On Trendy Brunch Spots and the Dark Night of the Self

I met the Hafe, and his wife of two weeks, at one of Greenville, South Carolina's trendy farm-to-fork brunch joints. By accident of providence, my “college best friend”--the Hafe himself--and one of my two “monastery best friends” both lived in Greenville, and they both married their respective wives last May. It was the morning before Hanuman Dass--one of the "monastery best friends"-- was to tie his own knot. I’d been in Greenville two weeks ago, serving as a groomsman in Hafe’s wedding to Mrs. The Hafe. I hadn’t known her previous to the wedding weekend—and wedding weekends will forever be crappy opportunities to actually connect with brides and grooms. This was to be my first chance to get acquainted with her, and a long overdue chance to connect with my former college roommate.

I called him “the Hafe.” My Jackie was stunned to learn, when I once called him Bryan—his first name— that I’d actually been talking about him for years. The Hafe shared a chill degree of Church-nerdery with me: we spent college ending up at the same daily Masses, praying morning and evening prayer daily, and pilgrimaging to monasteries for silent retreats over our breaks.

Me and The Hafe (El Haferino, if you're not
into that whole "brevity" thing.)

A couple weeks earlier, when they made the mistake of yielding the rehearsal-dinner MC mic to me, I looked directly at Mrs. the Hafe and told the following story. “Without saying too much, my family,” I said, “puts a little bit of the ‘fun’ in dysfunctional. Hafe graduated a year after I did, and I remember a day, when I was home on break during his Senior year. All things ‘family’ were conflicted enough one night that I felt I couldn’t go home. I asked the Hafe if I could crash on his dorm room floor. He said I could. I fell asleep that night having borrowed one of his pillows. When I awoke in the morning, Hafe had covered me with the blanket from his own bed. He’d covered himself with the trench coat he kept hanging on the back of his door.”

I looked at Hafe's wife-to-be, debated how honest to be with strangers, and the degree to which I wanted to publicly embarrass the Hafe. What I said was “You’re marrying a good man. Take care of him, because he’ll bend over backwards to take care of you.” Draft one, in my head, had gone "You’re marrying Jesus. Don’t forget that.” But I thought better of stating the truth too strongly. With strangers, that kinda thing can get creepy fast.

Back to bougie brunch venues, two weeks later. I sat down with the Hafe, and Mrs. the Hafe. “I’m really glad we’re getting this chance to connect. I also realize we don’t know each other’s back stories. How much has Hafe told you? Like, did he mention I spent 7 years living in a monastery?” For better or worse, this is the detail to which all others are footnotes.

Mrs. the Hafe said “Yeah, Bryan told me a bit about that. But I have lots of questions.”

All of this was fairly predictable. I’ve been telling “the monastery story” to first-time acquaintances for years. I was glad to be telling it to Hafe’s wife—at least the “retelling” was to someone I could, for Hafe’s sake, trust implicitly. “A lot of people are curious about that." I said "Can you identify the things you’re most curious about?”

She led with another classic curiosity: “I guess I’m wondering what would have made you enter the monastery, and what would have made you leave.”

“Thanks for asking me to tell the story. It always helps to retell it.” In the first place, my intended major was English, right up to the middle of my senior year. That year, when my parents divorced, I switched it to theology. A lot of different things went in to that. I’d just made a few humdinger adult mistakes, and was, on some level, trying to avoid facing them. I was losing parental stability, and the Church stood in to provide structure. Of course, that all happened when I was 18, and it took me till I was 27 to see it. On top of that, after the writings of a buddhist monk taught me a way to meditate, my prayer life absolutely ignited. A person’s initial forays into intentionally bettering their prayer life are often eventful: they’re full of tiny run-ins with altered states of consciousness. Such was the case with mine, and I began, subtly, to change my entire life and identity because of all this. None of this is any different than anyone else in the initial stages of the spiritual life, but I thought I was unique indeed. I lived all of college, and met your husband, during this time.”

