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)

The Divine Dialogue: Part 3 (Originally posted October 2007)

Preface: Time magazine article, “Her Agony”
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1655720,00.html

I. To Feed on God

“Jesus said to them, ‘I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him. Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your forefathers ate manna and died, but he who feeds on this bread will live forever.’” (John 6:53-58)

One thing is clear from this passage: we have no true life outside of Christ. Jesus’ comparison between the sustenance which comes by feeding our bodies on earthly bread and the sustenance which comes by feeding our souls on the bread of heaven (Christ Himself), is central to this passage. Jesus uses this comparison not only to emphasize the superiority of divine fulfillment versus natural fulfillment, but also to make the point that, in light of His design for us, anything short of life in Him is not to be considered life at all. Life for man, who was created in the very image of God, is inseparable from the soul-level nourishment we receive in intimate relationship with Him. In other words, you cannot call yourself living in God’s eyes simply because you have a pulse, breath in your lungs, and food in your belly. We come alive by feeding ourselves on Christ.

God commands His people in scripture to offer a sacrifice of praise to Him (Heb. 13:15). Psalm 33:1 reads, “Sing joyfully to the Lord, you righteous; it is fitting for the upright to praise Him.” And again in Psalm 147:1, “Praise the Lord. How good it is to sing praises to our God, how pleasant and fitting to praise Him!” Many people seem stupefied by this command and respond by offering among their highest praises, “Thank you, Lord, that I have a beating heart and breath in my lungs.” They might even go so far as to add, “If I receive nothing else from you, this is enough.”

Is there not something awry about this tendency of ours, first of all, to grasp at the most elemental scraps of our existence as God’s highest gifts and, secondly, to place such importance on the sustenance of our bodily existence? “Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes?” (Matt. 6:25) This question must have sounded awfully strange when Jesus posed it to the crowds gathered round Him on the mount. I would bet that at least a handful of them thought to themselves, “Wait a second, what could be more important to life than food?” But Jesus was so absorbed in the reality of His teachings (that is, that true life is the life found in Him) that the question poured out without the slightest hesitation.

John Piper writes in his book, Desiring God, “If [God] withholds himself from our contemplation and companionship, no matter what else he gives us, he is not loving (Desiring God, pg. 48).” Life, then, if we can consider it within its appropriate context, should not even be considered a blessing at all if we are otherwise withheld from enjoying God directly. To assert that the “blessings” of a beating heart and breath in our lungs were sufficient provisions from our Savior is to inadvertently advocate Hell itself as a suitable existence for God’s redeemed: for what is Hell but an eternal existence separated from God? Consider Queen Orual’s experience in Lewis’ Till We Have Faces:

“I did and I did and I did - and what does it matter what I did? I cared for all these things only as a man cares for a hunt or a game, which fills the mind and seems of some moment while it lasts, but then the beast’s killed or the king’s mated, and now who cares? It was so with me almost every evening of my life; one little stairway led me from feast or council, all the bustle and skill and glory of queenship, to my own chamber to be alone with myself - that is, with a nothingness. Going to bed and waking in the morning (I woke, most often, too early) were bad times - so many hundreds of evenings and mornings. Sometimes I wondered who or what sends us this senseless repetition of days and nights and seasons and years; is it not like hearing a stupid boy whistle the same tune over and over, till you wonder how he can bear it himself?” (Till We Have Faces, pg. 236)

Know then that life, in the mere sense of our sustained mortality, is no gift in itself. It is as the fictional devil, Screwtape puts it, “…simply an occasion which we and the Enemy [God] are both trying to exploit. Like most other things which humans are excited about, such as health and sickness, age and youth, or war and peace, it is, from the point of view of the spiritual life, mainly raw material (The Screwtape Letters, pg. 102-103).” So, if the sustenance of our bodily existence is not in itself praiseworthy, what is? What above our bodily health is the most important quality of life? In pointing us away from the physical, Jesus naturally directs our thoughts toward the nourishment of our souls. According to His assessment, true life begins when we are satisfied, not merely bodily, but within our very souls. And we recall from the opening passage that our souls are nourished by feeding on Christ Himself.

“Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and your soul will delight in the richest of fare.” (Is. 55:2)

It might be pertinent at this time to clarify what is meant by life in the salvific sense versus life in the mortal sense. Christ says “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you.” But we have already determined that this does not mean that our mortal existence will cease if we do not feed on Him. So what part of us does die? I think in the general sense, it is our spirits that die (and I’m not sure in what way the spirit is separate from the soul). In the practical, or applicatory, sense, it is our faith that dies when we are no longer nourished in communion with God. It is absurd to think that the branch can survive when separated from the vine (John 15), or that our faith of which God is the author and perfector (Heb. 12:2) can be sustained apart from His abiding presence. As we have already established, our position before God must always be patient to agent. He is the source.

II. The Contradiction

As a preamble to this post, I asked everyone to read the Time magazine article featuring Mother Teresa’s “crisis if faith”. It occurred to me that not everyone who read that article may have been able to extract the significant points of her experiences as it relates to this discussion. Therefore, let me cite, side by side, the two sets of “data” from which my “problem” arises:

1. Our faith is sustained by being nourished on Christ - As 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)

2. Christ, at times, seems to withhold Himself from us - Hear Mother Teresa’s complaint upon receiving an important prize in the Philippines: “This means nothing to me, because I don’t have Him.”

