated questions.

If spiritual people, e.g., religious or priests, come to a pastoral counselor with the self-diagnosis “dark night”; this could also be an attempt to disguise a depressive state and hide it spiritually. Unfortunately, the view still persists that those who believe correctly will not become depressed, people prefer to choose the Dark Night as an explanation.

Of course, this must still be followed up empathetically and attentively and possibly made clear that depression is an illness and therefore not causally linked to a person’s faith.

I can fully endorse Susanne Jacobowitz’s conclusion, which she formulates for dealing with spiritual night experiences from a psychotherapeutic perspective: “In psychotherapeutic support of the mental maturation process, it is important on the one hand to resist the temptation to prematurely psychologize or even pathologize spiritual longing or spiritual experiences. On the other hand, neurotic, infantile and pathological patterns of behaviour relating to spirituality must be recognized, taken seriously and treated” (Jacobowitz 2017, p. 202). In the case of spiritual accompaniment, there is a risk of spiritualizing or even, in extreme cases, abusing neurotic, infantile and pathological patterns of behavior in order to build up and manifest spiritual dependencies (Wagner 2019).

4. Theological Challenges

Karl Rahner already warned at the time after the Second Vatican Council against a too naïve and simple proclamation of faith: “If the preaching of the Church today is to be faith awakening and encouraging, it must be careful not to present the Gospel and faith indiscreetly and in a false optimism too simply as a power that victoriously shapes and enlightens life. (…) Basically, the ‘solution’ to all questions of life through Christianity is to keep them resolutely open without the short-circuit of radical pessimism and skepticism and without a mendacious optimism that thinks it already ‘has’ the solution, is ‘hope against all hope’, the recovery of all incomprehensibilities not in a transparent solution, but in the incomprehensible mystery of God and his freedom. This does not ‘solve’ anything, but rather unconditionally accepts the ‘insolvability’ of the mystery that is God. And that is precisely what it means to believe and hope and love” (Rahner 1968, 524f.).

This danger still exists today, that in an unreflected Jesuanism the figure of Jesus Christ is reduced to his humanity and the dimension of Christ is increasingly omitted in the proclamation. God is reduced to the “dear God”, his transcendence and incomprehensibility or rather “Überbegreiflichkeit” super-comprehensibility (Stolina 2012, p. 30) is rarely addressed.

In his groundbreaking 1966 article, Rahner emphasizes “The mystical approach of which we are speaking must impart the correct ‘image of God’, based upon the accepted experience of man’s basic orientation to God, the experience that the basis of man’s existence is the abyss: that God is essentially the inconceivable; that his inconceivability grows, and yet does not derogate from the fact that the more rightly God is understood the more nearly does his self-bestowing love touch us; the experience that in mapping the course of one’s life one can never confine God to specific points in it without being brought up against the fact that when one does so the sum fails to come out right; the experience that he only becomes our ‘happiness’ when we pray to him and love him unconditionally; but also the fact that he cannot be defined as a dialectical negation of the affirmative ‘thrown up’ by our experiences for instance that he is not simply the one who is remote as opposed to one who is near, not to be thought of as the diametrical antithesis to the world, but rather that he transcends such oppositions” (Rahner 1971, p. 15).

Karl Rahner draws attention to the situation of increasing secularization, which goes hand in hand with an individualization of the life of faith. The previously supporting pillars of society, the milieu, are gradually falling away, the personal decision of believers is increasingly in demand despite all their integration into church structures, because belonging to a believing community is no longer a matter of course and is no longer supported by social standards or by educational work that is clearly Christian in character. It is of “greater importance today than ever before” (Rahner 1984b, p. 27) that an immediacy between God and man is experienced, a “last radical, naked immediacy to God that once again transcends all mediations” (Rahner 1984b, p. 33). For in a secularized and pluralistic society, in which all social supports of religiosity are increasingly disappearing, Christian piety can only be kept alive and strong not by “help from outside, not even by help of an ecclesiastical kind, not even by help—taken directly and for itself—of a sacramental kind, but only by a final direct encounter of man with God” (Rahner 1984b, p. 27). In this situation, Rahner emphasizes, piety will have to be modest and meager: “If a man, repeatedly empties himself of all else so as to open himself to the depths of his being to the incomprehensibility of God, then, even though he seems again and again to become blocked up with direct experiences of the world in its palpable reality, the tasks with which it presents him and the needs which it demands that he supplies by his own efforts, as well as the beauty and glory of the world still unfolding before him—if he still manages to live with God and commune with him in spite of this and without the support of ‘public opinion’ and custom, then he is already a devout Christian” (Rahner 1971, p. 13).

Karl Rahner’s concern is to establish experiences of emptiness, loneliness, darkness, despair, and falling as important elements of the experience of faith. One must “start from the human being as he is today, the resigned, depressed, skeptical person who is tired, for whom all pathos seems like empty slogans. In this respect, perhaps a radicalization of today’s human mood to the very last would be the way to experience or achieve such a breakthrough. When mysticism speaks of the night of the senses and the spirit, this is not simply to be identified with any physiologically or sociologically induced depression from which modern man suffers. But these things have something to do with each other. A final coming to terms with these difficulties of man today is basically only possible in the final, loving and hopeful surrender of man into the incomprehensible mystery that we call God” (Rahner 1984b, p. 31).

