When people speak of going through a dark night of the soul, they usually mean they’re experiencing bad things. The bad news is that bad things happen to everyone and they have nothing to do whether you are a good or bad person, how effectively you’ve taken charge of your life or how carefully you’ve planned for the future. The good news, or at least part of it, is that good things happen to everyone too. At the outset, I must confess that I am no longer very good at telling the difference between good things and bad things. Of course, there are many events in human history that can only be labelled as evil but from the standpoint of individual inner experience, the distinction has become blurred for me. Some things begin looking great but wind up terribly while other things seem bad at the beginning but turn out to be blessings in disguise. I was diagnosed with cancer in 1995 which I thought was a bad thing but the experience brought me closer to God and to my loved ones than I’d ever been and that was wonderfully good. The chemotherapy felt awful but it resulted in a complete cure which I decided was good. I later found out that it may have also caused the heart disease that now has me waiting for a heart transplant. At some point, I gave up trying to decide what was ultimately good or bad. I truly do not know. Although not knowing may itself seem like a bad thing, I’m convinced it is one of the great gifts of the dark night of the soul. To be immersed in mystery can be very distressing at first but over time I have found immense relief in it. It takes the pressure off. I no longer have to worry myself to death over what I did right or wrong to cause a good or bad experience because there really is no way of knowing. I don’t have to look for spiritual lessons in every trouble that comes along. There have been many spiritual lessons to be sure but they have been given to me in the course of life. I haven’t had to figure out a single one. One of the biggest blessings and another gift of the dark night is the realization that I’m not as much in control of life as I’d like to be.
Gerald May, MD from "Dark Night of the Soul"