For guidance, I turned to a poem called “Dark Night of the Soul” by a sixteenth-century mystic, St. John of the Cross.

it might be difficult, at first blush, to get something seemingly tangible, practical, and readily applicable to one’s day-to-day life from poetry or spirituality. But men die miserably every day from lack of what is found there. In other words, we humans suffer needlessly from an absence of what can be found in poetry and in spirituality.

To live a spiritual life is to seek to grow in love and kindness—and to persevere even when love as a perfect integration of emotion and action seems daunting or out of reach.

A fifth quality of spiritual maturity is a sense of the sacred that is integrated and personal. “Integrated” in that it does not create separate compartments of our life, dividing that which is sacred from that which is not; “personal” in honoring spirituality through our own words and actions. Otherwise, our spirituality is not of any true value.

The knowledge I am talking about is not intellectual and analytical but integrative and of the heart, and the choices that lead to wholeness are not pragmatic and calculated, intended to achieve some goal, but simply and profoundly expressive of personal truth.