Christianity Archives - Page 6 of 12

The Sacrament of Living

“Yet I wonder if there was ever a time when true spiritual worship was at a lower ebb. To great sections of the church the art of worship has been lost entirely, and in its place has come that strange and foreign thing called the ‘program.’ This word has been borrowed from the stage and applied with sad wisdom to the type of public service which now passes for worship among us.”

Laments like that are commonplace among contemporary observers of the church scene. What makes this quotation so noteworthy, poignant in fact, is that it was not written about the contemporary church. It was written in 1948. A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God.

Tozer wants to correct the omnipresent sterility in the church. How? By encouraging exactly what the title suggests: the pursuit of God. “The stiff and wooden quality about our religious lives is a result of our lack of holy desire.” Or, from one of the prayers with which Tozer ends each of the chapters, he wants us all to say, “I am ashamed of my lack of desire, O God, the Triune God, I want to want Thee; I long to be filled with longing; I thirst to be made more thirsty still.”

Right away, we begin to realize that Tozer wrote this book with a particular audience in mind. This is not the book for the person who does not have at least a nodding profession of Christianity. The pursuit of God in the title is not why a non-Christian should start pursuing God. Tozer spends a brief moment having a merry time at the expense of the “idealists” who dispute the reality of things external to the mind and the “relativists” who like to assert there are no fixed Truths.

These idealists and relativists are not mentally sick. They prove their soundness by living their lives according to the very notions of reality they in theory repudiate and by counting upon the very fixed points that they prove are not there. They could earn a lot more respect for their notions if they were willing to live by them; but this they are careful not to do. Their ideas are brain-deep, not life-deep.

Just so. But this book is also not intended for the subspecies of Christian who wants to delve into the deep waters of theology. There are, Tozer argues, the scribes (those who tell us what they have read) and the prophets (those who tell us what they have seen). People who review books, like this here reviewer, are mere scribes. Tozer is a prophet. Scribes, Tozer laments, have dominated the discussion in the modern church. Scribes do silly things like wonder about predestination and divine sovereignty. “Prying into them may make theologians, but it will never make saints.” We really do not need people who tell us what they have read in books.

So, if Tozer does not want a reader like me who is going to talk about what I learned in a book, whom does he want to read his book? Tozer is a prophet who wants to tell us what he has seen, not what he has read. He sees sterility. He sees Christians who say they believe, but have become stuck in a rut in which God is just some distant Being who may have done a good thing or two (like dying on a cross), but has no immediate relevance in deciding how we live on a Tuesday afternoon. One of the greatest problems, Tozer argues, is the tendency of Christians to divide life into secular and scared spaces. The Pursuit of God is ultimately collapsing those two spaces into one, to pursue God always, at all times and all places. Tozer wants to awaken you from your slumber, to spur you on. This book is a call to action for the somnolent Christian.

Tozer’s audience is thus clear. You don’t read this book to plumb theological mysteries or to get persuasive arguments for why Christianity is true. You read this book because your faith has become sterile and you want to make it fruitful. You read this book because you want a gentle yet firm author telling you what he has seen when he faced God directly.

It starts here: “Much of our difficulty as seeking Christians stems from our unwillingness to take God as He is and adjust our lives accordingly. We insist upon trying to modify Him and to bring Him nearer to our own image.” God is the fixed point; He created everything and He is present in everything. Chapter by chapter, Tozer wants to tell you how to lead your life pursing that fixed point and not your own desires.

The fundamental challenge: understand the need for a personal and intimate acquaintance with God. For many Christians, “God is not more real than He is to the non-Christian. They go through life trying to love an ideal and be loyal to a mere principle.” The chapter titles alone tell you what this sort of life it is that Tozer is arguing you should want to live. Apprehend God. Understand that God is universally present. Remove the veil separating you from God. Give up your possessions, your toys. Hear the voice of God. Gaze on the beauty of God. Remember you are a creature, not the Creator. Learn to be meek.

