Your dark night is forcing you to consider alternatives. It is taking you out of the active life of submission to alien goals and purposes. It is offering you your own approach to life. You can sit with it and consider who you are and who you want to be. You can be fortified by it to stand strong in your very existence. You can be born again, not into an ideology that needs your surrender, but into yourself, your uniqueness, your God-given reality, the life destined for you.

Masochism is disguised control. My friend’s life had been on hold for years because she considered it important to keep all her relationships calm and ordered. This highly controlled suffering is full of ego and essentially blocks the natural flow of life. When that flow is finally released, a deeper source of strength becomes available, shattering the masochism and establishing the paradoxical condition of strength in yielding. Finally being able to let life flow through you, you discover a calm and courage you may never have felt before.

The relaxing of your will, however desperate, allows life to proceed. It may not go according to your plan, but whatever it makes will be more secure and ultimately more satisfying that anything you could force into existence. Such are the lessons of a dark night.

Building a marriage can be a joyful experience, but surrendering to another person is never a happy choice.

In his powerful book The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker addresses the many complications and ambiguities, as he calls them, in this process, stressing the need of any person to enter life newly cleansed and liberated. ‘The very defenses that he needs in order to move about with self confidence and self-esteem become his life-long trap. In order to transcend himself he must break down that which he needs in order to live. Like Lear he must throw off all his ‘cultural lendings’ and stand naked in the storm of life.