Dark Nights Of The Soul
A guide to finding your way through life's ordeals
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Beschreibung des Verlags
A 'dark night of the soul' is not a psychological syndrome, but a quest for meaning during life's darkest hours: the loss of a loved one, the end of a relationship, ageing and illness, career disappointments or just an ongoing dissatisfaction with life. Thomas Moore's extensive experience as a psychologist and theologian has taught him that the dark night is a challenge to restore ourselves and to become someone of substance, depth and soul. By using these trying times as an opportunity to reflect and delve into the soul's deepest needs, we can find a new understanding of life's meaning. Dark Nights of the Soul has its roots in a favourite chapter in Thomas Moore's million copy bestseller, Care of the Soul. In this beautifully-written and thought-provoking work he explores our contemporary anxieties and insecurities and shows how these metaphoric dark nights can become transforming rites of passage.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
There's an old saying that a devil is appealing at first but leaves you in despair, while an angel appears terrifying at first but leaves you refreshed and hopeful. This eighth book since Moore's extraordinarily successful Care of the Soul considers loss, pain, conflict, confusion, anger, excess, deviance and other disturbing feelings and behaviors not as devils to be exorcised but as angelic opportunities for deepening and altering the self. Derived from a chapter of the first book titled "The Gifts of Depression," the idea is not that suffering per se is good for the soul, but that to regard such visitations merely as suffering is to miss their point and meaning. Art and religion feature more prominently here than psychology, which Moore, a Catholic monk turned therapist, finds too mechanical and fix-it oriented to serve the soul. He adopts F. Scott Fitzgerald's phrase "the real dark night of the soul" to refer to anything from a short episode to an entire marriage and sees it as an invitation to spiritual cultivation, work that can be intellectual, creative or even physical, but which the monastically trained Moore tends to depict as quiet, solitary reflection. All this is set forth in a fluent, unflaggingly earnest style. Moore, who has an exceptional arsenal of literary and religious lore at his disposal, scatters allusions to figures as various as Madame Bovary, Gandhi, Thomas More and Glenn Gould (no Luther or Malcolm X, though) with dexterity. Short on detail, long on evocation, this book coveys the important if familiar message that spiritual growth entails darkness as well as light. While not exactly a substitute for reading Dostoyevski or Keats, this is perhaps an inducement to give them a chance.