By the end of college, I was becoming more and more depressed. There weren’t many of the typical joys of life that were untouched by that depression. Hafe, do you remember the birthday party you threw me, senior year of college?”

He nodded that he did. “That was a great party” he said.

“You’re right,” I agreed, “it was a great party. I was surrounded by people who care about me. But I couldn’t connect with them. That kind of thing—not being able to connect with the good things right in front of me-- would become an issue more and more. Later I’d realize that, broadly, my depression was showing me the difference between compulsive thought (which eventually expresses itself in compulsive action) and deliberate thought. As college ended, I used the only language for that material that I had: the "wrestling with demons" language of the desert fathers. I read Malachi Martin's book Hostage to the Devil and it terrified me. See, it portrayed demonic possession as happening because of the routine turnings of the mind. So now there were two reasons to continue to pray: an attraction to the consolations I was experiencing in prayer and an aversion to potential demonic possession.”

“Let me just stop you there—“ Mrs. the Hafe interjected, cradling her visibly furrowed brow in her non-coffee mug hand. “I just want to say that I find the demonic terrifying. To the point that it’s hard to talk about.”

“I do too,” I said. “But that was part of the good contribution monasticism made in my life. Even if we all cooperate with evil a little bit, and we all do, God’s help is ultimately the thing that people need to stay safe from total, overt demonic possession. So it was a comfort to begin prayer 7 times a day with the same words. Hafe knows them, we prayed them all through college.”

I pointed at Hafe, who chimed in “O God, come to my assistance, O Lord, make haste to help me.”

“Right.” I said, "So I guess, in order to handle my fear of evil, I try to stay in that space of resorting to God’s help. The hows and whys of doing that have been difficulty to learn, but it’s how I’ve handled the risk."

Hafe got up to warm up his coffee. "Let me preface this next bit by saying: I wish Catholics weren’t so Dualistic. I wish they didn’t give away so many Religious Hero Cookies to people in the midst of spiritual transition. We usually use John of the Cross’ category of “Dark Night of the Senses” to describe a stage where great saints start to care less about the world. I don’t know if I’ve been through it, and I don't care.  That's my story and I'm sticking to it. In any case, after that first period, when people described the Dark Night of the Senses, I could empathize. When I began to pursue religion, I formed my whole identity around it. I referred to it as my “vocation” and I entered the monastery because of it.

"I found in the monastery, that I could lengthen the effects of consolations by interior pushing and self will, I found I could lengthen grace by way of adrenaline. This move was ultimately more of a substitution than anything else. Also, though, part of the 'substituting adrenaline for Grace' maneuver of putting myself above other people. It’s the 'my life is graced and I'm surrounded by assholes' move. For a long time, this made my life with the brothers difficult. What I eventually found is that I had made a god out of my own thoughts about God, and I had made a a drug out of the adrenaline of self-will, calling it all Grace. This, too, is a pretty typical move: St. Paul experienced something similar when his relationship to the Law soured. I realized then that I had left my upbringing and psychological wounds unaddressed, that I’d begun using region addictively because of it, and that the whole thing was affecting my entire adult worldview. This led me to join Adult Children of Alcoholics. I got honest about the ways I was treating prayer like a drug and not facing the trauma I’d been left with. The “Power greater than yourself” language of the 12 steps was important. It confirmed for me that, if I’m thinking about God, I might well be going in the right direction, but I haven’t, by any means, arrived. In part, I left the monastery, because all I could see was how selfish and idolatrous my previous use of it had been. I couldn’t find a way to work with it healthily."

"Let me run and get a glass of water real quick." Hafe's wife said "Does anybody need anything?"

“No worries, and I'm fine” I replied, “This will give the overly-talkative former college-roommate a chance to shove some food in his face.”

