Have there been any other poetic-sounding names given to the “dark night of the soul”? I can think of at least one. At least, it’s close to poetic. Maybe it’s not quite poetry. At any rate, it’s catchy.

It’s the act of changing sadness into joy. This one is at the pen Marcel Văn. Why am I so sure it can be another name for the dark night of the soul? Well, Marcel lays it out like this:

God has given me a mission, that of changing suffering into happiness. I am not abolishing suffering, but I am changing it into happiness. My life from now on, in drawing its strength from Love, will be only a source of happiness. I have, above all, been able to conquer myself.

He’s been able to conquer himself; that entails, without abolishing the sufferings and difficulties, changing sadness, or suffering, into joy, or happiness. They’re linked. The more we can follow God’s will, the more there is joy – even when sadness and suffering do not disappear. This is not a newfangled invention of Marcel’s. It’s actually a teaching that occurs, from time to time and with varying emphasis, in Saint John of the Cross:

Suffering purifies and the more the purity increases, the deeper and clearer the knowledge and therefore the purer and more exalted the joy, because it is a knowing from further within.

And I wouldn’t be surprised if this is one of the layers of meaning that occurs in the letters of Saints Catherine of Siena and John of Ávila, to give other examples: changing bitterness into sweetness, without annihilating the bitterness, is a progress in the spiritual life. Catherine is not specific, but the implication is there in letters to her brother; and meanwhile, John seems to get more explicit in linking all this to the nugget of the Gospel: “your sorrow shall be turned into Joy” (Jn 6:20), though it is less clear whether he sees this transformation occurring progressively within this life. (My own opinion is that his words lend themselves in that direction, though they are not clear.)

Suffering changed into joy: and progressively so as we follow God’s will more and go closer to his heart. (This is what Marcel says.) And what allows us to follow more God’s will? The “dark night” and suffering and the act of stripping of the “old man” (Col 3:10) itself. They are one and the same thing, this “dark night” and this act of “changing suffering into joy”.