In 19 years of sharing my son’s story with the world, I have spoken about his joy.

I have spoken about his devotion to the Eucharist, his love for our lady, his technology projects, his sneakers, his laughter.

These things are true and they are beautiful and they are the parts of Carlo that the world needed to hear first.

But there is a teaching he gave me in August of 2005 when he was 14 years old on a Tuesday evening in our living room in Milan that I have held in reserve for 19 years because it is not comfortable.

It does not fit the tone of books with bright covers that tell you faith should make you feel wonderful.

It does not belong in a list of reasons why prayer will improve your life.

It is in fact the most important spiritual teaching I have ever received.

And Carlo gave it to me because he could see that I was going to need it.

And he gave it to me when he did because there would not be enough time to give it to me later.

What he described was the three nights of darkness.

Three specific stages of spiritual purification that every serious soul must eventually pass through on the way to genuine holiness.

And that most Catholics abandon, not because they lose faith, but because no one ever told them that darkness is not the same as abandonment.

that the silence of God is not the absence of God.

That the most terrifying spiritual experience of your life might also be the most loving thing he has ever done for you.

I entered the first night approximately 2 years after Carlo died.

Without his teaching, it would have destroyed me.

I’m telling you this now because I believe many of you are in one of these nights right now and do not know what you are in.

My name is Antonio Salzano.

I’m 59 years old and I am the mother of St.

Carlo Acudis.

You know parts of my story from other testimonies I have shared.

Carlo was born on May 3rd, 1991 in London.

He grew up in Milan.

He died on October 12th, 2006 at 15 years old of fulminant leukemia that moved through him in 9 days.

He was beatified in Aisi on October 10th, 2020 and canonized in 2025.

He attended daily mass.

He prayed the rosary.

He cataloged eucharistic miracles from around the world with the methodical precision of a scientist.

He wore jeans and sneakers and played video games and laughed with the complete unstudied ease of someone who had nothing to perform.

And he was also simultaneously one of the most spiritually serious persons I have known in my 60 years of life.

Spiritual seriousness and joy were not opposites in Carlo.

This was one of the things about him that confused people who expected holiness to look like severity.

He was genuinely, consistently, organically joyful.

Not because he was naive about suffering, but because he had understood something about suffering that most of us do not understand until it arrives.

And by then, we are inside it without a map.

He gave me the map on August 16th, 2005.

He was 14 years old.

I was sitting in our living room with a devotional book about Christian joy.

And Carlo noticed the cover and frowned slightly in the specific way he frowned when something was technically inaccurate.

and he said, “Mama, that book is going to hurt people when they hit what’s coming.

” I asked him what he meant.

He sat down across from me and said, “I need to tell you about the three nights of darkness.

I want to tell you about the book because I think many of you have read versions of it.

” The book I was reading, I will not name it because it was not unusual.

It was one of dozens of its kind.

Presented the spiritual life as a progressive movement toward greater peace, greater joy, greater felt closeness to God.

It was warm.

It was encouraging.

It was full of testimonials from people who described how prayer had transformed their lives into something luminous and settled and consistently consoling.

It used the word joy on nearly every page.

There is nothing wrong with Christian joy.

Carlo was the most joyful person I have known and his joy was real and earned and worth every word written about it.

But the joy he carried was not the joy the book was describing.

The book was describing the joy of the early stages of spiritual life.

The specific particular joy that God gives to souls newly awakened to prayer to draw them forward to make them want more.

It is real.

It is given for a purpose.

And then for souls God loves and is serious about, it is taken away.

The taking away is not punishment.

It is not evidence of failure.

It is the transition from one kind of spiritual life to a deeper one.

And it is, if you are not prepared for it, devastating.

Because everything you have been told to expect tells you that the loss of the good feeling means something has gone wrong.

Carlo looked at the book’s cover and understood immediately that I was being given a promise that would eventually be broken.

Not by God, but by the book’s inadequate account of how God works.

He had been reading San Juan de la Cruz and Santa Teresa de Avala for months.

At 14, with the focused, methodical attention he brought to everything he considered important, he said, “Mama, sit down.

I need to explain something that you may need in a few years.

I did not understand at the time why he said a few years specifically.

I understand now.

Carlo did not begin with abstractions.

He never did.

He began with what he called the mechanics of the thing.

The precise sequential structure of what San Juan de la Cruz described and what Carlo had spent months digesting and was now prepared to explain to his mother in language she could actually use.

The spiritual life is not a straight line upward.

He said it is more like climbing a mountain with three deep valleys that you must cross before you reach the summit.

Each valley is a night and each night is darker than the one before.

He paused to make sure I was following.

The reason most Catholics don’t know about these nights is that they are not comfortable to teach.

They don’t make good titles for books.

They don’t attract people to retreats.

But they are real and they happen to almost everyone who takes the spiritual life seriously.

