"Sometimes I feel like a motherless chile," the weary black slave would sing to the hot southern night, giving expression to the condition of having been taken from home and family and subjected to the power of death. Although none of us has known the bitterness of that dehumanizing experience, the sung lament has surely expressed our own agony of soul from time to time, as we confront isolation and alienation and the world becomes too much with us.

"The dark night of the soul" is a fact of the religious life; the sense of the absence of God is as real as the divine presence. Those who use the Psalms as a daily part of their spiritual diet cannot but be impressed by the alternating sense of the presence and absence of God occurring there. St. John of the Cross makes it clear that the sense …