The ultimate call of this book is to practice the Sacrament of Living. All the admonitions point the same way: your life can be spent in the pursuit of God. If you want a patient and insistent guide to learning how to live a life like that, then this is a great book for you. It’s no surprise that the book is still in print; it is far crisper and more direct than most of the similar books being written today. For those who like this sort of thing, it is a book which will happily sit on your bedside table, always ready for another read.

(Moody Press sent me a copy of the book in exchange for this review.)

Faith and Uncertainty

There is something about the human mind that does not like uncertainty; a mystery leaves a hole in the psyche that simply must be filled.

This is a rather good thing for the survival of the species. If you heard a strange growl behind you and you didn’t wonder what was causing it, you might not be around to generate offspring.

That doesn’t explain, though, why we like to know what happened in a bit of fiction. Consider Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw.” The story is Henry James looking right at you and saying, “You don’t like uncertainty. It makes you anxious not to know what is going on. Well, here, let me turn the screw a little more and increase your anxiety.”

The plot in brief: a governess goes to a large country manor to watch a couple of wonderfully charming children, a boy and a girl. While there, she sees a male ghost, whom she finds out look just like a former servant on the estate. Shortly thereafter she sees a female ghost, who looks like the former governess. She keeps seeing the ghosts. Nobody else ever sees the ghosts. Her terror mounts. Then the ghost appears in the presence of one of the other servants and the young girl. Neither one sees the ghost as the governess shrieks in terror. Afraid of the governess and her crazy tales of seeing ghosts, the servant and the girl leave the estate. Soon thereafter, left alone with the young boy, the governess sees the male ghost coming into the room to attack her or the boy. In her terror, she murders the young boy. End of story.

The question: are the ghosts real or just a figment of the active imagination of the governess?

Oh, that wasn’t actually the plot of the Henry James story.

The plot in brief: a governess goes to a large country manor to watch a couple of what we will soon discover are terrifying children. She discovers to her horror that the ghosts of a pair of former servants are haunting the place. Even more terrifying, the children can see the ghosts, yet refuse to acknowledge that they are there. She begins to realize that the children have a connection with these ghosts. There are hints that she is afraid that before they died, the former servants may have had a relationship with these children, perhaps even a sexual relationship. The ghosts and the children may or may not be planning to all unite again in a sort of ghostly family. Eventually she catches the daughter running off with the female ghost, but when she exposes the matter, the daughter becomes furious and refuses to have anything more to do with the governess. The young girl leaves. Left alone with the governess, the young boy is in the room when the male ghost shows up. The governess sees the ghost first, and then the boy screams out, “You devil” and then mysteriously dies.

The question: was the young boy calling the governess a devil because she had exposed the existence of the ghosts or the ghost a devil because he was afraid of the ghost?

Now, Dear Reader, you have two plot outlines, both of which lead to a question. The answer to the question will color how you read the entire story. You can hunt for clues in the story to answer the question. Enjoy.

But, first, which one of those is the real plot of “The Turn of the Screw”?

Before you answer, there is also this important tidbit: the bulk of the story is a manuscript written by the governess herself. Is she a reliable narrator?

This is the brilliance of the Henry James story. If you just read it, having no idea what to expect, you might very well think you just read a rather conventional tale, without a lot of mystery. I read a story about governess who was slightly insane and just seeing things until her mind snapped and she murdered a young boy. Ho-hum, I thought. Then I Googled the book and discovered that everyone else also knows exactly what this story is about, but that there is zero agreement which story is the correct one. I then chatted with a couple of former students about the book, and discovered they also read a different book than I read.

That, of course sends everybody back to the text to see why everyone else is wrong. Going back, you discover something remarkable. James, ever the precise writer, has oh so carefully arranged every trace of evidence for your preferred theory in a way that it can actually be read in a completely different manner.

This is not the case of a book which just doesn’t make any sense. Thomas Pynchon writes books like that; when you hit the end there is absolutely no point in going back to try to figure out what just happened in the novel; the novel (take your pick which one—they are all the same—but if you want the best example, Gravity’s Rainbow) deliberately makes no sense—that is the point.

