“God only knows what’s really going on—literally!”

In a spiritual sense, the objects of our attachments and addictions become idols. We give them our time, energy, and attention whether we want to or not, even—and often especially—when we are struggling to rid ourselves of them. We want to be free, compassionate, and happy, but in the face of our attachments we are clinging, grasping, and fearfully

gross satisfactions and dulled by overstimulation. The dark night of the senses, through its dryness and the spirits it brings, serves to cleanse the faculties and to energize and sensitize them. To put it in more modern psychological terms, most of us become desensitized or habituated to the especially delicate experiences of life. Most of us live

Liberation, whether experienced pleasurably or painfully, always involves relinquishment, some kind of loss. It may be a loss of something we’re glad to be rid of, like a bad habit, or something we cling to for dear life, like a love relationship. Either way it’s still a loss.

During the dark night of the senses, the soul finds freedom from its attachments to particular sensory gratifications, while the dark night of the spirit releases attachments to rigid beliefs and ways of thinking, frozen memories and expectations, and compulsive, automatic choices.

To our normal human capacities God is nada, “no-thing.”19

The spiritual life for Teresa and John has nothing to do with actually getting closer to God. It is instead a journey of consciousness. Union with God is neither acquired nor received; it is realized, and in that sense it is something that can be yearned for, sought after, and—with God’s grace—found.

For John, the spirit of blasphemy is an impulse to rage against God. Whether we look at the ancient Psalms or modern headlines, it is painfully easy to see the natural outcries that accompany tragedies in life. “Why me, God?” “Where were You in my suffering?”

I have characterized the night as the ongoing spiritual process of our lives. We have periodic conscious experiences of it, but it continues at all times, hidden within us. We are aware of only the experiences that come to our consciousness. Thus what someone else might call “going through the dark night” I would call “having an experience of the d