Terms of Release (Originally posted October 2007)

Ok...someone help me answer this question. Let's suppose for a moment, hypothetically, that there was no God. Let us say also that our "devotions" are exactly what they often feel like: us in an empty room, talking to ourselves, trying desperately to read the silence, etc, etc...Assuming this were the reality, how would we get out from under our responsibility to it? In other words, how do we release ourselves from the feeling of accountability to constantly attend to the silence? When is it ok to say, ‘the silence will not speak back, and that's ok, it was never meant to?’ Or, as Christians, have we resigned by default to both attendances - that is, to the prospect of a real God as well as to silence? (Do we accept both in hopes that the one is true. And is the alternative equally as inclusive - we break ties to one at risk of defying the other?).

The thing is, I am at a place in my life where the strength of my desire to worship God is rivaled very closely by a competing desire to defy attendance to a non-entity (that is, silence). Somehow over the course of time, my relationship with God has become completely exasperating, and I feel as though if I don't find a way out, I'm going to lose it. Even though I ask for a way out, I'm not looking to take it. I just feel like I have to know, under the circumstance that all of this proves empty, that a Christian (who claims to live in daily communion with the REAL GOD) would eventually catch on.

But, if that possibility is open, if that prospect really exists, show it to me. What can't God do - or NOT do - within the confines of His arrangement with us? You would expect that, under the terms of relationship, God would abide by the generally agreed upon "rules of engagement." It was He who condescended to that position, He who established the grounds by which we are to approach Him, so then why is He allowed such liberality in the dispensation of His love to us? How contrary to His revealed nature can He behave before we can legitimately conclude that the "face" we (Christians) have given Him/believed Him to have cannot, within good reason, be accurate of Him (that is, whom-/whatever we imply by the term divine nature).

John Piper writes, "If God withholds Himself from our contemplation and companionship, no matter what else He gives us, He is not loving." (Desiring God, pg. 48) But even within those boundaries, our God exercises surprising freedom. Please, someone, show me a single instance in which our concept of intimacy with God has any more substance to it than your run-of-the-mill superstition. Tell me also where the substance lies in our dialogue with God that so distinguishes it from attendance to pure silence. How would the Christian recognize their God’s absence/non-existence? I can’t tell you how much I need an answer to this question…At my pastor's direction, I’ve been trying to perform all the disciplines that might be required of my situation without sensing God’s presence. All I want to know is how I can participate in the life God promised me, but no one seems to have the answer.

It deeply concerns me that what I consider to be the most essential aspect of my relationship with God is the same part that is largely ignored by my Christian counselors. Their counsel always follows the pattern, “this first, that later.” In other words, before we tell you how to simply have God, to abide in His love or participate in His offer of life, let’s tend to this or that auxiliary doctrine. They are always talking around; but what happens if we direct our attention right at the thing we desire? Is God something we can only allude to? Can He only be experienced through some peripheral approach? My experience in approaching God has been very similar to that experience we’ve all had, when we really examine a close friends face and realize, though we thought it was so familiar to us, we didn’t really know it. Or when you say a familiar word over and over again until the sound of it really sinks in to your brain, and you realize, you had never really considered it before. We become familiar with these things, desensitized to them really, through our common usage of them without ever having to know them for their own sake. Most people will never realize that their knowledge of God is really more a numb familiarity with Him attained through frequency of use. It usually requires some form of suffering to ever need that truer, more direct knowledge of Him. As John 11:9 reminds us, “Are there not twelve hours of daylight? A man who walks by day will not stumble, for he sees by this world’s light. It is when he walks by night that he stumbles, for he has no light.” How dependent have we become upon our conventions to conceptualize God and mediate our approach of Him? These things are mere adornments, embellishments, non-essentials. “Only one thing is needed,” says Jesus (Luke 10:42), and yet it is the one thing I can’t gain access to.

Mother Teresa wrote once upon receiving an important prize in the Philippines, “This means nothing, because I don’t have Him.” Note that she said the prize means nothing because she doesn’t have Him. Imagine now that our attendance, though believed to be toward God, was actually given only to silence. How pitiable would it be if our unchallenged allegiances turned out to be wasted on a non-entity, a nothing, and that we had allowed a lifetime to go by allowing our lack of reply from a indifferent silence spoil every other potential enjoyment? How much more pitiable to be given up front every resource by which to dismiss this silence (that is, promises to which it is accountable), but to never give ear to those concerns? I mean, really, there must be a pretty significant distinction between our worship and this lower attendance. We claim to worship the true God, and moreover, to commune with Him daily! To lack the capacity to discern His presence or absence in our lives seems as ridiculous a notion to me as having a blue whale take up residence in my living room, getting in my car for work, and not being able to recall whether or not he was there that morning.

But that is where I am…I feel like Orual, on the precipice of having to make a decision about Psyche’s welfare in light of her confession of marriage to a god (Till We Have Faces, pg. 102-176)…I know what all good reason tells me, and I feel entirely justified in the conclusion I have drawn, but I know equally well how unaccommodating are the gods. I fear divorce from the silence at the risk of betraying my responsibility before the Divine, for which I will certainly not be excused. I have before I make my decision, the knowledge which Orual found too late. And yet, I am no better for it. We stand on the same ground: “You must guess the riddle. Not a word will come to you until you have guessed wrong and they all come crowding back to accuse and mock and punish you for it.” (ibid, 150)

“[The god] had made it to be as if, from the beginning, I had known that Psyche’s lover was a god, and as if all my doubtings, fears, guessings, debatings, questionings of Bardia, questionings of the Fox, all the rummage and business of it, had been trumped-up foolery, dust blown in my eyes by myself.” (ibid., 173)