“The Turn of the Screw,” in contrast, makes perfect sense. There is a perfectly coherent story here, and there is a ton of evidence that the story is saying exactly what you thought it said. Moreover, there is not a single unexplainable part of the story. It all fits neatly in a little box.

That is true, no matter which of the above plots you think is the actual plot of the story.

The Big Question: how does this uncertainty about the plot of “The Turn of the Screw” make you feel? Is the answer simply that the story has no meaning? Can you read it and say, “The ghosts are like Schrodinger’s cat, neither there nor not there, but the box is one which it is impossible to open”?

What if I told you that “The Turn of the Screw” was a true story? It comes with an introduction where a narrator, who could very well be Henry James, is talking with someone who has the governess’ manuscript. Maybe the story isn’t fiction at all. (OK, you know it is fiction (how?), but pretend for a second that you don’t know.) If the story is true, are you still perfectly willing to accept that there is no correct version of the plot?

Life is like that. The history of theology and philosophy is full of explanations of the nature of life. You might think you could just sit down and reason out the world, but you will rapidly find that many have gone before you and reasoned about the world. What did they find? Not the same thing.

You cannot escape the fact that if you are going to understand the world, you have to start by believing one thing. Then you can work out the rest. You can test your theory of the world against the world to see if it collapses. Is it possible, for example, that in “The Turn of the Screw” the people you thought were real are the ghosts and the people you thought were ghosts are the real people? I haven’t tried to see if that works too—I didn’t see anyone propose it, so I have no idea if anyone has ever tried to see if that theory works. Maybe it works. Maybe there is some place in the narrative that it would break down and demonstrate it doesn’t fit the world. In that case, you’d toss the theory aside and begin anew.

That is how we live our lives. We start with faith. We must start with faith in something. And from there, we build up a world. People are confused about this fact all the time. People think it is faith that needs to be examined. People think that other people’s faith is silly or childish or something. But, the faith isn’t the only question worth discussing. Another interesting discussion is whether starting with wherever you place your faith, do the facts of the world fit? What does that story of the world look like? Are there wobbly parts or unexplained parts?

As Chesterton notes in Orthodoxy, if a man starts by believing he is Napoleon, there is no point in arguing with him about whether he is Napoleon. Far more interesting is to explore the world of this Napoleon. Ask, him “If you are Napoleon, then why is the world the way it is? Why don’t you fix this shabby little world if you are the Great Napoleon?” That conversation is really interesting. You might learn something about your own world in that conversation.

You say that there is a God. Then why did God create the world in this way instead of another way? You say there is no God. Then why do you follow a moral code? You say that the world is determined. Then why do you have faith in your own mental processes? You say you have free will. Then why do you decide to do so many things you wish you did not do?

“The Turn of the Screw” is a lesson in world building. What you start believing has consequences for how you interpret a great many details of this world. How certain are you that the facts of this world are not better explained by that person over there with a different starting place, a different faith?

Equal Rights

It is easy to imagine Friedrich Nietzsche sitting in his study, writing away, merrily imagining the look of horror which will cross the faces of his readers when they come across the line he just penned. He obviously liked to shock people; the bigger the shock, the happier he was. But, alas, unlike his contemporary creator of scandalous bon mots, Oscar Wilde, Nietzsche was not popular in the salons of the day. People never knew what the guy was mumbling about over there in the corner.

Having never read a biography of Nietzsche, I have no idea if that portrait is correct. But, it sure feels right. How else to explain bits like this:

This book belongs to the very few. Perhaps not one of them is even living yet…
The conditions under which I am understood, and then of necessity—I know them only too well. One must be honest in matters of the spirit to the point of hardness before one can even endure my seriousness and my passion. One must be skilled in living on mountains—seeing the wretched ephemeral babble of politics and national self-seeking beneath oneself. One must have become indifferent; one must never ask if the truth is useful or if it may prove our undoing. The predilection of strength for questions for which no one today has the courage; the courage for the forbidden; the predestination to the labyrinth

That is from the Preface to a book Nietzsche wrote in 1888, shortly before he went insane. It wasn’t published for another 7 years because, well, the Publisher (quite understandably) was a bit leery. The title of the book: The Antichrist. Yep. Nietzsche put on his most malicious grin and pulled out all the stops in this one.

