When God seems far and frustratingly silent...

At some point we've all gone through it. We've all had those nights when we climb in bed spiritually exhausted from another day of questioning where God went. Time spent reading the word feels better spent staring at a wall. Praying seems like wasted moments of internalistic catharsis. God is not there. He cannot be. If he was, then we would feel something different. We would feel joy, motivation, excitement. Instead, we feel angry, frustrated, alone. Where did God go? What has gone wrong?

A traditional response to this aspect of the Christian experience comes packaged in the euphemistic quip, "If you feel far from God, he's not the one that moved." Thereby implying that you are somehow responsible for the apparent shift in your relationship status with our impassible Father. However, I do not see how this rationale rigorously handles the whole counsel of Scripture in the matter. How can it possibly be that your human actions can separate you from the love of God (Rom. 8:38-39)? How can you possibly rid yourself of the indwelling Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 6:19)? The truth is you cannot. As a believer, you have been sealed with the Spirit of God (2 Cor. 1:21-22). You are held fast in His grip and cannot run away (unless you think, in like fashion, it is possible for your body somehow to outrun your soul in a moment of epic acceleration).

So this is all well and good, but we still need to account for what's going on when we pass through these desert times with God. Is there another possible account for this experience? Indeed, I think there is. For an alternative solution let's turn to 16th century Carmelite monk, St. John of the Cross.

This blessed mystic says:

"As God sets the soul in this dark night… He allows it not to find attraction or sweetness in anything whatsoever. [In this] God transfers to the spirit the good things...if it is not immediately conscious of spiritual sweetness and delight, but only of aridity and lack of sweetness, the reason for this is the strangeness of the exchange. If those souls to whom this comes to pass knew how to be quiet at this time… then they would delicately experience this inward refreshment in that ease and freedom from care… it is like the air which, if one would close one’s hand upon it, escapes...In this state of contemplation… it is God Who is now working in the soul."

For St. John, these periods of dryness (i.e. dark nights) are not the punitive judgment of God for sinful actions or arbitrary removal of God's blessing. These too, like all things from God's hand, are spiritual gifts from Him, given for the development of the soul! In these times of darkness where God seems most distant, He is arguably most present as He opens your heart to see the truth of who you really are. He is continuing you on the journey towards transformation into Christ's image. If only we could learn to silently open our hearts to God and experience the 'strangeness of the exchange' instead of hastily asking what we did wrong, then we could truly maximize the experience of these dark nights in our life.

Tattered pieces of a long lost Telos.

There are many quandaries of life that seem to evade even the best of explanations. What best explains the death of a baby in the womb? How can you really define the essence of love? Can we truly be epistemically sound in asserting the reality of an external world? Inevitably, every realm of life eventually produces some experience that cannot be immediately categorized and accounted for. The Christian experience is no different. What does a Christian do when, claiming to believe in one God, they are faced with the God-man Jesus Christ who asserts His divinity, but also the divinity of His Father and the Holy Spirit? Must a sincere believer now set aside his previous belief in order to acquiesce to this new information? Arguably, it is this 'hiccup' in experience, this bump in the road, that gives rise to the formulation of comprehensive theological doctrine. So, out of a seemingly irreconcilable disparagement in Christian belief arises the beautiful doctrine of the Trinity. However, there was something peculiar to the 4th century formulation of this doctrine that proves lacking in contemporary study of Trinitarian theology.

Many 4th century church leaders such as Arius, Alexander, and Athanasius felt something towards their content that I am afraid modern 'theologizers' do not. Truly, the men who hashed out the intricacies of Trinitarian doctrine - including painstaking definition of terms, exhausting hours of rhetoric, etc. - did it because their experience of Christian life required that they do so. Like the parents who cannot help but try to understand the loss of their unborn baby, so these men could not help but try to understand the radical claims that Jesus made concerning His divinity.

And the same could be said concerning the various other tenets of Orthodox faith (hypostatic union, imputed righteousness, adoption, etc.) taught in modern seminaries. Unfortunately, though these were life-giving formulations of belief for the early church, they are often life-sucking facts on a test for the modern seminarian. They have become divorced from Christian life and forced into the realm of 'doctrine-qua-fact' not 'doctrine-qua-life'. Herein lies a fatal flaw concerning contemporary Christians and their approach to theological doctrine.

Doctrine is not merely carefully argued propositions concerning Christian belief. Doctrine is the Church's attempt to account for various 'bumps in the road' that she has experienced throughout the years. Instead of rolling our eyes to it, we would do well to reflect on the reasons behind the formulation of certain doctrines and how our Christian experience requires similar explanations.