There was a time I believed God had left me. It was the second semester of my sophomore year of college that I first experienced a night so long, a darkness so deep, that I despaired of life itself. I prayed to the God I couldn’t feel, trust, or see to take me out of this world, because the mental and spiritual anguish was unbearable. It was only afterwards that I came to understand that this was a spiritual experience with a long history, something 16th century mystic St. John of the Cross termed “The Dark Night of the Soul.” For centuries, Christians who have tried to make sense of their very real felt experience of God’s absence have found solace in St. John’s work and ideas. Likewise, when I encountered his poetic treatises on darkness as a purgative vessel through which the soul ascends to a greater intimacy with God, I began to wonder if there was more to my experience of depression paired with ‘God’s absence’ than I originally thought. . .