The quick summary: Christians are really bad. The longer version: Christians are really really bad.

The book is a mess if you want a nice linear dispassionate argument. Then again, all of Nietzsche’s books are a mess on those grounds, which, not coincidentally, is what makes him fun to read. Would you rather read a long dry explanation of the failures of Christianity or witticisms like this: “What is more harmful than any vice? Active pity for all the failures and the weak: Christianity.”

Be careful before you agree with that witticism, however. Do you really think pity is a vice?

Quite in general, pity crosses the law of development, which is the law of selection. It preserves what is right for destruction; it defends those who have been disinherited and condemned by life; and by the abundance of the failures of all kinds which it keeps alive, it gives life itself a gloomy and questionable aspect.

This is the same issue with which Darwin struggles in The Descent of Man. If you have a passel of pigs (also known as a bunch of pigs), and one of them is sickly and weak, you don’t take pity on it and let it spend its days breeding and bearing offspring. You kill it off to preserve the passel. (Yes, really!, a group of pigs called a passel. I am not making this up! There is, incidentally, also a “Sounder of Swine” and a “Singular of Boars.”)

Where did we get this crazy idea that we should have pity on the weak? Yeah, that is a Christian idea. Nietzsche explains that it is part of the slave revolt, the rise of the priest, whom Nietzsche recognizes “for what he is, the most dangerous kind of parasite, the real poison-spider of life.” Again, be careful before you agree that priests are really that evil.

If you are a Christian, can you really take offense? Nietzsche is, after all, right. You do take pity of the weak, you do think they should be loved and helped. And, if you are honest with yourself, you also know you would not prosper in Nietzsche’s preferred playground.

Nietzsche may seem like he is all merry fun if you like the idea of mocking Christians. If you like the frisson of shocking religious types, a book like The Antichrist seems like the perfect tome. Well, until you hit this sort of passage:

Whom do I hate most among the rabble of today? The socialist rabble, the chandala apostles, who undermine the instinct, the pleasure, the worker’s sense of satisfaction with his small existence—who make him envious, who teach him revenge. The source of wrong is never unequal rights but the claim of “equal” rights.
What is bad? But I have said this already: all that is born a weakness, of envy, of revenge. The anarchist and the Christian have the same origin.

What’s worse than a Christian? A socialist! An anarchist! Anyone who thinks that all people are equal. People like you.

The poison of the doctrine of “equal rights for all”—it was Christianity that spread it most fundamentally. Out of the most secret nooks of bad instincts, Christianity has waged war unto death against all sense of respect and feeling of distance between man and man, that is to say, against the presupposition of every elevation, of every growth of culture…
And let us not underestimate the calamity which crept out of Christianity into politics. Today nobody has the courage any longer for privileges, for masters’ rights, for a sense of respect for oneself and one’s peers—for a pathos of distance. Our politics is sick from this lack of courage.
The aristocratic outlook was undermined from the deepest underworld through the lie of the equality of souls…

Are you still agreeing with Nietzsche about the evils of Christianity?

Nietzsche is entirely right about this: Christianity is the source of the belief that everyone deserves equal respect. As Paul notes in his letter to the Galatians, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” That is a very radical claim. We have still not perfected the idea of living like that. Truth be told, we will never be able to perfect that life as long as we are all stamped with sin. But the idea that this is something to which we should all aspire is powerful. How powerful? It is powerful enough that you can hear it echo in the arguments of people today who believe they have completely rejected Christianity.

You want an honest and total rejection of Christianity? See Nietzsche. But, if you want to talk about equal rights, then perhaps you should acknowledge your debt to the New Testament.

Hipster Church

Why Would Anyone Go To Church? The very way that question is framed suggests there is something odd about church. Even odder are the people who go to church.

Kevin Makins wrestled with this question and then wrote a book with that title. His answer? Well, that will take a bit to explain.

