Prayer time 15 April 2026
Prayers in the dark night of the soul
We pray in the dark night, and from the dry place, of the soul.
Download a PDF of the prayer script
Orientation
My name is Jacinda. I am your host.
Welcome to Prayer on a Wednesday.
All prayers and pray-ers welcome here.
This prayer is for the dark night of the soul, or any slight dip towards such a thing. So our prayers aren’t actually imagining how we manage such a place, but we are praying as if we are in the midst of that dark night. Our prayers are offered for all people experiencing a version of this dark place — because of war, fear, poverty, oppression, slavery, abuse, broken relationships, or tricky business times. Or, it’s for the faith-filled who are completely emptied out, crying along in the shower at night, or driving home and can’t remember where to find their house. It’s for us all. And these are prayers to return to and to offer to friends who ask ‘where is God?’ These are prayers for all humanity, at all stages of life and faith, who leave the consciousness of the presence of God. We pray for ourselves and for others who require hope that the presence itself does not ever move away.
We pray in the Unity tradition: affirmative prayer that does not deny what is real, but anchors in what is more real still. We pray knowing that the presence of God is not something we can fall out of. We pray to remember our connection to God, as we are promised we are called Children of the Most High God.
Check that you are on mute. We will speak our prayers boldly, in our own spaces.
Let us begin.
Relaxation
Our usual sweep of the body and attention to our breathing and physical stillness.
We don’t require a quiet surround. Even with noise and bustle close to you, you can be still, and a broader sense of silence will fall around you.
Concentration
THE POEM
Before anything else, we receive a poem.
A Spanish friar called Juan wrote this in a stone cell in Toledo in 1577. He had no paper. No books. A window near the ceiling. He memorised the lines in the dark, one by one, until he could carry them.
This is ‘Dark Night.’ We receive it as prayer.
On a dark night,
Kindled in love with yearnings — oh, happy chance! —
I went forth without being observed,
My house being now at rest.
In darkness, and secure,
By the secret ladder, disguised — oh, happy chance! —
In darkness and in concealment,
My house being now at rest.
In the happy night,
In secret, when none saw me,
Nor I beheld aught,
Without light or guide, save that which burned in my heart.
This light guided me
More surely than the light of noonday
To the place where he (well I knew who!) was waiting for me —
A place where none appeared.
O guiding night!
O night more lovely than the dawn!
O night that has united
The Lover with his beloved,
Transforming the beloved in her Lover.
Upon my flowery breast,
Kept wholly for himself alone,
There he slept, and I caressed him,
And the fanning of the cedars made a breeze.
The breeze blew from the turret
As I parted his locks;
With his gentle hand he wounded my neck
And caused all my senses to be suspended.
I remained, lost in oblivion;
My face I reclined on the Beloved.
All ceased and I abandoned myself,
Leaving my cares forgotten among the lilies.
(Juan de la Cruz, ‘Noche Oscura,’ c.1577. Trans. E. Allison Peers.)
THE DISGUISE
The soul leaving in disguise is the whole point.
Juan does not say the soul departs in triumph. He says it departs in disguise, in the dark, without being observed — even by itself. The house must first be at rest. The usual noise quieted. The usual tools set down.
Many of us know this place. The prayer that forms in the mouth and goes nowhere. The meditation that produces air. The affirmation spoken into a room that does not seem to hear it. The God who was, just recently, here — and now is not.
‘I can’t feel you, I can’t sense you, are you real, where are you, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me.’ (Psalm 22:1, NRSV)
This is the dry place. The dark night of the soul. The hinterland of the soul.
We feel flat, dry, frail, brittle, broken, alone. Our world is austere. Our soul finds absolutely no shelter, no comfort. We are empty.
Juan says: the soul on a dark night is already in motion, but we do not know this. Our soul reads its own experience as failure. But the ‘house being at rest’ — the old consolations gone, the easy warmth withdrawn — is the first condition of the deepest encounter available to it.
We are in good company tonight.
A WORD FROM THE TRADITION
Eric Butterworth wrote this:
You do not leave the Presence of God or the flow of life when you are negative or resistant. You leave the consciousness of the Presence. You are always in the flow, and it is always in you. The flow is constant. Your prayer is not to generate the flow but to acknowledge it.
(Eric Butterworth, In the Flow of Life, 1975)
The flow did not stop. We left the awareness of it. Those are not the same thing.
Any attempt to find or to reach the presence is to practise the absence of God.
So tonight we do not reach. We stop reaching. We acknowledge what is already here, beneath the dryness, beneath the feeling, beneath the hollow sound of our own words.
The well is below the dry ground. It has not stopped moving.
DEAR GOD
We pray together now. Speak this as your own prayer, in your own voice, in your own space.
Dear God —
I am going to tell you what it has been like. And I am going to trust that you already know, and that my telling is just my way of turning toward you in the only language I have right now.
It has been dry. The words I have always used feel like just words. The silence I have always trusted feels like a barren, cold room. I have done the things I know to do and arrived at nothing I can name.
