a dark night of the soul

The past few months have been what one could call a “dark night of the soul.” Such dark nights come in life, and they’re never the same. These are periods of testing and times of wrestling: wrestling with yourself, wrestling with the world, and wrestling with God. Although these dark nights of the soul are, by nature, the very opposite of fun, they often become benchmarks in the history of our faith. These dark nights of the soul carve lines upon our hearts, forever altering the way that we view the world. These dark nights, some filled with many tears and much cursing, become in time our greatest strengths, and through the ashes flowers can emerge. Sometimes, I believe, these dark nights of the soul come with the territory of living in the tension between Easter and Consummation, but sometimes, I equally believe, these dark nights come from the hand of God himself. C.S. Lewis called pain God’s megaphone to a deaf world; these dark nights of the soul can pierce our hearts, and we who have refused to be wakened are drawn from our sleep to face the realities which we so eagerly seek to dispel. The pain of these dark nights, to quote Lewis again, “removes the veil; it plans the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul.” These dark nights can end in several different ways; there’s the route of cognitive dissonance, where the pain of the dark night doesn’t mesh with the way we perceive the world, and instead of dealing with the pain as it ought to be dealt with, we stick our heads in the sand like the ostrich and frolic in our own fantasy worlds. There’s the opposite help, of running swift and sure from the pain itself, leaping from one worldview to another worldview like a frog hopping lily-pad to lily-pad. The appropriate route is that of rebuilding, of wrestling and struggling through the dark night to come out forged into something—someone—better.

There have been several dark nights of my soul, and none have been the same. This past one has centered, essentially, on my inability—no, my hesitancy—to trust God. As I’ve been thinking and praying about this, I’ve been seeing again and again that the roots to this mistrust lie in both (a) my misinterpretation of past experiences and events, and (b) various insecurities (everyone has insecurities, and they affect us in different ways, and mine totally dovetail into the whole trusting God thing; but, alas for you, I’m not going to share these insecurities, because they’re not public domain). There’s quite likely demonic influence over this as well, though to what extent and how that’d play out, I’m not sure. I haven’t blogged on this much, mostly because it’s quite a private matter and because I’ve just been so damned busy, but I’ve been talking and praying with friends over this matter. This whole “trust freak-out” started sometime around the tail-end of winter, I think, slightly after I stopped dating Codename Elle. Everything with “The Girl” started up a bit later, and I pushed the whole trust thing to the side. Now I had something else to focus on, something else to work for. When that fell apart (as these things seem to do) I knew I had to face these issues head-on. I got scared and ran like a little pussy (pussycat, cat), losing myself in a host of other things and doing everything in my power to avoid the wrestling match. An old professor wisely told me, “If you’ve never wrestled with God, then perhaps you’ve never met.” I’ve wrestled with God. I’ve met him. And I didn’t want to do it again. But no matter how hard I tried to disengage from the Subject-@-Hand, God was there, his Spirit prodding and pulling, convicting and encouraging. Around this time Cincinnati became a definite reality, and because it was such a big decision, I decided to pray about it. I felt as if God were telling me, “Go,” but I didn’t know if this was just because I wanted to be down there or if it was legitimately God’s answer. I guess when you get to the point of doubting God answering prayers, you’re going to take any “answers” quite skeptically. I went to the doctor’s one day and the nurse, who’d never met me, told me out-of-the-blue that she knew I was a Christian, and that God sometimes talks to her, and she told me, in effect, that God wanted me in Cincinnati. I still don’t know how all that works out, but I ended up moving to Cincinnati and have been here for two months. And how has that been going, at least on the spiritual level?

Quite good, actually. There are people down here much wiser than me, people who have been encouraging me in these things and who have themselves been walking alongside me on these dark roads. There’s been much prayer, meditation, scripture-reading, lots of wrestling. And it’s damned good wrestling: the kind that exhausts you but makes you energized at the same time. “First Match” kind of wrestling. God is showing me many things about my personhood and life, and I’m “returning to my roots” so-to-speak (and so-to-speak is important here, because there are convictions, beliefs, etc. of my earlier days that I now see to be completely ludicrous and unsubstantiated).

Has trusting God become second nature to me? No. And really, the hesitancy is still there. These insecurities and misperceptions, these wounds, they go deep, and I see now that any attempts at invasive self-surgery will just lead to self-mutilation. Some things we are virtually powerless to change, but God takes hearts of stones and makes from them hearts of flesh. No one can top that. I am tiptoeing along the great chasm of trust, with the wind in my sails and my heart hammering behind my ribs. The call to trust God isn’t a call to figure everything out, to make sense of all the chaos and confusion, to come to a point where we can 100% put our trust in God. The call to trust is a call to decide to trust, and the trust that we’re called to embrace is a ruthless trust, a trust embraced as we launch into the unknown with fear and trembling, making a decision of the will to trust God and pursue his will no matter come what may. That’s the kind of trust that God’s looking for, not a 100% devoted kind of trust.

And if you know anything about my theology, you know that devotion to God is a big deal to me. I believe it’s the quintessential essence both of faith and of loving God. Devotion, loyalty, allegiance to God: that’s what God demands of his prized image-bearing creatures. But I’m also a realist, and I know that sometimes—if not much of the time—our trust can be weak, our devotion can be flimsy, and it’ll never be “perfect” (to use a Hellenistic ideal which I find repulsive, to say the least). But even the littlest trust can move mountains. Looking back at all the heroes of the Bible and even to the saints of the last centuries, and what do we see? Delve into their deep and personal inner lives, and we find there sprinklings of doubt and mistrust, of self-preservation over against loyalty to God. We’ve all done it, do it, and will do it, usually in the littlest and most unseen ways. But we shouldn’t get all guilt-ridden because of it; it’s a matter-of-fact that the current state of the world, coupled with the human condition, make the doctrine of “sinless perfection” an impossibility. The fact of the matter is that we’re made of dirt, and God knows that; we’re not yet glorified, and God doesn’t expect us to be. Abraham passed off his wife as his sister; King David said, “To hell with it,” and took the census; Jeremiah almost lost his prophetic office. All three of these individuals are held up as heroes of the faith, and we see in their own lives the doubt, the mistrust, the self-preservation. Are we to self-flagellate ourselves because we’re not better than them? Damn. That’s a road I don’t want to walk, because there’s no end in sight. My point being: God doesn’t expect me to have a rock-solid trust, he expects me to get off my ass and move in the right direction, and he’s promising to be there every step of the way.

So that’s where I’m at right now.

There’s more to the story, but not less.

I’ll be sure to keep everyone updated on how things pan out.