At first glance it would be very easy to dismiss this book. (Don’t worry, there is a second glance below.) Millennial hipster decides that the church of his childhood is boring and decides to start a Cool Church (called Eucharist!) which does Cool things with Cool people. No boring oldsters here! First step: move church to Sunday afternoon so we can all sleep in! I’m not making that up; that is exactly what Makins says. Afternoon church makes it easier to go to those all-night parties with cool emo music and fights breaking out on the dance floor which Makins begins the book by describing.

But wait, there’s more! “A steampunk-themed summer camp, which featured an ‘Imagination Train’ maintained by a bunch of twentysomethings in thrift shop overalls.” (Note “thrift shop”—these Hip Millennials only wear overalls ironically.) Or, “One Sunday, we took photos of every congregant with their hands covered in fake blood in front of a large golden halo. Then, hoping to spark conversations about faith, we pasted eighty of the photos onto an old fence at our city’s Art Crawl event under the title Sinners and Saints.”

But, alas, constantly thinking of hip new things to do is tiring, but when they save on the planning and repeat an event, nobody comes. Sometimes you just get tired. That’s especially true the Sunday after Christmas. So, let’s have Nap Sunday! Instead of that sermon thing, everyone can just stretch out and take a nap!

You see, people don’t want all those old denominations and theological debates. Everyone should be welcome at church. Everyone! Well, almost everyone. One year, the church rents an old gothic cathedral to use on Sunday afternoons. Being young and hip and cool, they do all sorts of young, hip and cool things in this 150 year old building. Predictably enough, damage was done. Repeatedly. Eventually, the church which owned the building kicked them out. And in one of the uglier moments in this book, Makins explains the problem with the church from which they were renting space:

They had witnessed congregational decline and a loss of cultural influence while being stuck with an expensive and impossible-to-maintain building, which drained them of resources. Was it any surprise that the added discomfort of our young congregation finally broke the camel’s back? I had hoped they would be able to respond to these challenges with courage and imagination. I wanted St. Barnabas to welcome a young church and her chaos, but after 150 years of stability, how would I feel if I was of the generation that witnessed members die off and watched youth walk away?
There’s a good chance I’d also cling to the little bit of security I had left.

Everyone is welcome at church as long as you aren’t old and think 150 year old church buildings are worth preserving. If you are like that, well just die off and let the millennials take over. (By the way, the anger dripping in this passage is a mere trickle compared to what shows up in the chapter on the professional church plant advisors.)

The church struggles. One day a newer, hipper church starts up, but it is a bit different. It is cleverly named “New Church”! It is like a church for, you know, grown-ups. People start switching churches. As one of the switchers tells Makins, “It’s nice to see some of our old gang here. It feels like Eucharist was high school and New Church is university!” Makins talks about how angry and bitter he became until he broke down and realized how wrong he was to feel that way.

It is that sort of moment that shows the book deserves the second glance. While Makins all too often can’t get out of his own way and drifts back into Rebellious Hipster Mode, that is not the story he wants to tell. He wants to tell the story of how he discovered The Church.

The popular vision of the church is that it is that building in town where people dress up and go on Sunday. Even Christians, who often say that the church is really the people and not the building, all too often think of church as that institutional structure. Makins is unravelling that image. Go back to the yarn and start over.

What is the church? It is a community. With Christ as the Head, it is the worldwide community of people who are acting as God’s agents on earth. What Makins discovers is that local manifestations of that worldwide community don’t all have to look the same. They don’t all need to sing the same songs and meet at the same time and have the same type of sermon. They don’t need to all agree on the secondary matters of the faith. They don’t even all need to have polished Sunday Services:

I am of the firm opinion that, every now and then, church should suck. The music should be out of key, the sermon meandering, and the chairs uncomfortable. That is our reminder that church isn’t a Sunday show—just another product to consume—but a called-out community of people following Jesus together. That’s easy to forget if church is “good” every week.

As Makins discovers, when Paul compares the church to the human body, he really did mean that hands and feet play different roles. A millennial hipster church doesn’t have to look exactly like the Lutheran church of his youth. It can indeed do things differently.

