There’s a lot in my head today. I’ve been reading Merton, especially, and that seems to have juggled something loose. The “joy of studying God”, as Thomas Oden puts it in his systematic theology, seems to have gradually begun to return. This whole season of religious experience seems awfully–and not coincidentally, I hope–appropriate to the season of the church year in which we now reside. I suppose the struggle has always gone on, and I can say with some certitude that it began much earlier than Advent. But Advent as a liturgical season drew the existential reality of the absence of God, and of the spirituality of foresakenness and abandonment, into sharp relief.
A few weeks before Advent started, I had the distinct pleasure–and displeasure–of reading emerging theologian Peter Rollins’ newest book, Insurrection. Insurrection was in many ways a prophetic encounter, as in the coming weeks all of my emotional and psychological doubts about God, Christ and the church would come flooding to the surface of my thoughts and would not be quelled no matter what structure I put in place to try and understand them. Rollins’ book calls for a deeply experiential kind of theology: a dangerous theology, because it calls for us to participate in the radical reality of the crucifixion in a way noone else but Luther has dared to do. It was not a message I understood or wanted to hear, until the weeks afterward brought home–for the first time in my life–real doubt as to the presence of God. This time was not just a felt absence, as most of us probably experience in “ordinary” dull moments of life. It was much deeper, an anxiety-producing “negation” as Tillich might have called it, a sense that God as a concept was meaningless and the church a squabbling group who was unified over nothing. It is not common in American Christianity, particularly the gung-ho evangelicalism with which I grew up, for those kinds of doubts to be voiced aloud. I admit that I felt comfortable sharing these doubts with almost no one; not only because of the seeming rarity of such feelings, but because for the first time in my life doubt was of an incredibly non-intellectual kind.
So what happened? I gradually came to understand, over the period of Advent culminating in and around Christmas Day, that such a doubt is part and parcel of the human condition. It was in reading books like Tillich’s The Courage to Be that I understood both my feelings of meaninglessness and despair and my unwillingness to either abandon the feelings or abandon the faith on which the feelings are based. I hesitate to call this experience mystical, or a dark night of the soul. Its brevity makes me wonder how important it truly was. Nevertheless, I think I have begun to understand the existential reality of faith, and the idea of “dying to oneself” in a much more visceral way than I otherwise would have. It’s a painful experience, and I can’t say I enjoyed it. But through the turmoil of doubt, the resurrection of the joy in theology seems all the more remarkable. It is comforting, too, to know that I have never been alone: though I have not devoted much time to them apart from daily Gospel readings, the Psalms set forth a similar idea of crises of faith, along with resurrection and deliverance, that ground my experience of divine absence in traditional Christian language.
All that is to say that spiritual formation is something I am only beginning to understand. In the same way that my present doubts were less intellectual, my renewed theological joy is less grounded purely in propositional logic. Every story must have its lows, and any theology that cannot also be a grand story is not worth much. Narrative, liturgy and existence are all tied into a knot for me: my existence as an individual is reinforced and transformed through the overarching theological narrative of Christianity proclaimed and enacted in liturgical prayer, worship and sacramental participation.