And if you don’t know they are coming, if you have been told that the spiritual life should always feel like joy and consolation, you will interpret the darkness as disaster and you will either abandon prayer entirely or run desperately toward new devotions trying to get the feeling back.

And both of those responses make the night longer.

He looked at me with the expression he had when explaining something he considered important.

Focused, unhurried, entirely present.

So, I’m going to tell you what the three nights are, what they feel like from the inside, how you know you are in one rather than simply struggling ordinarily, and what the only correct response to each one is.

I want to pause here because what I am about to share is the teaching that changed my life.

The teaching that allowed me to survive the years after Carlo’s death with my faith not just intact but deepened in a way that the early consolationfilled years of my prayer life could never have produced on their own.

If you are in spiritual darkness right now, if your prayer has gone dry and silent, if doctrines that once felt clear have become confusing, if God seems to have withdrawn to a distance you cannot account for, please receive what Carlo told me that evening.

He meant it for me.

I believe he also meant it for you.

And if you want to go deeper into his daily practice, the specific way he inhabited the dry seasons and the consled seasons with the same faithfulness, the prayer he used when God seemed distant and the prayer he used when God seemed close.

Seven days with Carlo is in the description below.

Seven days of practice drawn from his actual life.

The link is there when this ends.

Now the three nights.

The first night, Carlos said is called the night of the senses.

It is when God withdraws the emotional consolations that drew you into prayer in the first place.

He described the early years of serious prayer with precision.

The warmth, the tears at mass, the sense of God’s nearness that makes the new life of faith feel genuinely luminous.

He did not dismiss this.

He said it was real and given intentionally.

God gives those consolations at the beginning because they are necessary at the beginning.

They are like the warmth a parent gives to draw a child who is learning to walk.

But there comes a point for every soul God is serious about.

Yet when the parent withdraws the hand, not because the child has failed, because the child is ready to walk.

He described what the withdrawal feels like from the inside.

Prayer that suddenly feels empty, mechanical, productive of nothing.

mass that is attended faithfully but received without the warmth that made it previously alive.

The rosary set on schedule feeling like words into air.

A growing sense that something is broken that a silent phone line has replaced what was once a warm voice.

And because you have read books that told you faith should always feel like joy.

He said your first interpretation is I have done something wrong.

God is angry with me.

My faith was never real.

or I need to find a new devotion, a new retreat, a new spiritual director, something that will make the feeling come back.

He looked at me steadily.

All of those interpretations are wrong.

The correct interpretation is God loves me enough to take me past spiritual childhood.

He is withdrawing the consolations so that I learn to pray from faith, not from reward.

He is teaching me that prayer is not about how I feel.

It is about what is true.

He was quiet for a moment.

The correct response to the first night is to continue doing exactly what you were doing before.

Mass, rosary, lectio deina, whatever your established practice is with the specific expectation that you will feel nothing.

Not because feeling nothing is the goal, but because continuing when you feel nothing is how faith becomes something more than a feeling.

It is how the soul develops the strength it will need for the second night.

I asked how long the first night lasts.

Months, he said.

Sometimes years.

It varies by person and by what God is trying to accomplish, but it ends.

It always ends.

And what follows it is not the old consolations restored.

It is a different quality of prayer.

Quieter, deeper, less dependent on experience.

The soul begins to understand that it is praying to a person who is always present rather than seeking a feeling that comes and goes.

He added one more thing before moving to the second night.

There is a sign that you are in the first night rather than in ordinary spiritual laziness or depression.

The sign is this.

You still want to pray.

The desire is there even when the consolation is not.

If you find yourself at mass thinking, I feel nothing but also I cannot imagine not being here, you are in the first night.

If the desire itself is gone, that is a different situation that requires different attention.

The second night, Carlos said, is harder.

It is called the night of the intellect.

He described it with a precision he had developed through months of reading San Juan de la Cruz.

the specific unmistakable experience of intellectual darkness that falls on a soul that has navigated the first night and moved into deeper territory.

In the second night, God withdraws intellectual clarity.

Doctrines that were always clear become suddenly confusing.

You read the creed and realize you’re not sure what you actually believe about the resurrection, about the Eucharist, about the nature of sin.

You attend a homaly and it produces not nourishment but a kind of frustration.

A sense that you are being told things that do not reach what you are actually experiencing.

You read scripture and encounter contradictions you never noticed before or interpretations you find unconvincing.

And you wonder whether your faith has been built on arguments you can no longer defend.

He held my gaze.

And the temptation in the second night is one of two things.

Either you conclude that you have discovered something the church has been hiding or misunderstanding, that you have arrived through honest intellectual examination at the recognition that Christianity is not what it claimed to be, or you become rigidly defensive, cling more tightly to doctrinal formulas, refuse any question, treat your intellectual confusion as evidence of weakness or attack rather than as the purification it actually is.

He paused.

Both responses are wrong.

The correct response is a specific form of intellectual humility that is not passive.

