A Flashlight for a Dark Night

Spiritual Aging's Call: Choosing Between Despair and Freedom

Yesterday, at the tail end of leading a global Zoom webinar with a remarkable group of old souls, a blizzard somewhere north of us blew me off the Internet. From all reports, the group carried on without me quite well which, of course, is both inspiring and humbling. In that discomforting interim, where I was brought face-to-face with my ultimate powerlessness, I had the opportunity to do a spontaneous life review. This was not only the call to dive deeper issued to me by a snow storm, but the bigger sense of helplessness sweeping over me of whatever new calamity is headlining that day’s news.

What I know from my conversations with so many of us in the spiritual aging community both in person and online, is that we did not expect to be at this age and stage in our lives feeling so out of control. The good news is that many of us seekers have spent a lifetime preparing for this moment. Many of us are old enough that we’ve already had our own brushes with mortality, grieved many of our losses, made peace with multiple regrets. But the thing is, aging and time inevitably raise the stakes and we suddenly find ourselves forced to grow again. As true as this is in the best of times how much moreso is this true in times such as our own when against the backdrop of the imploding illusions of our understanding of reality and shared values, willpower is useless.

In my book The Making of an Old Soul, I have a chapter about the life stage many have unexpectedly found ourselves in (again!) called The Void. In it I tell a story I find particularly helpful to share with you. Some years ago, I was invited by the American Society of Aging to present about spirituality and aging alongside keynoter Jane Marie Thibault. Beforehand, we had the chance to compare notes about life-threatening illnesses we had suffered. Mine was well in the past, but Jane’s encounter with mortality was fresh in her mind. Her words to the rapt audience that day resonated deeply. “Do you wish to persevere pridefully into the old life? Of course you do: the old life was a good life, but it is no longer available to you. It has been carried away irreversibly.” Jane Marie, who has served as chaplain to the monks at Thomas Merton’s monastery, Gethsemani, found she could not look forward until she’d taken the time to mourn: “To say Kaddish for the me who was…and would never be again.”

And what is this place shrouded in shadows: the fearsome inevitability that you have worked so hard to avoid all your life? You’ll know what it is in when you’re in it: a dark and vast place, a bottomless pit, devoid of hope. You will feel listless, adrift, lost—but only when you aren’t otherwise consumed by anxiety, regret, and grief. When you are in the place mystics refer to by many names but that I describe as a void, you feel for all the world that you are the only one to have ever been in it. And yet listen to the words of this Psalm and see if they don’t sound like they could have arisen from your own broken heart.

O Lord, God of my salvation,

I have cried day and night before thee;

Let my prayer come before thee; incline thine ear unto my cry;

For my soul is full of troubles: and my life draweth nigh into the grave.

I am counted with them that go down into the pit; I am as a man that hath no strength…

Thou hast laid me in the lowest pit, in darkness, in the deep.

There are archetypal forces, transcending the particulars of time and place, pulling you into the shadows as the chaos of life and whatever the times conspire to break you with. As the English writer Katherine Mansfield wrote in her private journal in 1923: “There is no limit to human suffering. When one thinks: ‘Now I have touched the bottom of the sea—now I can go no deeper,’ one goes deeper. And so it is forever. …What must one do? There is no question of what is called ‘passing beyond it.’ This is false. One must submit. Do not resist. Take it. Be overwhelmed. Accept it fully. Make it a part of life. …The present agony will pass—if it doesn’t kill.”

These accounts of pain have withstood the test of time not because they are the words of so-called “losers” who let life do them in, but because they are the courageous cries of vital spirits asserting themselves, willing to engage with the biggest questions of meaning and to struggle with God’s very essence. Rejecting simplistic answers, overworked explanations, and rationalized defenses, these are the ones who let go of the branch hanging over the cliff, not knowing if they were going to hit bottom and, if they did, whether they would live or die. Their words, and the testimony of the many brave elders who have come before us, call out to each of us en route to the world of old souls, that feelings of despair are not yours alone but belong to all times and ages.

In other words, if you resonate with the notion of the void, you are not alone. We are all inheritors of human nature and largely predetermined responses to archetypal forces built into the DNA of our very being. Viewing us through this lens, Carl Jung writes that even “a creative person has little power over his own life. He is not free…” And yet, little power is not no power. While at our best, we will struggle against triggers that tug us back toward habitual unconscious patterns all of our lives; the difference between enduring the shadows of unnamed dread versus living in as awakened a state as humanly possible is the degree of consciousness one succeeds in commandeering. “We are imperfect and dependent, but we have the freedom to choose—to the degree things become made conscious…,” writes Jung. In fact, the more we become willing to tell the greater truth to ourselves, about both our internal and external reality, the more freedom we will have in our lives to make meaning. We do so by devoting ourselves, as did Jung, to creating “more and more consciousness.”