What is important to Rahner in everything is the new openness and orientation of the human being towards the greater and different God. For this reason, Rahner pleads for a differentiated approach to the “label” of the experience of God or spirit and critically remarks: “I can no longer, in the sense of following Christ, regard every somewhat friendly mood as a pneumatic experience” (Rahner 1984a, p. 24).

Dealing with experiences of crisis and the darkening of God is also, and often decisively, related to the images of God held by pastoral workers, because anyone who does not perceive or has not experienced the mystery, supra-comprehensibility and also the darkness of God can hardly “teach to be close to the incomprehensible God”, to endure him. Anyone who engages with God, who recognizes and confesses him as the one who is always on the way in search of man and the world, will have to experience that “not only light, but also darkness, not only good, but also evil, not only unity, but also diversity, not only clarity, but also confusion—everything is shaped by him, whose presence wants to be perceived and practiced throughout life and death” (Fuchs 1988, p. 341). Contrary to any addiction to experience, it should be noted that experience and non-experience belong equally to the encounter with God and that the mystery of God eludes any kind of doer mentality. Mystical experience, however urgently necessary it may be, is and remains a gift. “The one who is called God in it is neither to be made nor to be had—and ‘experience of God’ is therefore a highly ambivalent word in Christian terms” (Fuchs 1988, p. 348).

The dialog with the tradition, with experienced people of the spiritual heritage is important and could be very helpful: “It is more urgent than ever to have a theology and, even beyond this, an initiation into man’s personal experience of God. And the classical masters … are thoroughly good and irreplaceable teachers when it is a question of developing such a theology and mystagogy that makes intelligible the personal experience of God” (Rahner 1993, p. 362).

In contrast to a “kind of experience, a new kind of perception: a holistic one, which does not reflect critically, but rather fits harmoniously into the cycle of all events, which participates in a cosmic dissolution of boundaries and joins in the process of evolutionary events” (Peters 1992, p. 128), as propagated, for example, by a wellness spirituality with a Christian touch, the brokenness of human reality must be adhered to and the silence of God, his darkness, must be perceived. The sober everyday life must not be covered up: “In view of the quiet, indeed, almost mute and yet powerful and constantly elusive closeness of God, his self-communication in the ‘mysticism of everyday life’, mystagogical pastoral ministry lacks the proclaiming word rather than having it loosely on the tip of its tongue. It therefore needs the language of ecclesial tradition and the language of Scripture; but: it will be careful not to use these in a hollow way and without any experience, on the contrary: if it lacks the support of the experience-based understanding of Christian faith tradition, then it admits this and prefers to remain silent, for the sake of God and the otherwise afflicted listeners” (Bäumer 1991, 308f.). In doing so, it is important to address the issue of dealing with the silent God, the experience of the powerless God. For pastoral care, this means: “Always seeking the experience of God and his will, and always experiencing anew that it is wrong, it is per se skeptical of its own goals and plans of action, always ready to adapt them to changing situations. That is why it is never purely deductively dogmatic, but always oriented towards the harsh reality of everyday individual and social life, in which it wants to bring the tradition of faith to life” (Bäumer 1991, p. 307).

When accompanying people in crises of faith and/or in the Dark Night, the companion’s familiarity with such experiences becomes all the more important. Companions “must learn to appreciate that the journey to union with God is ultimately a journey of faith and therefore one that takes place in darkness. They can willingly embrace this darkness by living mindfully in the present moment and placing concern for the past and the future in God’s care. This behavior leads to both self-emptying and growth in faith, hope and love. This is indeed the dark path to union with God” (Culligan 2010, p. 74).

5. Concluding Remarks

The spiritual crisis initially and fundamentally has nothing to do with the secularized environment of faith today but is an important and transformative experience of the spiritual journey and the spiritual process and as such is widely attested to by the tradition of Christian spirituality (Plattig 1994; Fuchs 1989). The concrete form and the questions that arise, the triggers and the circumstances as well as the images may change over time, but the fundamentally positive view of the crisis in the sense of proving and deepening faith and the relationship with God remains, whereby of course, as with every crisis experience, failure cannot be ruled out, but the following applies: “Failure and happiness are lived and proven in abysmal unity, in the Dark Night of the senses and the spirit. The more thus concerned about God, the more people can be selflessly concerned for this world, acting and suffering, standing by God in his need” (Fuchs 1990, p. 442).

The experience of the Dark Night can therefore also mean “participation in God’s compassion and in God’s powerlessness in the world” and has as a consequence a distinctively Christian approach in solidarity with those who suffer and are powerless. The experience of the Dark Night is therefore not simply to be understood as suffering, as enduring or getting through, as experiencing a lack of understanding, as doubt and passive distress, but that the experience of the Dark Night includes acting in solidarity and sharing this experience. This sharing of the experience of the crisis of faith as its self-evident and dynamizing part is what Karl Rahner calls for in mystagogical pastoral care and proclamation, as quoted above.

Finally, the maturity stage of being a Christian is shown in the liberated selflessness of the person who has become self-confident in accepting the poor God himself. “What a person has or gets from God is no longer decisive. Immediate satisfaction and ‘comfort’ are no longer the focus of expectations, consumerist and narcissistic as it were. The fear of God is also gone. It has been replaced by fear for God, concern for his will and his world” (Fuchs 1991, p. 252).