I don’t think other congregations should necessarily do what we’ve done….
I get it. Eucharist is freaking weird. Not every church should be a foot like us. I’ll go one step further: most churches shouldn’t be like us.
But we should be like us.

That doesn’t mean the Lutheran church of his youth got things wrong. Eucharist is a foot, but the Church still needs those hands too.

Although he doesn’t mention the passage, what Makins discovers over the course of this book is that stripped to its essentials, a church looks something like this: “And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” (Acts 2:42) Christians gather together for teaching, fellowship, bread-breaking, and prayer. Note that nothing in that passage dictates the form of the fellowship or the teaching. If Eucharist wants to have Nap Sunday, why would anyone outside that local congregation object? If the church down the street wants to play hymns on an organ in an old building, why would anyone at Eucharist object?

The subtitle of Makins’ book captures both the good and the bad of this book: A Young Community’s Quest to Reclaim Church for Good. There is something refreshing about Makins’ story. There is something incredibly good about the way he points attention back to the fundamentals of what a church actually is. Many people would benefit from rethinking the nature of the church instead of just the details of the church they attend or used to attend.

But, unfortunately the tone of the book will mean this book gets a much smaller readership than Makins’ message deserves. Makins doesn’t just want to talk about the Good. He wants to Reclaim the Church. Reclaim it from Whom, exactly? With a bit more charity to the types of Churches and Christians which anger him so much, Makins would have had a much stronger claim on their attention.

The Dark Night Returns

“I call, I cling, I want … and there is no One to answer … no One on Whom I can cling … no, No One. Alone … Where is my Faith … even deep down right in there is nothing, but emptiness & darkness … My God … how painful is this unknown pain … I have no Faith … I dare not utter the words & thoughts that crowd in my heart … & make me suffer untold agony.”

“So many unanswered questions live within me afraid to uncover them … because of the blasphemy … If there be God … please forgive me … When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives & hurt my very soul. I am told God loves me … and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul.”

“As for me—The silence and the emptiness is so great—that I look and do not see;—Listen and do not hear.”

Mother Teresa, the nun who spent her life caring for the most destitute people in the most destitute city on earth, wrote those words. They were part of series of letters she wrote to her confessor over her lifetime. Published a decade after her death, they sent shock waves through the Christian community. How could a women who epitomized the love of God write such things, not once or twice, but over and over for decade after decade?

Such sentiments run directly counter to the message on a typical Sunday morning in churches everywhere. Come to church, meet Jesus and experience the Joy of Christ. Draw closer to God and be happy. If you are feeling distant from God, the problem is not that God has moved; the problem is obviously that you have wandered away. Come back and be happy. If tragedy strikes do not despair. God is there. Be happy.

That message is misleading. Knowing God is not one long experience of joy and feeling ever closer to God. This is not a new thought. St John of the Cross, a 16^th century Spanish monk, described in excruciating detail the agony that comes to some Christians as they follow Christ. The book: The Dark Night of the Soul. When your soul is in that dark night, you would write things exactly like Mother Teresa’s thoughts above. This dark night, according to John, is not a wandering away from God; it is rather something that God brings to some Christians in order to help them draw closer to Him.

How to describe the Dark Night? It is hard, if not impossible:

We may deduce from this the reason why certain persons—good and fearful souls—who walk along this road would like to give an account of their spiritual state to their director, are neither able to do so nor know how….But this capacity for being described is not in the nature of pure contemplation, which is indescribable, as we have said. For the which reason it is called secret.

This is a general problem with discussing the work of the spirit. Paul notes that such communication happens in “groanings too deep for words.” Eliot repeatedly laments the failure of words to describe deep thoughts. Our language fails us.

Nonetheless, John does grapple with what is going on in the Dark Night. “God leads into the dark night those whom He desires to purify from all those imperfections so that he may bring them farther onward.” What is happening?