Knowing this, however, does not make your experience of falling into the void any less lonely, painful or personal. Nor, at the time, does plummeting into the void feel like a choice or anything at all related to spiritual growth. But nevertheless, your descent pays testimony to the courage it has taken for you to let go of the familiar –self-chosen or imposed--because you know there’s more to life than you’ve yet experienced, and you are willing to do whatever it takes, whatever the cost. Thomas Merton in The Silent Life describes one who has allowed life’s challenges to shatter the last of his masks: “He can peacefully accept that when his false ideas of himself are gone he has practically nothing else left. But then he is ready for the encounters with reality: The Truth and the Holiness of God, which he must learn to confront in the depths of his own nothingness.”

To take a stand for yourself against all evidence often entails nearly more pain than we can bear. But for those of us who persist against the odds, this is pain of a higher order. Spiritual teachers from many ages, faiths, and perspectives view the pain that results from both internal and external crisis not as a bad thing to be avoided but as a necessary instigator of spiritual growth. This spiritual interpretation of pain has many names. St. John of the Cross, in the 15th century, called it the dark night of the soul. The Kabala describes such a place as Ein Sof and, in some schools of Tibetan Buddhism, bardo. Anthropologists and scholars in the field of ritual studies call it liminality. However one refers to it, one experiences it as the discomforting period, unformed and unsettling, that comes between what was and what’s next.

Psychologists inform us that crisis is not built into the fabric of the actual events themselves. Rather, crisis occurs “when our theories about ourselves in relation to the outside world go fundamentally wrong,” explains author Glenys Parry: “It is as if your front door, one day, instead of opening when you turned the key, gave you an electric shock.” Rabbi Rami Shapiro comments that when someone—like Ram Dass, struck out of the blue by a debilitating stroke—hits bottom with such force, “there is no opportunity for denial, no room for ego, no option for anything but a radically humble cry for help.”

It is the dissonance between our expectations and our outcomes, both in regard to what we expect of the world, but also, and more to the point, what we expect of ourselves, that causes the pain—not the outcomes alone. Foremost among our expectations is the belief that pain is something to be avoided at all costs: that it is bad for you. While our culture tends to call surrendering to pain “apathy,” the Greek root for apathy actually means the avoidance, not the experience, of suffering. Transformation begins the moment you admit that the precipitous event that ultimately took you under has outstripped your capacity to manage the world to your satisfaction, and that you are out of tricks. When you stop trying to force your will upon the world, you accept the limits to your power. Of course, this does not excuse us from doing what we can to make things better. As the Serenity Prayer teaches, we should dig as deep as necessary to find the courage to change the things we can. But it is equally incumbent upon us to accept that there are things we cannot change and while we may aspire to do so with serenity, more often than not we find ourselves taking that call for a leap of faith with our hair on fire.

Nothing is more effective than crisis for emptying your bag of tricks. Crisis foils your expectations, shakes you out of the false security of the status quo, and carries the potential to wake you up not only to your own limitations but to the truth about reality. There have been many who have endured the journey and survived to tell the tale, like Ram Dass, Thibault and Florida Scott-Maxwell. Not only did they survive, but they emerged more vital, more integrated, more connected to life’s possibilities, not despite of but because of having undergone catastrophe. The void is, after all, the place where the status quo has the least grip on you, and where you are most able to let go of old structures, illusions, and outgrown ways of being. It is in the void that you are most likely to shed the beliefs that once circumscribed the meaning in your life and to take up what had never before occurred to you, the unpremeditated and radically new.

Understanding this—that the void has a sacred role to play in spiritual development--Pema Chodron writes: “Instead of transcending the suffering of all creatures, we move toward the turbulence and doubt. We jump into it. We slide into it. We tiptoe into it. We move toward it however we can. … With us move millions of others, our companions in awakening from fear. At the bottom we discover water, the healing water of bodhichitta. Right down there in the thick of things, we discover the love that will not die.”