According to the article in Time magazine, Mother Teresa endured a half-century feeling as though God were absent from her life. It was reported that “with her confessors, she developed a kind of shorthand of pain, referring almost casually to ’my darkness’ and to Jesus as ’the Absent One.’ In a transcribed prayer she writes, “When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven - there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives and hurt my very soul.- I am told God loves me - and yet the reality of darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul.” She wrote elsewhere in a letter to Archbishop Ferdinand Perier, “Please pray specifically for me that I may not spoil His work and that Our Lord may show Himself - for there is such terrible darkness in me, as if everything was dead. It has been like this more or less from the time I started ‘the work.’”

Again, Piper writes, “God’s quest to be glorified and our quest to be satisfied reach their goal in this one experience: our delight in God which overflows in praise.” (Desiring God, pg. 53) Might God have other purposes which necessitate His withdrawal from our lives? The life of Mother Teresa, and testimonies like hers, portray a picture of faith in which that single necessary element is denied it (Luke 10:41-42). As tempted as I am to dismiss the implicit doctrine of the second “datum” by a fundamental adherence to the first, I just can’t. The plaintiffs are too many, and frankly, too credible. I believe that C.S. Lewis used the fictional Orual to vicariously carry his own complaints before God. You can hardly read his book without getting that impression. The clarity with which he describes the suffering at the hands of the gods, and the specificity of the language he uses are too incriminating. Then I have myself to reference, and I certainly can’t renounce my own testimony.

Piper quotes George Mueller: “…now, since God has taught me this point, it is as plain to me as anything, that the first thing the child has to do morning by morning is to obtain food for his inner man…food for my own soul is the object of my meditation.” (Desiring God, pg. 134 and 133) Again, the centrality of being nourished on God is emphasized. One might reasonably ask, how does one’s soul “feed” on God? How does one recognize that they are living in nurturing communion with God? C.S. Lewis’ contemplations on prayer give us a starting point in answering this question:

“…for our spiritual life as a whole, the ‘being taken into account,’ or ‘considered,’ matters more than [our petitions] being granted…We can bear to be refused but not to be ignored. In other words, our faith can survive many refusals if they really are refusals and not mere disregards. The apparent stone will be bread to us if we believe that a Father’s hand put it into ours, in mercy or in justice or even in rebuke. It is hard and bitter, yet it can be chewed and swallowed. But if, having prayed for our heart’s desire and got it, we then became convinced that this was a mere accident - that providential designs which had only some quite different end just couldn’t help throwing out this satisfaction for us as a by-product - then the apparent bread would become a stone. A pretty stone, perhaps, or even a precious stone. But not edible to the soul.” (Letters to Malcolm, pg. 52-53)

A soul fed on God feels alive and there are fruits in accordance with that life. “Out of the overflow of the heart…” is a common phrase in scripture (Luke 6:45). If we are filled on the heart level with God, we should expect such fruit as love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control (Gal. 5:22-23) to result. Note that this list speaks of internal conditions rather than external acts. Keep this in mind when you read the following passage from Till We Have Faces.

“It was as if I were dead already, but not as the god, or Socrates, bade me die. Yet all the time I was able to go about my work, doing and saying whatever was needful, and no one knew that there was anything amiss. Indeed, the dooms I gave, sitting on my judgment seat, about this time, were though to be even wiser and more just than before; it was work on which I spent much pains and I know I did it well. But the prisoners and plaintiffs and witnesses and the rest seemed now to me more like shadows than real men. I did not care a straw (though I still labored to discern) who had a right to the little field or who had stolen the cheese.” (Till We Have Faces, pg. 236, 285)

When we cease to receive the soul-level nourishment of communion with God, we experience a spiritual death while our physical existences continue almost uninterrupted. Often this change, as Orual noted, goes completely unnoticed by those around us. We begin to feel hollow, more like ghosts than living beings, moving through this existence as if we were still part of it, when in reality, we have no real participation in it. As Orual recounts, the plaintiffs and witnesses no longer seemed like men to her, but mere shadows. Everything that moves around us remains external, and we no longer receive nourishment into our souls.

All these descriptions are echoed almost exactly by Mother Teresa in the biography, Come Be My Light. And these also were the words I found being laid down in my journal night after night as I began to focus my attention directly on Him. I can’t help but wonder if it is in fact the natural result of attending so directly to God’s presence. I asked before if intimacy with God was something you could only allude to, or if His presence can only be experienced through some peripheral approach. The doctrine I’ve discussed here - that of being nourished by our direct communion with God - is yet another route through which this question naturally arises. The Bible teaches that this communion is essential to the life He’s called us, and yet not everyone who seeks Him finds nourishment in Him. Often it is quite the contrary, and our intense longing for His immediacy in our lives becomes nothing but a source of death, keeping our souls starved even of worldly pleasures.

To first seek communion with God is to leave the shore of everything the world offers (Heb 11:15-16, 24-27)…we brave the vast and featureless ocean in pure hope that the land which awaits us will be infinitely better (ibid., Rom. 8:18). Every decision against the world in hope of God’s promise makes our trust in Him that much more severe, that much more costly if we are wrong. But as we float here alone, seeing neither the land we left behind nor that which we are striving to reach, a depth of sobriety which we may have never before experienced inevitably sets in. This is the moment you cease to be satisfied with mere allusions to the prospective reality. All peripheral things drop away, become utterly insufficient, and your soul cries out for the reality itself. And within Christianity we are taught that access to the reality is not only readily available but principal to our faith experience. If this is so, why the apparent contradiction?