My roots are pretty distant, and certainly elsewhere, from Saint John of the Cross. A general familiarity with the western tradition informs me of his well known dark night. Certainly there's a universal element to John's experience, such that it's quite easy, and almost logical, to identify with his predicament. The truth is, however, that I'm not even familiar enough with him in order to know to what extent that predicament is similar to, for example, that of Job. Basically, the most I can honestly do is use him as a metaphor. And frankly, even then I'm not sure how much I can really identify.

I have nothing against darkness, but on the other hand, I don't particularly view it as an old friend either. I suppose that my relationship to darkness is similar to Jessie Colin Young's - on the one hand he sings of a "pain of knowing" that he'd like to have taken away, while on the other, he asks the darkness to keep his mind "from constant turning". It would seem that he wants to have things both ways, and it's my guess that many of us also feel this ambivalence toward the dark.

And maybe it's not really a dark night, but instead a good one? Though I obviously housed my own ambivalence toward possibly deciding that the Boidem had run its course, there seemed to be more sense to going gentle, rather than raging against something that in the long run seems rather inevitable.