summer reading

I have just finished reading The Dark Night of the Soul: A psychiatrist explores the connection between darkness and spiritual growth.

I highly recommend this book. Don't let the Christian emphasis put you off. He is addressing an inevitable part of the spiritual journey. In my case this was a very long period of years with short, far too short, periods of grace and illumination. This darkness opened into an abiding grace a number of years ago. Oh sure I still deal with issues but it is all with so much ease, and the opening is only a breath away or a moment of self remembering. And the journey is not over, maybe it is never over, but I have been met by presence, by God. It would have helped me enormously to read this book. It would have given me hope when I had lost it, or so it seemed. He uses the poetry of St John of the Cross and St Teresa  of Avila. Easy read, contemporary. And he makes a clear distinction between depression and the dark night, and how they can overlap. I would also a distinction between clinical anxiety ( nervous system), and ego fear of losing control of the familiar.

Let me know what you think.