And when the soul suffers the direct assault of this Divine light, its pain, which results from its impurity, is immense; because when this pure light assails the soul, in order to expel its impurity, the soul feels itself to be so impure and miserable that it believes God to be against it, and thinks that it has set itself up against God. This causes it sore grief and pain, because it now believes that God has cast it away…For by means of this pure light, the soul now sees its impurity clearly (although darkly), and knows clearly that it is unworthy of God or of any creature. And what gives it most pain is that it thinks that it will never be worthy and that its good things are all over for it.

Again, there is a strain of Christianity that instantly rebels against descriptions of the Dark Night, insisting that we should never feel separated from God. And yet, we have a very reliable account of someone experiencing exactly this Dark Night. I don’t mean Mother Teresa.

And when the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour. And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Why does Christ scream out about God forsaking Him? It is not that Christ Himself has wandered away from God; God forsakes Him because He bears our sin. All of it. Christ walks into the Dark Night of the soul because He bears your sin and he no longer believes that God is there when He feels in his own Being the enormity of your sin.

What is the advantage of enduring this Dark Night?

But there is a question which at once arises here—namely, since the things of God are of themselves profitable to the soul and bring it gain and security, why does God, in this night, darken the desires and faculties with respect to these good things likewise, in such a way that the soul can no more taste of them or busy itself with them than with these other things, and indeed in some ways can do so less? The answer is that it is well for the soul to perform no operation touching spiritual things at that time and to have no pleasure in such things, because its faculties and desires are base, impure and wholly natural; and thus, although these faculties be given the desire and interest in things supernatural and Divine, they could not receive them save after a base and a natural manner, exactly in their own fashion. For, as the philosopher says, whatsoever is received comes to him that receives it after the manner of the recipient. Wherefore, since these natural faculties have neither purity nor strength nor capacity to receive and taste things that are supernatural after the manner of those things, which manner is Divine, but can do so only after their own manner, which is human and base, as we have said, it is meet that its faculties be in darkness concerning these Divine things likewise. Thus, being weaned and purged and annihilated in this respect first of all, they may lose that base and human way of receiving and acting, and thus all these faculties and desires of the soul may come to be prepared and tempered in such a way as to be able to receive, feel and taste that which is Divine and supernatural after a sublime and lofty manner, which is impossible if the old man die not first of all.

Suddenly the problem Christians have is evident. Someone comes to have faith that Christ is indeed Lord and Savior of all. The next step is to learn more and draw closer to God. Eventually, the person becomes a “mature” believer, someone who has grown up and is no longer like those people in the hour they first believed. Mature believers starts to feel good about their walk with God. They feel close to God. Indeed, they become a bit proud of how much they have grown in faith.

The Dark Night, the terrible and awful and nearly unendurable Dark Night, is a purgation of that pride. God feels distant; the Christian feels abandoned. To endure the Dark Night, you must keep going, humbling yourself before God, continuing to follow the path that God has set forth, climbing what John calls the ladder of love which begins with the first rung when the soul “can find no pleasure, support, consolation or abiding-place in anything soever.” Having hit that point, only then can the soul proceed to the second rung of seeking God without ceasing, without distractions of any kind. And even at that point, there are still eight rungs to go before becoming “wholly assimilated to God.” Few reach this last rung. Yet, in the Dark Night, there is nothing to do but steadily go up.

The Dark Night of the Soul is, at its root, a devotional book, but it is nothing like the modern day examples of books in that genre. Christians don’t talk much about the Dark Night. Perhaps they should. The Dark Night has no easy answers; it may well last the rest of your life; it is a place of spiritual agony. It is a place where there is nothing left but faith.

How Long?

O LORD, how long shall I cry for help
and you will not hear?
Or cry to you “Violence!”
and you will not save?
Why do you make me see iniquity,
and why do you idly look at wrong?
Destruction and violence are before me;
strife and contention arise.
So the law is paralyzed,
and justice never goes forth.
For the wicked surround the righteous;
so justice goes forth perverted.

That was the prophet Habakkuk. Twenty-five hundred years ago.

