What to Do When God Is Silent — The Dark Night Tradition
⏱ 12 min read
The silence has been going on long enough now that you have stopped naming it. The first month, you called it a dry spell. The third month, you called it a season. By the sixth, you stopped having a name for it at all — it was simply the new shape of your prayer life. The verses still get read. The chair still gets sat in. The morning still gets opened with the Lord’s prayer. None of it lands the way it used to.
You have asked, more than once, whether something has gone wrong with your faith. You have asked whether He is angry. You have asked whether you have been doing something to deserve this. You have asked, in the harder hours, whether He is there at all.
This is a slow walk through John of the Cross — a sixteenth-century Spanish Carmelite who wrote the contemplative tradition’s most honest book about exactly this season. He called it the dark night of the soul. He did not write it as a warning. He wrote it as a teaching for the soul who is already in it, to say: this is not what you think it is. The silence is the lesson, not the absence. The slow practice of staying in it is the work, and there is a journal that holds that work — the Dry Season Devotional, a 140-day form of the practice the dark night tradition has been walking for four hundred years.
What John of the Cross says about the silence is not what your church will say. It is not what the books on hearing God’s voice will say. It is older, quieter, and far more useful for the woman who is actually in it.
What John of the Cross actually said
The first thing John of the Cross does in Dark Night of the Soul is refuse to call the silence a problem. He calls it a passage. A specific kind of teaching God only does in a specific kind of weather. The weather is the silence itself.
Here is the line that holds the whole thesis:
“This, as we have said, is an infused and loving knowledge of God, which enlightens the soul and at the same time enkindles it with love, until it is raised up step by step, even unto God its Creator.”
— John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul
Read it once. Read it again. Notice what he is saying the silence is.
He calls it an infused and loving knowledge of God. Not the absence of knowledge. A knowledge that is being put into the soul by God, in a form the soul cannot consciously process while it is happening. The soul is being taught. The soul cannot, in the moment, feel the teaching. The teaching is happening anyway.
This is what makes the dark night different from spiritual failure. In failure, the soul has stepped away from God and the silence is the natural consequence. In the dark night, the soul has not stepped away at all — the soul has, in fact, often been more faithful than it has ever been — and the silence is God’s doing, in His direction, for His purpose, which the soul will not see until it is on the other side.
John’s word for the experience inside the night is enkindling. The night feels like the going-out of the fire. It is, he says, the kindling of a different fire — one that will burn longer and deeper than the one that has gone out. The reason it feels like extinction is that the new fire is still beneath the surface. The old fire — the felt sweetness, the spoken comfort, the unmistakable warmth of God in the chair — has been removed precisely so the deeper fire can be lit.
This is hard to hear when you are in the silence. It is harder to disbelieve when you read what John has been saying for four hundred years to women who could not, in the moment, see what He was doing in them. (If the silence has been the whole season — months, not weeks — When You Feel Spiritually Dry: The Practice for the Year God Goes Quiet walks the daily companion to this teaching.)
How this lands today
You did not pick the silence. The silence picked you. You did not stop praying, or stop reading, or stop showing up. You have been showing up the whole time. The showing up has, in fact, become harder than ever, because the showing up is no longer accompanied by the felt warmth that used to make it easy.
This is exactly where John of the Cross says the dark night begins. Not in the souls who quit. In the souls who keep showing up, in the absence of any of the rewards that used to make the showing up bearable.
What he asks of the soul in this season is not more effort. Not more eloquence in prayer. Not a new method. He asks for something much harder. He asks the soul to stay, faithfully, in the practices it has been doing — and to allow the felt reward to be absent without taking the absence as a sign that the practice has failed.
The practices have not failed. The practices have done their first work — the work of forming you. They are now doing a second work — the work of forming you in a way that does not depend on you feeling them work. That is the work the dark night is for.
This means the chair still gets sat in. The bible still gets opened. The verse still gets read, slowly, even when it goes flat in the chest. The honest sentence still gets written at the end of the day, even when the sentence is today He felt far. The practice continues. The reward does not, for a season. The continuing without the reward is the deeper formation.
The woman in the dark night, by year two, becomes a woman whose faith is no longer tied to her feelings. That is what the practice has been quietly making in her. She did not ask for it. She would have preferred the felt sweetness. The deeper faith is what she got instead, and the deeper faith is what holds when the harder things come — the bereavement, the betrayal, the diagnosis, the wait that does not end. The felt-faith would have collapsed under those weights. The faith forged in the dark night does not. (If the practice of writing the honest sentence in this season feels impossible because the page is just blank, What to Write in a Christian Journal When You Feel Blank walks fifty prompts for the empty-page days.)
Pause for a moment
Let the shoulders lower. The dark night is the season the shoulders are the highest, because the soul has been bracing against a silence it does not understand. Let them drop by an inch. Not by trying to relax. By stopping the small ongoing effort to hold them up.
One slow inhale. One slower exhale. The body has been carrying the weight of the silence the whole time the mind has been turning it over. Sixty seconds, here, of letting the body lower. The night does not need to be solved in the sixty seconds. The night is asking, gently, for the body to stop bracing against it for one minute.
That is the first small act. The silence will still be there in a minute. You will still not understand it. The body will, however, be lower. The practice continues from a lower body more easily than from a braced one.
What the night is for, in the longer view
John of the Cross is careful about one thing above all others. He does not want the soul in the night to mistake the silence for punishment. He says it again and again — under different metaphors, in different chapters — because he knows the soul will keep reaching for punishment as the explanation, and punishment is exactly the wrong frame.