I can’t pretend this away. And I flat out refuse to manufacture a feeling I do not have. I am here as I am. Dry. Empty. Hollow. Present. Still turned toward you, but in truth, I don’t really know what direction to face because I don’t know where you are.
I know — I know beneath this, not in my feeling but in the deepest part of what I understand to be true — that you have not moved. That your presence is not something I can fall out of. That the centre of the sphere is here, even here. Even in this.
So I am not asking you to return. I am asking to recognise that you did not leave. I am not asking for the warmth to come back. I am asking to know that love is real even when all I feel is cold.
I am not asking you to fix the dryness. I am asking to trust that the dryness is not the ultimate truth. That the truth is below it. That the water is still moving through the stone.
All I have to offer tonight is this: I am here. I am turned toward you. That has to be enough, because it is all I have. Amen
Meditation
We move now into stillness. Nothing to do. Nothing to manufacture. The deep caverns of feeling, once obscure and blind — we let them be what they are. We do not fix them. We pray in the silence not just for ourselves, but for those who simply cannot even pray anymore.
We simply stay.
And I’ll declare for us that we are sitting, facing in the direction of love. With whatever we have brought to this prayer.
‘Be still, and know that I am God!’ (Psalm 46:10, NRSV)
And as we return: feel the edges of your space. The chair. The room. The screen. Come back slowly.
Realisation
DENIAL AND AFFIRMATION
We speak now. First the release. Then the truth. Speak each denial once, quietly. Let it go. Then speak the affirmation with your full voice.
I release the belief that God has withdrawn from me. God cannot withdraw. The centre of the sphere is here. Even here. God is where I am.
I release the belief that a dry prayer is a failed prayer.
Every turning toward love, however hollow it feels, is received in full. I am already in the flow.
I release the need to feel what I know to be true.
Truth holds whether I feel it or not. I am held in this place. The holding is real.
SEVEN AFFIRMATIONS
These are declarations of what is true in the dry place, even as we are in it. Speak each one. Then breathe. Then the next.
The ground holds, whether I feel it or not.
I do not need to feel God’s presence for God’s presence to be real.
I am already turned toward the light, even in the dark.
The dryness is not the whole truth. The whole truth is deeper than the dryness.
I stay. In this place. Turned toward love. And that is enough.
The flow of life has not stopped. I open now to the awareness of what has always been here.
Love is doing something in me that I cannot do for myself. I trust the slow work of God.
Appreciation
And so we give thanks. Hold on to your jewels, clutch your pearls, as our elders say, and here are our wild prayers of appreciation tonight!
We give thanks for our unresolved feelings. We give thanks for the cold, dark place from which I sometimes pray. We give thanks for the empty house of our soul. And we give thanks for the soul that has departed in disguise.
We give thanks that we are already in motion towards something we cannot yet see. We appreciate the story of Elijah who sat under the juniper tree and did not have to be anything other than exhausted.
‘The journey is too great for you.’ (1 Kings 19:7, NRSV) So we won’t argue with this.
We give thanks for the food from heaven. And the deep sleep and rest that we may take. For every person here tonight who showed up dry and has stayed, we give thanks. And we appreciate there are many in the world at this time who would be comforted to know they too are held in these prayers. And finally, we give thanks for the well below the dry ground and that it has not stopped flowing. We remain standing above it at all times, whether we feel it to be true, or not.
THE SECOND POEM
In place of the Lord’s Prayer this evening, we receive Juan’s other poem. ‘The Living Flame of Love.’ He wrote it after the dark night. Not instead of it. After. Speak it as a prayer — not as description of what you feel now, but as a declaration of what is moving, underground, toward you.
O living flame of love
That tenderly wounds my soul in its deepest centre!
Since now you are not oppressive,
Now consummate! if it be your will:
Tear through the veil of this sweet encounter!
O sweet cautery [cauterizing],
O delightful wound! O gentle hand! O delicate touch
That tastes of eternal life
And pays every debt! In killing you changed death to life.
O lamps of fire!
In whose splendours
The deep caverns of feeling,
Once obscure and blind,
Now give forth, so rarely, so exquisitely,
Both warmth and light to their Beloved.
How gently and lovingly
You wake in my heart,
Where in secret you dwell alone;
And in your sweet breathing,
Filled with good and glory,
How tenderly you swell my heart with love.
(Juan de la Cruz, ‘Llama de Amor Viva,’ c.1586. Trans. Kavanaugh and Rodriguez, ICS Publications.)
The deep caverns of feeling, once obscure and blind, now give forth warmth and light.
This is the destination of the dark night. Together, as pray-ers and prayers, we are on the road.
THE PRAYER OF PROTECTION
The light of God surrounds me.
The love of God enfolds me.
The power of God protects me.
The presence of God watches over me.
Wherever I am, God is.
(James Dillet Freeman, Unity, 1941)
Tihei mauri ora.
Prepared by Jacinda Faloon-Cavander for Unity of NZ