We are tactile beings; loving a thing without also wanting to touch it is nearly impossible. Consider your cat. Your crush. Icons of Jesus, Mary, Krishna, Buddha — petted and anointed with oil. Who wouldn’t trade abstraction for a god whose feet we can kiss? However misguided such an impulse might be, surely it is forgivable.

This desire to touch what is holy is why I went to a Greek monastery on Monday evening, even though I haven’t been to the Orthodox Church in two years. It was the beginning of Holy Week. I will go as an anthropologist- outsider, I told myself, the way I came to the church five years ago, knowing nothing. Open and curious.

The room was sprinkled with fresh bay leaves and redolent with incense. Monks were chanting. It could have been great — it should have been great. I really wanted it to be great. But it was kind of meh. And I realized: I am still groping through my dark night. In my impatience to be over it, or through it, I’d closed my eyes and fooled myself into thinking the darkness was a thing I could end when I chose.

We often use the phrase “Dark Night of the Soul” to indicate anyone going through a hard time. But a true dark night of the soul (as meant by St. John of the Cross, who originated the term) is spiritual annihilation. Everything that previously made sense—the noble causes to which one devoted one’s life, the notions one had about God/church/the soul/the afterlife—all of it suddenly turns to dust. It comes without warning, and for those to whom it comes, there is no language, practice, or teaching that can undo it.

Picture an astronaut suddenly separated from her craft, drawn helplessly toward the horizon of a black hole. As she drifts away from everything she’s ever known, she notes with irony that the stars look no nearer now than they seemed on earth.

This was how I felt two years ago, when the Orthodox Church and the practices that once nourished me became ashes in my mouth.

No one understood. I scarcely understood it myself. Because I couldn’t explain it well, I didn’t tell many people. The people I did talk to alternately congratulated me for losing my religion or offered to pray for me. There were, and still are, people in my life who grieve the person they lost when my dark night descended.

It’s understandable. Dark nights happen to some and not others, and only God knows why. St. John of the Cross called it a holy experience. Tell that to my priest, I wanted to say. Tell it to the godparents I can’t face. Tell my spouse, who doesn’t understand why we can’t go to church together anymore, no matter how I try to explain. It feels like a wilderness.

But it’s not all bad. There’s a kind of abandon in it.

I cannot write about this without also admitting that last year I had what can only be described as a mystical experience. I have not written about it here, or anywhere, and suspect I never will. It would be impossible to describe without falling into hyperbole or overly poetic language. What I can tell you is that experience was the single most beautiful thing that has ever happened to me, and it changed me forever.

It also changed the way I think about God. The phrase “God is love” went from being a metaphor I didn’t really understand, to a tender and visceral truth. If I could, I would summon that experience again and again. I would live in it, and never leave.

And yet, returning to the church was never an option. Unfolding in my heart was—and is—a kind of spiritual entropy. I knew this before my mystical experience and nothing about the experience pointed me back in that direction. In some ways this was a relief, but also a disappointment.

For someone like me, whose needle always points toward a kingdom whose gates I can’t seem to find, there is sorrow in learning that no one path, no matter how well-trodden, leads to God. God lives in the wild, a nomad with no fixed abode. You do not find God; God finds you. Sometimes only once. Sometimes not at all. And none of us can say why.

I desperately wanted to be moved by the services at the monastery Monday night. Instead I bridled at the way men were allowed to kiss the icons before the women were. A monk scrolled his phone behind the iconostasis, bored. My soul was like an octopus, groping the dim reaches of the sanctuary: Not here, not here. Not here.

Beyond the windows, swallows swooped through the exterior courtyard. Their shadows flicked through panels of evening sun cast onto the monastery’s ceiling, and I thought about the archangels for whom the monastery was named. I don’t know if I believe in angels, but the birds’ flight was joyful and also singularly full of purpose. Make me like that, I prayed.

I looked to the nearby icon of the Virgin for comfort or some sign that my prayer had been heard, but she looked away with drooping, sorrow-filled eyes, offering her tiny son to the world. Jesus, too, seemed to be looking beyond me, over my shoulder or at the crown of my head. Only the image of John the Baptist would meet my gaze. The wild man, dweller-in-the-desert. Wearer of skins and eater of insects. The narrow fingers of one hand curled against his bony chest, pointing at something.

He was pointing at his own heart.

Stop searching, he seemed to be saying. Go within. You carry the only gate, right here, inside of you.

But I don’t know how to open it.

So I lit a candle in front of his icon instead.