The night is not punishment. The night is, in his hands, the slow work of purgation — the soul being relieved of attachments to its own felt experience of God, so it can come to know God Himself rather than the experience of God. That is a hard sentence. Sit with it.
Most of what you have called your relationship with God, until this season, was your relationship with how God felt to you. The warmth. The sweetness. The recognisable nearness. The verse that lit up. The peace that came after prayer. All of these are gifts. None of them are God. They are signs of God, gifts from God, the felt edge of God — but they are not the substance of Him.
The dark night begins when the gifts are temporarily withdrawn so the soul can come to know the Giver Himself, no longer mediated by the felt experience of His presence. This is why the night is, in John’s hands, a promotion in the contemplative life, not a demotion. The soul that comes through the night knows God in a way that the soul who has only ever known the felt edge of God does not.
You will not feel this is a promotion while it is happening. It will feel like a long famine. The promotion is real anyway. The famine is the form the deeper communion is taking. (And the silence is not yours alone — the sibling article How to Recognize God’s Voice — Brother Lawrence’s Quiet Answer walks Lawrence’s quieter answer to the same long question, and Why God Whispers Instead of Shouts — Tozer on the Still Small Voice walks Tozer on why God’s preferred volume has always been low.)
The journal that walks this season day by day — without trying to talk you out of it — is the Dry Season Devotional. Built for the woman who is in the night and wants a daily seat to come back to, with scripture pre-printed and space for the honest sentence even when the sentence is today He felt far.
What this means for your daily practice
The practice in the dark night has four small habits. None of them are dramatic. All of them are doable on a day when nothing inside you wants to do them.
The first is show up to the chair anyway. Same time. Same place. Same opening of the page. The showing up is the practice. The felt reward is not required. You are not failing if you do not feel anything in the chair. You are succeeding by being in it.
The second is read the verse slowly, even when it lands flat. Not the long passage. One verse. Read it twice. Let it sit. The verse is not failing to land on you because of you. The verse is doing slow work beneath the surface that the soul will see later. The reading is the practice. The felt landing is not the measure. (For the evening shape of this same practice, What Is Evening Devotion (and Why It’s the Quiet-Time Sweet Spot) walks the slow end-of-day version.)
The third is the honest sentence at the end of the day. One line. The actual one. Today He felt far. Today I did the practice without feeling it. Today I am tired of the silence. Today the silence had a small quality I cannot name yet. The honesty is the practice. The performed gratitude is not what the night is for.
The fourth is the small act of trust, made without proof. One sentence, before sleep. I am keeping the chair. I am keeping the page. I am keeping the practice. I do not know when You will speak again. I trust You while You are quiet. That sentence, said in the dark, is the deepest prayer the night will ask of you. It is also the prayer that is, quietly, the new fire being kindled. (And if the silence has reached the part of the house that does not normally speak about silence at all — the husband, the father, the son — A Devotional for Spiritual Dryness (for the Christian Man Who Won’t Talk About It) walks the same practice in the language the silent man can pick up.)
Pause for a moment, again
The jaw. Where is it. The dark night season is also the clenched-jaw season, because the soul is holding the silence by tightening the body around it. Let the jaw open by a small amount. Let the tongue come down from the roof of the mouth. Let one slow exhale, longer than the inhale.
The body is allowed to lower even on the day God is silent. The lowering is not premature relief. The lowering is the small permission you give yourself to be a body that breathes through the silence, rather than a body that braces against it. Thirty seconds is enough. Thirty seconds across the rest of the day, returned to as often as you remember, is the somatic version of the prayer the silence is trying to teach you.
What John of the Cross said about the longer view
There is one line from the wider contemplative tradition that hangs above John of the Cross’s whole teaching on the night. The Mirror for Monks, written by a Benedictine in the same century, said it directly:
“In holy longanimity, contain yourself, and expect in silence until it shall please the Most High to dispose otherwise.”
— Mirror for Monks (the tradition John of the Cross stood inside)
Longanimity. The old word for the long-suffering patience that does not collapse under a wait. Contain yourself. Stay inside your own practice. Do not chase the felt experience. Expect in silence. Wait without arranging the wait. Until it shall please the Most High to dispose otherwise. The silence will not last forever. Its ending is in His hands, not yours.
That is the whole instruction for what to do when God is silent. Contain. Expect. Wait. Trust the timing is not yours.
The woman who tries to shorten the night usually deepens it. She picks up a new method. She tries a new devotional. She listens to the podcast about hearing God’s voice. She attends the conference. She does the fast. None of it produces the felt presence she is looking for, because the felt presence has been withdrawn for a season for a reason, and the reason is not bypassable by effort.
What ends the night, in John of the Cross’s hands, is the soul’s slow surrender to being inside it. Not the resignation that gives up on God. The surrender that gives up on demanding to feel Him while He is doing this deeper work. The night ends when the soul has learned the lesson the night was for — and the lesson is exactly that God is faithful even when He is silent, and that faith is for the silence, not for the felt warmth.
You will not be able to learn that lesson on a timeline. The lesson takes the time it takes. The Dry Season Devotional walks the daily practice across 140 days, which is roughly the length most dark nights take to begin softening into the next thing. Not because the journal causes the softening. Because the journal holds the practice steady through the wait, so the soul has somewhere to keep coming back to while the deeper work is being done.
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Dry Season Devotional.
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The Everspring Dry Season Devotional walks the dark-night practice across 140 days with scripture pre-printed and space for the honest sentence on the day He feels far. Built for the woman who is keeping the chair through the silence and wants a steady daily seat to return to.