It is the humility of a person who says, “I don’t understand this right now.

” 2,000 years of saints and theologians have thought about these questions more carefully than I have in my confused current moment.

I will hold my confusion without resolving it falsely in either direction.

I will trust that the darkness is temporary.

I will continue.

He described what the second night is actually doing, what God is accomplishing through the withdrawal of intellectual clarity.

In the early stages of faith, understanding carries the weight of belief.

You believe because things make sense, because the arguments are satisfying, because the theological framework holds together in a way that feels intellectually compelling.

And that is good.

And it is not nothing.

But it is not the deepest kind of faith.

The deepest kind is the faith that continues when the arguments are silent.

When understanding cannot carry the weight and something else must carry it instead.

God withdraws the intellectual clarity because he wants the faith to rest on him rather than on the arguments.

He wants the soul to learn to say I believe not because it has assembled a satisfactory case but because it has encountered someone and encounters do not require arguments.

He mentioned Abraham again.

Abraham was asked to do something that made no theological sense.

He had been told his descendants would come through Isaac.

He was being asked to sacrifice Isaac.

The command contradicted the promise.

And Abraham went, not because he had resolved the contradiction intellectually, because he trusted the person who gave both the promise and the command.

The second night is Abraham on the mountain.

It is the purification of faith from dependence on understanding and the soul that comes through the second night arrives at something that no intellectual argument can produce.

The direct unmediated conviction of a person who has encountered God in the dark and found that God was still there.

Carlo was quiet for a moment before he began the third night.

I remember this a specific quality of stillness as if he was preparing himself as well as me.

The third night, he said, is what San Juan de la Cruz called the dark night of the soul.

It is the most difficult, and I do not want to be dishonest about how difficult it is.

He described it directly.

Not the withdrawal of emotional consolation, not the withdrawal of intellectual clarity, but the apparent withdrawal of God’s presence itself.

The sense of total abandonment, prayer that meets not silence, but void.

The cry to God that produces no echo, no warmth, no sign of reception.

The agonizing question, was any of it real? Most people, he said, do not come through the third night.

This is not judgment.

It is simply the honest testimony of the mystics.

The third night is the experience of spiritual desolation so complete that it can be indistinguishable from the inside, from the loss of faith itself.

And souls that enter it without preparation, without understanding what they are in, frequently either abandon prayer and gradually disengage from the faith entirely, or undergo a kind of spiritual crisis that produces permanent bitterness, a faith curdled into resentment, into going through the motions without any interior life remaining.

He held my gaze with complete seriousness.

But mama, here’s what I need you to understand.

The third night is the greatest act of love God can perform for a soul.

Because what it is purifying is the deepest and most invisible attachment of all.

The attachment to God himself as a source of comfort.

The soul that has navigated the first two nights still has at its core a relationship with God that is partly organized around receiving.

Receiving peace, receiving light, receiving the intellectual satisfaction of a faith that makes sense.

The third night strips all of that away.

It purifies the love until what remains is love without any reward whatsoever.

Love that continues in total darkness for no reason except that God is worthy of love.

This is the love he said quietly.

That was on Calvary.

Jesus crying, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me from a cross?” That cry is not failure.

It is the culmination of perfect love.

the love that continues when there is nothing left to support it except the bare fact of who God is.

He described the only responses that allow a soul to survive the third night.

The first is naked faith.

Believing that God exists and is present even when there is no experiential confirmation whatsoever, not feeling it, not reasoning to it, simply holding it as the conviction you will not relinquish regardless of what the darkness says.

The second is hope against hope.

Abraham’s hope, the hope that continues in the complete absence of visible reason to hope, not optimism, not the expectation that things will probably work out.

The specific costly act of hoping in a God who has apparently withdrawn because the soul knows that withdrawal is not absence.

And the third and the hardest is love without consolation.

the decision to continue loving God.

Not because the love produces anything, not because it feels like anything, not because it makes sense in any framework currently available, but simply because God is worthy of love.

Because the soul has been shown across the years of the first and second nights that there is something, someone worth loving for his own sake rather than for what love returns.

He looked at me.

The souls that survived the third night emerged transformed in a way that nothing else produces.

Not holier in the sense of being better at devotional practices, but genuinely structurally changed.

The attachment to self at the core of spiritual life, the subtle spiritual ego that persists even through years of serious prayer is gone.

What remains is a soul that loves God as God deserves to be loved.

And the light that follows and the dawn after the third night is what the mystics describe as union, not a feeling of union.

Actual union with God direct and unmediated that no first night consolation was ever capable of approximating.

He paused one more time.

Mama, I am telling you this now because you will probably need it.

And I want you to know before you need it, darkness is not abandonment.

Darkness is purification.

And the God who permits the darkness is present in it, closer than he has ever been working in silence precisely because silence is what the work requires.

Carlo died on October 12th, 2006.

He was 15 years old.

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