The Loving Fire

While the pain is still sharp and bright, Starr continues to search for a way to understand this strange journey that led her to fulfill a long- held fantasy right at the time when her world would suddenly be reduced to ashes.

"I've loved 'Dark Night of the Soul' for a long time," she said in an interview conducted on a sunny Valentine's Day, last week. "I even wrote my master's thesis on it."

After completing a number of "bad novels," she said she discovered that when she wrote about spiritual literature, she found that her true voice seemed to emerge.

Starr had been using St. John's text in her University of New Mexico-Taos humanities course and had always been frustrated when her students seemed bored by having to wade through its antiquated language. What seemed to save it, however, were their reactions when she interpreted its message.

"When I would guide them they would get it and they would love it," she said. "I just figured there was something in this and that maybe nonfiction was my writer's voice."

There is a current trend in publishing, Starr said, to translate for contemporary audiences great classic works that may have fallen out of favor due to the very hazards she encountered in her classroom. Few people today are willing, nor equipped, to embark on a trek through tough-to-decipher language and archaic repetition. We like our spiritual texts clear, concise, non-judgmental and to the point, preferably delivered by the likes of Bill Moyers or Deepak Chopra. That may be why the 12th Century Persian poet Rumi has become so popular today.

"He has really become accessible," Starr said, largely due to the work of modern translator Coleman Barks, "a Southern poet who has done these beautiful contemporary translations."

So, for good or ill, Starr's work follows on the heels of this trend, but it wasn't so by design. Starr said her relationship with this text goes back a long way in her life, back before other tragedies, a "terrible divorce" and the various searches she's embarked on to find answers to her spiritual questions. In the back of her mind all that time was the fantasy of finally sitting down and conducting a modern translation of one of her favorite works.

Interestingly, Starr said she doesn't consider herself particularly religious and doesn't ascribe to any one belief system in particular, although she has studied almost all of them at one time or another. Even a blurb on the book jacket touts it as "the first complete translation ... by a scholar outside the Catholic Church."

Starr isn't bothered by this. She said that since she's studied the text for so long she's come to the conclusion that you don't have to be a Christian to get the message in "Dark Night of the Soul." You don't even have to be religious either. So fundamental is its message, she said, that you may not even have to believe in God.

What is its message?

That may depend on how you read it for yourself. But, according to Starr, its message is about spiritual self reliance.

"True devotion springs from the heart," Starr writes as St. John. "It is the truth spiritual objects represent that matters. All the rest is mere attachment. For the soul to pass into perfection, such cravings need to pass away."

In essence, she said, he is saying that religion will help you maintain harmony in your life for a long time. But even the most devout may someday encounter a strange, unexplainable lull in their spiritual life, a time when the tenets of their faith aren't enough. It is as though the trusted cane you used to navigate a tortured landscape had inexplicably melted into the earth, leaving you standing alone and confused.

This is the dark night of the soul -- not the cliché of having weathered a bad dip in the road. This is more basic, more personal, something that will not easily go away and something for which you shouldn't feel self congratulatory about having withstood.

The trick, Starr said, is realizing what a gift this truly is.

In her introduction, Star writes, "Say each of the familiar rooms you go to seeking refuge are dark now, and empty. You sit down anyway. You take off all your clothes at the door and enter naked. All agendas have fallen away. You grow so still in your nondoing that you forget for a moment that you are or that maybe God is not . This quietude deepens in proportion to your surrender.

"Say what's secretly going on is that the Beloved is loving you back. That your first glimpse of the Absolute was God's great gift to you. That your years of revelation inside his many vessels was his second gift, wherein, like a mother, he was holding you, like a child, close to his breast, tenderly feeding you. And that this darkness of the soul you have come upon and cannot seem to come out of is his final and greatest gift to you."

Conducting a translation isn't as literal an exercise as you might think, according to Starr. Because of her long involvement with the text, something she shares with other translators, she said she has fallen in love with its language and ideas, and so there is less of an urge to impose a personal influence. There are exceptions, as evidenced by her work in "Dark Night."

"Like I used the adjective, 'juicy,' to describe a state of prayer," she said. "St. John of the Cross didn't say 'juicy.' I did. And it's funny because a couple of the reviews that have come out ... quoted the book and it was stuff that I made up. They were saying it was St. John of the Cross, but I knew it was Mirabai Starr."

The merge of both voices appeared to be a good one as she progressed toward finishing the manuscript last fall.

As gradually as the seasons change in Taos, something else began brewing that she found herself unprepared to deal with. It became a strange instance where the metaphysical ideas of the mind and visions of the heart ran headlong into the rock hard substance of mortality. Something was happening to Jenny.

In late October 2001, Starr and her family had just returned from an idyllic vacation in Hawaii. Soon afterward, she said her adopted daughter, Jenny, had a profound spiritual experience and had "entered an altered state."

Jenny attended a ceremony at the Hanuman Temple here, a "divine mother ritual" that, according to Starr, she had gone through many times since she was little. But this time, she had such a deeply "mystical experience" during it that the next day she was "still in an altered state, and the day after that, and the day after that. She was like getting further and further away, hardly speaking, hardly eating, not wearing shoes, making altars. And when she did speak, it was in these little aphorisms. And this was like a tough, rebellious, smart, sassy kid, completely transformed into a radiant, gentle, loving 14-year-old. Which was exactly what set me on my own spiritual path. It was an amazing transformation. People were saying, 'This is an enlightened being.' "

The trouble was, she didn't seem to be coming out of it.

"I was going, 'What is going on?' " Starr said. "I mean, yes, my daughter is being radiant and beautiful and is in this holy state, and I think that she's in a psychotic state."

Growing increasingly concerned about her health, Starr said that on the night of Oct. 30 she was trying to get Jenny to the hospital. "She hadn't eaten or slept. She was refusing to come indoors. It was the end of October and I was getting really worried."

Alone with her, Starr decided to take action. Holy Cross Hospital is a short distance from her home in Talpa, but along the way Jenny kept jumping out of the car and insisted on walking. At several times, Starr said she left the car running, door open, trying to get her back inside.

One of those times, Jenny jumped in the car and drove off.

That was the last time she saw her daughter alive.

"People think that maybe we had a fight and she took my car, but it wasn't anything like that," Starr said. "She was in a state that very well might have been psychotic."

Starr said she believes that both her mystical experience and her break with reality were genuine. As is so often the case with such tragedies, trying to make sense of it is the hardest part.

"I'm very bewildered by all this," Starr said. "I just know that it all coincides somehow," meaning her work, the book and Jenny's passing, " and it may take the rest of my life to sort it all out."

In the meantime, she is trying to cope. And trying to reconcile the ideas put forth by St. John and her grave sense of loss. Like she said, she may never figure it all out. But then, maybe she isn't meant to.

Starr is planning a book-signing and reading of "Dark Night of the Soul" (featuring a foreword by Thomas Moore), Saturday (Feb. 23), 2-5 p.m., at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House, located at the end of Morada Lane in Taos.

This article appeared February 21, 2005 in the Taos News)