Spanish mystic and poet Juan de la Cruz is famous for putting into words what he called “the dark night of the soul,” that time when one’s spiritual life is dark and heaven yields no seeming answers.

Apart from those individuals who struggle for days or months or years or even decades against unbelief, there’s the struggle that many feel temporarily and more often.

It’s that waking during the night and being confronted with an onslaught of thoughts of things that need doing or more soberingly, thoughts of our failures, our sins, our wrongs.

Because it’s at night when the props and baubles of daylight are stripped away and we sometimes confront ourselves in a way we don’t usually do when distracted by the ephemera of the day.