We can’t understand what is happening to us, and if we are in the habit of always wanting to know what is going on, this aspect of the dark night will be maddening. We can find meaning in these times of change, but we have to think differently about our lives, be less psychological in our approach, and more philosophical and spiritual.

In a key letter, written to his brother and sister-in-law when he was twenty-three, he [Keats] said that being intelligent is not enough. Your intelligence has to be converted into a soul. “Do you not see,” he wrote, “how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul?...Call the world if you Please ‘The vale of Soul-making.

It’s tempting to become the hero and savior, but getting life in apparent order is not the same as giving the soul what it needs. It may need more chaos, deeper impasse, and increased darkness.

...the soul’s progress is both deep and dark and requires a descent as well as an ascent. “Growth” is entirely the wrong word for what ripens and matures us into people of substance and gives us a soul. Sex is integrally involved in that process, and it isn’t always “nice,” clean, uncomplicated.

Either a nation faces its uncomfortable truths, or it is overwhelmed by them; for there is a prophetic consequence in the perpetuation of lies, just as there is an unavoidable fate for all those who refuse to see.

There are some things on earth that are stronger than death. One of these is the eternal human quest for justice; a people cannot live without it, and in due course they will be prepared to die to make it possible for their children.

Fables are made of this.