Sharing the Dark, Singing the Night

Psalm 88 and the corporate dark night of the soul

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The Unresolved Dark Night

When is the right time to share one’s story of suffering? How do you know if it’s too soon? Should one be healed to some degree first? And if so, how much healing is enough? Furthermore, is the story being told for personal benefit, or for the benefit of others, or perhaps both? These are recurring questions in trauma recovery, and I have been helped in the past year by

K.J. Ramsey

’s many related essays and how she models what sharing from open wounds can look like.

Recently I’ve been asking that question with respect to the dark night of the soul. It’s proving to be a difficult and painful question. John of the Cross explains one reason for that pain when he says it is normal for those in the dark night to blame themselves for being in the dark. Invariably, the question comes in some form of, “What’s wrong with me?” I found myself asking that question the other day. My wife and I visited a new church for the first time on Sunday. It was pleasant. We were welcomed by the pastor as he saw us sitting in the back row ten minutes before the service started (not my preference, as an introvert; I should have known to show up 3-5 minutes after the service started when all of the members entered). We sang, prayed, listened, ate and drank, and left. And then I crashed. Hard. Headache. Brain fog. Short temper. Offended my wife and children multiple times throughout the rest of the day. Pretty much the literal opposite of what one hopes to feel after being fed by Christ in word and sacrament. Part of this, even much of this, I know, is caused by grief and trauma.

An additional source of grief comes when I ask myself, “What right do I have helping others wrestling with similar spiritual pain and suffering?” You see, my scars aren’t fully healed yet. They get re-opened and bleed—onto myself and others—and have to scab over again. Must I, like Jesus with the disciples, have fully healed scars to offer for others’ inspection unto belief in God’s healing power?

I don’t have answers to these questions, but they bring me to the subject of this week’s substack on Psalm 88. Like the above, academic questions of Psalm 88 quickly slide from intellectual to existential. For instance, when did Heman the Ezrahite compose Psalm 88? With no context given in the psalm’s superscription and no scholarly consensus on the psalm’s date, there’s no way of knowing for sure.

But the “when” question also relates to the compositional timing in Heman’s experience. Psalm 88 is most famous for its lack of resolution. Unique among the psalter, it does not end in confidence, unlike the typical psalmic ending of confident trust in God or confidence of justice and vindication. So I wonder, does that mean Heman’s suffering anguish was never relieved? If so, wouldn’t that mean that Heman was still in the middle of that suffering when he wrote Psalm 88? Did he compose a song about death, darkness and despair while he was still in the pit? June Dickie, quoting Derek Kidner, writes

“The psalmist, however, gives no indication that he experienced any resolution to his plight. Thus, Kidner (1975, 319) maintains that Ps 88 testifies to ‘the possibility of unrelieved suffering as a believer’s earthly lot.’”¹

Perhaps, then, Psalm 88 gives license for children of God to write and speak and sing from the depths of their own darkness. Yes, the danger of re-traumatization is real, like picking at a scab repeatedly and too soon so the wound never truly heals. I believe an additional aspect of Psalm 88 helps address that problem.

The Covenantal Dark Night

As Christian Scripture, Psalm 88 can be sung by all God’s children, in all places, and at all times. In our belonging to God in the people of God, the 88th psalm is covenantal property: this song of darkness is a gift that belongs to all of God’s daughters and sons.

Treasuring this gift might mean weeping with those who weep (Rom 12:15); it might mean weeping with and for oneself, but in the presence of others. While Psalm 88 uses the singular voice, it’s place in the Hebrew psalter makes it a corporate song of lament. It is intended for all God’s people to sing with one voice, even if that one voice has many different hearts in different soul conditions. In this way, the psalm is a biblical witness to what a few writers have termed the corporate/communal/collective dark night of the soul.² For example, taking the work of John of the Cross, Constance Fitzgerald uses the word “impasse” as a synonym for the dark night of the soul. She writes (and I’m emphasizing the corporate dimensions),