Mrs. the Hafe said “You’re not overly-talkative. I actually think you should write some of this down. I think it would help people.” I made a mental note to talk up my blog, after I was done talking up myself.  I was starting to annoy myself.  I was monopolizing the conversation and I knew it, but I hadn’t “told my story” this fully in years. It was good, and anyway here we all were, having this conversation. Later, I’d shut my fat cake hole. For now, I continued.

"Again, leave Spiritual Hero Cookies aside: I don’t know if I’ve been through the Dark Night of the Soul. But I can empathize with it. For years, after leaving the monastery, I couldn’t think of God without getting a headache and feeling nauseous. I grieve in a real PTSD kinda way, storing tension in my body. Add into that mix the gluten allergy I was diagnosed with after leaving the monastery, and what you’ve got is a person who feels a bit weird about the things of the world—I only want them when I’m insecure and self-comforting—you’ve got a bloke who feels weird about anything perceptibly Spiritual, and you’ve got a bloke who started out highly devoted to the Eucharist, only to become allergic to it. It doesn’t leave me a lot to hang on to.”

At that point, Mrs. the Hafe reached across the table with her right hand, knocking over her coffee. “Oh God,” She said, “I’m sorry.” We found every paper napkin within 20 feet in a matter of seconds.  No one got terrifically wet.

"No harm, no foul," I said, "So alright, if we can call what I went through the dark night of the senses, I detached from possessions. But then started treating things of God like they were possessions. I ran the game when I was attached to the world, and ran the game when I was attached to God. And eventually, both things lost their lustre. All of this is normal--I came to see it's just how desire works.  Sometimes that happens because I've obtained the thing I want. But I’m coming to see that it can also happen when I’m being asked to question myself—the one who’s doing the wanting, in other words."

"If I’ve been through the dark nights, they left some work undone. Until recently—and still today, if I’m not careful—when thoughts of self came up I shoved them down, tried to deny I was having them…because it’s good to be selfless, yada yada yada. What that really is, though, is using the self to repress thoughts about self. Whoever 'I' am, I’m still attached enough to thoughts of self to react negatively to them. Nowadays it’s hard to think about devotion to God, because it seems to do two things. First, it relies on my actions, not God’s, and second, it puts God at a distance from me."

"What I’ve come to see about Catholicism is that, though we have the dark nights of the senses and the soul, we need a third category: the dark night of the self. Ultimately, this would account for the way the spiritual life relativizes the self and desire. The fact is, sometimes labelling things as “better or worse, higher or lower, good or evil” gets old. Sometimes the distance implied in so many parts of religion gets wearisome—when we see heaven as above us, hell as below, when we call out to or think about a God who is always distant from us—well, sometimes that happens because we think dualistically. It has nothing to do with God, and everything to do with the egotistical dividedness of the the one doing the thinking."

"The Desert Fathers taught that end-stage Pride, a mixture of all the preceding evil thoughts, created a false self. All of the desires we gratify shore up that false self. Helpfully, the Church later adopted Freud’s term 'Ego.' All of our numerous thoughts about self come from that. St. Paul went in the direction of questioning self, saying 'my true self is hidden with Christ in God.' He said it would be revealed when Christ is revealed, and we saw him as he was. Contemplatives have, for centuries, been saying that the dualistic subject-object relationship between supplicants and God goes away in contemplative prayer. If there are separate selves, we cease to be aware of them. The Christian East has said that our common destiny is to be 'Divinized.' I don’t know all the details—because I’ve only just begun intuiting this, let alone experiencing it— but it stands to reason that, for the divinized, imperceptibility of separate selfhood is fairly permanent."

“Wait,” Mrs. Haffey interjected. “Doesn’t that make us into Gods, and isn’t that the sin of Adam?”

“This is why it’s key to allow concepts like ‘God’ and ‘self’ to diminish in importance” I said. “In this life, at his moment of fullest divine union, Jesus was nailed to a Cross and screaming ‘Father, why have you forsaken me?’ The end-stage of Benedict’s Ladder of Humility says that a person who is united to God doesn’t know it. He’s just a guy who knows his shortcomings, for whom life in the world isn’t a come-on. And furthermore, a person united to God knows that divinization is everybody’s reality—that everybody is God, and we’re all supposed to know it eventually. It’s not ‘I’m the only one who’s God.’ It would be a sin if it were a source of specialness or manipulation."