Just as before, the cicadas kept on singing their song, dry and hoarse. There was not a breath of wind. Just as before, a fly kept buzzing around the priest’s face. In the world outside there was no change. A man had died, but there was no change.
“So it has come to this….” He shivered as he clutched the bars. “So it has come to this….”
Yet his perplexity did not come from the event that had happened so suddenly. What he could not understand was the stillness of the courtyard, the voice of the cicada, the whirling wings of the flies. A man had died. Yet the outside world went on as if nothing had happened. Could anything be more crazy? Was this martyrdom? Why are you silent? Here this one-eyed man has died—and for you. You ought to know. Why does this stillness continue? This noonday stillness. The sound of the flies—this crazy thing, this cruel business. And you avert your face as though indifferent. This…this I cannot bear.

That was Shusaku Endo. Fifty years ago.

Silence is a Great Book. I am amazed I have only now read it for the first time. It’s a book that I have heard about sporadically for decades, but beyond the crucial moment toward the end of the book, I knew nothing about it. Nobody ever told me that its greatness is much larger than the tough moral decision to which the story leads.

The Big Moment: a Portuguese priest is faced with the decision: apostatize or let other innocent people be tortured. That is one of those decisions you really don’t want to have to make in life. But, framed purely a story leading to that decision, the book seems much smaller than it is.

There is a triumphalist strain of Christianity that makes it seem like becoming a Christian means moving from one spiritual high to another. Sure, we know there are spiritual lows but, gosh, all you need is a retreat or a camp or a really great worship team at church to lift you out of those spiritual lows and set you back on the mountain top. If you have a problem, you pray. Problem solved. If you know someone who is feeling down, you tell them you are praying for them. Problem solved. If the pesky problem just doesn’t go away, pray harder.

But, what if the problem doesn’t go away? This is where it gets sticky for many Christians. What if God is…silent.

And like the sea God was silent. His silence continued.
No, no! I shook my head. If God does not exist, how can man endure the monotony of the sea and its cruel lack of emotion? (But supposing…of course, supposing, I mean.) From the deepest core of my being yet another voice made itself heard in a whisper. Supposing God does not exist…
This was a frightening fancy. If he does not exist, how absurd the whole thing becomes.

There is the test of faith. When God is silent, do you still believe God is there?

This test of faith is a tough one for the modern Christian Church, much like it has been for the church in all ages. “The law is paralyzed and justice never goes forth.” What then? Surely God will act, right? Surely justice will prevail, right? Why is God silent?

Habakkuk complains to God about the injustice he sees in his land. God finally answers. The Babylonians roar in and things get much, much worse. What then?

Silence wrestles with this question in unflinching prose.

“You will not meet with greater suffering than this,” said the priest in a voice filled with earnest fervor. “The Lord will not abandon you forever. He it is who washes our wounds; his is the hand that wipes away our blood. The Lord will not be silent forever.”

The protagonist in the novel is constantly tempted with the lie of infertile soil. Japan is just not a place where Christianity can prosper. The Japanese converts don’t really believe; they have corrupted the message. There is no hope for Christianity in Japan. So there is no point even in trying. None at all. Just give up. Look for a different cure. “Love the Lord Your God” is not enough. “Love your neighbor as yourself” is not enough. Christians, if they want to do something productive in this land, must find something else to do. There are other problems, you know. It’s not really about love and conversions. It’s about making people’s lives better. Abandon the Christian message of Love and do something tangible, something useful.

That is the counsel of despair. That is the counsel of a loss of faith. It is easy to say you have faith when things are going well. It is easy to say you have faith when God is doing what we want Him to do. But, what do we do when God is silent? What do we do when misery and injustice prevail? Do we still trust God then? Do we still believe that God is sovereign, that He is in control?

“So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” Why faith, hope and love? Faith that even though God is silent, He is still there. Hope that God will not be silent forever. And love? There it is again. Love. Love God. Love Your Neighbor. “Do this and you will live.”

What do we do when God is silent? Well, read Silence. And Habakkuk:

I will take my stand at my watchpost
and station myself on the tower,
and look out to see what he will say to me,
and what I will answer concerning my complaint.