Three Signs of Spiritual Progress — Dark Night of the Soul

The first sign that a person is walking this night of sense is a double dryness: no pleasure in the things of God, and no pleasure in created things either. God has set the soul here to quench sensual desire, so he will not let sweetness attach anywhere. That is how you tell the dryness from fresh sin. If a new indulgence were the cause, desire would still lean toward something else. Here nothing pulls. The old consolations are gone and the substitutes do not work.

The second sign is anxious care for God. The soul thinks it is not serving him, that it is backsliding, because sweetness has vanished. That worry is a good sign. If the dryness came from sin or slackness, the soul would grow indifferent and stop caring. This anxiety still wants God without the old feeling, which is why the dryness is purgation rather than collapse.

The third and surest sign is that meditation will not run. However hard the soul tries, it cannot reflect with the imagination as it used to. God now communicates by pure spirit, by an act of simple contemplation, not through sense, forms, and images. The blocked imagination is not a failed technique. It is a change of channel. Saint John says the three signs together mark this night, not a season you should fix by hunting a new high.