The progression through life depends on this cycle of destruction and renewal, taking its model from what humanity has observed since the dawn of time: Nature privileges spirals and cycles over sticks and linear trajectories. The seasons, the phases of the moon, the cycle of life. This is the essence of life’s meaning as embodied in the I Ching, the ancient Chinese Book of Changes. At any given point, certain aspects of our lives are falling away, new aspects birthing. This disruption and renewal is what characterizes our progress through life stages, and not only in the purview of mystics. As Nobel Prize-winning chemist Ilya Prigogine postulated, in healthy organisms there is a necessary period of stasis after deconstruction that he refers to as “the theory of dissipative structures.” Utilizing the scientific method, Prigogine theorized that people, things, and events are involved in a continuous exchange of energy, impacting one another on an ongoing basis. When something disturbs or upsets the system, the components have the capacity to reorganize into a higher order. When applied to cognitive function, it is the impact of new information, pleasant or not, that causes the spontaneous realignment of neural relationships into the more evolved hierarchy of thought we think of as “breakthrough,” “insight,” or “revelation.”

The moment you come to understand that your pain is not necessarily about what’s wrong with you but rather about that which yearns to grow larger, the very forces that have been pushing you from behind give way, and when the night is darkest, you catch a glimmer of what had previously been hidden in plain sight: that powerlessness is also freedom. In psychological terms, this turn toward increased consciousness is known as “preparation.” Rather than resist the pain, you use it as a point of entry into your deeper consciousness, where progress is possible.

Those of us who are struggling right now are what Meg Wheatley refers to as spiritual warriors. Your journey through life becomes heroic, the moment you become willing to engage in struggles worthy of yourself. It can take more faith and patience than you know in the moment you have in you, but something in you perseveres through the dark night trusting that the path forward can be found.

As you progress through the arc of life, your newfound humility will continue emptying you of the last vestiges of your will to power. And here the void reveals its true nature: not as punishment, not as an ending, not even as culmination. But a pause—a place of resting where the limitations and illusions of the past loosen its grip and you are made ready for a transformation so profound it leaves even the mystics breathless. God blesses those of us who are willing to wrestle with angels with what Ram Dass refers to as “fierce grace”: coming to see and make peace with the whole truth about yourself, all the while accepting that there will always be a discrepancy between your ideals and your reality. You may stumble, make mistakes, get your values turned upside down, but only when you become willing to face up to and rectify what you can no longer avoid do you become a candidate for the fulfillment of life’s promise. The Jewish mystics call this turn toward the good teshuva and the individual willing to engage in this holy struggle a tzaddik, a righteous soul.

The freedom of powerlessness comes not out of your achievements, but out of laying down the burden of sustaining the illusion of who you had thought yourself to be, ending your exhausting struggle to maintain control, and ceasing to pretend that you have achieved any semblance of life mastery. Understanding the fundamentals of spiritual progression, this would be a good time for you to undertake a life review, coming to recognize how the circumstances through which you’ve transited have been destined from the first to bring you to this moment of reckoning and opportunity. You made many choices along the way that brought you to this moment, some consciously, many more unconsciously. And now you are once again at a crossroads with a new choice to make: Will you choose despair, or will you choose freedom? Making the choice for freedom over despair is not an action step—it’s a prayer. It is the nobodyness of a Ram Dass and the nothingness of a Merton.

Recalling Thibault’s call to Kaddish, I was inspired to dig out the journals I’d been keeping at the time of my diagnosis of breast cancer 30 years ago, capturing the essence of what the void asks of you: “There are those times in our lives when the pain is so great, it is enough to remind yourself to just keep breathing. I trust that, in time, I will discover whether or not there is inherent meaning in what is happening to me. But I also realize that to short-circuit, circumvent, or deny my pain by pretending I believe that this is some kind of gift when I clearly do not is to trivialize and degrade both myself and the Divine. Rather, I find it challenge enough simply to stay sufficiently alert to wrestle with the real questions underlying my faltering faith. Sometimes, all we can do is feel. And thankfully, it is enough.”

In the end, it is only your honest tears that prove to be strong enough to dissipate the forces that have been pushing you from behind from birth, setting you free. This is life’s promise to you—a new way of being in the world calling out to you. And so I say to you what, in the interim when the Internet blew, I said to myself: If it is to be the Void for me for the time-being, I will not wait to be pushed. I will grab my flashlight and descend willingly trusting that somewhere in the course of my explorations, a path forward will appear. As the mystics who have shown us the way not just down but deeper instruct us, let us choose to be more curious than afraid.