“The Dark Night of the Self would mean a couple of important things. It would mean that our thoughts about things aren’t the things themselves. Self-consciousness gets in the way of consciousness, in other words. The God who can be named is not the Eternal God. The World that can be analyzed is not the reality of the world. If we know that we know something, we don’t really know it."

"The Dark Night of the Self would begin to reveal God everywhere. Br. Lawrence of the Resurrection, whose 'practice of the present moment' taught that God used all things to connect with us, and Jeremy Narby, who more recently taught that God was communicating, intelligently and metaphorically, through the Logos that pervaded the world—both of these would be important keystones of the Dark Night of the Self. If the 'self' has ceased to treat God as 'other,' then it isn’t just some things that speak of God. It’s everything. We mightn’t be able to tap into that—bid trees to bloom in winter, as St. Francis of Assisi did—but it all serves as proof in the pudding."

"The Dark Night of the Self would render God a bit more all-pervasive, less specifically subjective. The Trinity, 'The Godhead,' is a more useful object for our meditation than any one person of the Trinity—because we’ll lose track of the three for the sake of the one as we’re more fully divinized anyway. The full force of the Name of God hits a person here. When I’m not thinking of myself, but am instead being myself, then I touch that part of who I AM that has always been part of God."


"Along with loss of identity, all the force drains out of our tryingto do good and avoid evil. The dark night of the self emphasizes the 'purgatorial predicament:' that is, the doing of a certain amount of our purgatory on earth, in this life. Though we’re subject to God, not to fate or destiny or determinism, it seems to be God's modus operandi to make people look fully at their own faults. Even though religion says sinning is bad, there’s a long history of spiritual practitioners getting handed over to the Pauline 'thorns in the flesh' for humility’s sake. The Apostles’ desertion of Christ wasn’t their finest moment, but it happened, and God used it to teach them. Those alternations aren’t good or bad, and they aren’t brought on by our efforts. We’re subject to them, just as we are to God’s love. In the end, it seems to be the gentlest way God has found to get us humans, who are stuck in denial and fearful of truth, to safely face ourselves.”

I paused. By now, my coffee was cold, the breakfast crowd was starting to securely yield to the early lunch folks, and I was realizing that what I was saying was a lot for me to handle, much less someone else. "I should probably be getting back to my other two soon-to-be newly weds”

“This is all good stuff” Mrs. the Hafe said, draining her latest cup of lukewarm coffee.

“What gets my goat is that it’s nothing new.” I said "The Church has always taught these things. But the Dark Night of the Self boils them down to Self and Desire, its two central issues. This kind of Spiritual Stage would leave us 'in the world, but not of the world.' We will always interact with the things of the world. It’s our Egos, and our Attachments to the world, that the dark night of the self would troubleshoot. The reality of God will always be the entire solution, but we need a way to identify thoughts of God and religion—at least for those of us still caught in our Egos—as part of the problem. My ability to let thoughts of self and possessions go, my ability to refrain from manipulating emotions or people based on my ideas of good and evil, perhaps detaching from these would happen faster if I knew there was no way I could affect them by force. But enough—enough of my rambling. Kerstin, don’t ever give a church nerd license to theologize. And I really hope that next time, I’ll give myself over to more listening.”

Bryan, coffee finished and poised to leave, said “We’ve got to find a way for you to be down here more permanently.”

I hugged him, and told him I’d work on it. Then I turned toward his wife “I sometimes forget how important telling my story is in the process of living it. It’s a providence to find someone so willing to listen. Next time I want to hear yours.” She promised it would happen, and we parted. To close, it only remains to promise one thing: Mrs. the Hafe, you have my word. Yourlife story won’t become my next blogpost.