“Moreover, intrinsic to the experience of impasse is the impression and feeling of rejection and lack of assurance from those on whom one counts. At the deepest levels of impasse, one sees the support systems on which one has depended pulled out from under one and asks if anything, if anyone, is trustworthy. Powerlessness overtakes the person or group caught in impasse and opens into the awareness that no understandable defense is possible. This is how impasse looks to those who are imprisoned within it. It is the experience of disintegration, of deprivation of worth, and it has many faces, personal and societal.”³

Safely in the dark, not alone

Bringing these two points together—the lack of resolution, and the role of corporate singing—Psalm 88 gives room in the family of God for voicing complaints with no expectation or hope of deliverance. To use the words of Fitzgerald, Psalm 88 is the psalm of the impasse:

“By impasse, I mean that there is no way out of, no way around, no rational escape from, what imprisons one, no possibilities in the situation. In a true impasse, every normal manner of acting is brought to a standstill, and ironically, impasse is experienced not only in the problem itself but also in any solution rationally attempted.”⁴

Psalm 88 serves to guide and channel awareness—not just individual but also communal—of the pit, the grave, the darkest places, the depths, the place of being shut in and trapped, the place of drowning and endless darkness. Awareness requires recognition, and it requires more than that, the ability to name, however tentatively and obliquely, the object of awareness. This, according to Fitzgerald, is the fundamental prerequisite for experiencing the transformative potential of the dark night of the soul.

“The person [or group] caught in impasse must find a way to identify, face, live with, and express this suffering. If one cannot speak about one’s affliction in anguish, anger, pain, lament—at least to the God within—one will be destroyed by it or swallowed up by apathy. Every attempt to humanize impasse must begin with this phenomenon of experienced, acknowledged powerlessness, which can then activate creative forces that enable one to overcome the feeling that one is without power.”⁵

Psalm 88 is just such a means of helping sufferers identify and face this suffering in the night. Naming one’s experience is no small thing. “Name it to tame it,” as they say. Fizgerald testifies to the power of this naming:

When I am able to situate a person’s experience of impasse within the interpretive framework of dark night, that person is reassured and energized to live, even though she feels she is dying. The impasse is opened to meaning precisely because it can be redescribed.⁶

This is all quite paradoxical. Which makes me think there is a paradoxical hope in the most despairing line of Psalm 88, that “darkness is my only friend.” Wouldn’t it be more natural to say “darkness is my enemy”? Or perhaps something less antagonistic but still highlighting the isolation, “I am alone in darkness.”

More on that in a few weeks. The focus will be on the paradox of this corporate song in which God’s people sing “darkness is my only friend,” and yet they sing it in the company of family and friends.

Quote from Gerald May

“Also like the night, these [corporate dark night] experiences are often obscure. The people involved feel confused, mystified, unable to get a grasp of what is actually going on, much less how to respond to it. This happens frequently in corporate and religious organizations as well. Something shifts somewhere, things are not as they used to be, people lose touch with goals and mission, everything seems to have lost its moorings.”⁷

Question

What do you think, is the church, or portions thereof across the globe today, in a corporate dark night of the soul?

1. June Dickie, “Psalm 88 within its contexts (historical, literary, canonical, modern, and psychological): Do they help with interpretation?”, p. 9.

2. See Gerald May, The Dark Night of the Soul: A Psychiatrist Explores the Connection Between Darkness and Spiritual Growth (HarperSanFrancisco, 2004), 174-180; Constance Fitzgerald, “Impasse and Dark Night,” in Living with Apocalypse: Spiritual Resources for Social Compassion, ed. Tilden H. Edwards (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1984), 93-116; Bruno Barnhart, The Good Wine: Reading John from the Center.

3. Fitzgerald, “Impasse and Dark Night,” 95.

4. Ibid, 94.

5. Ibid, 96.

6. Ibid, 97. It would take a longer post to give important nuance here that this naming is not simple and straightforward. John of the Cross gives signs to help discern whether one is or is not in the dark night of the soul, and also recommends discerning with the help of a spiritual director. Even then, the very nature of the dark night as obscure (from oscura, one of the Spanish words John and Teresa used for the dark night) means identifying oneself as in the night is inherently uncertain.

7. Gerald May, The Dark Night, 176-177.