What do you do, how do you think, should you even pray when for days on end nothing happens? Put differently, lately nothing of the invisible realm seems real. My materialist friends of course could step in with a solemn, “That, Louis, is because it isn’t real, there’s no there there.” I can think that thought on my own of course.
There are two problems, then. The question of reality: what if the gospels and the other brilliant passages in the Bible are made up? The question of futility: even if I do believe the scriptures, what am I to do about it if, in Hamlet’s words, the entire realm of faith seems “weary, stale, flat and unprofitable”?
I’ve been wasting away in the doldrums for days or weeks now. The materialist version (no there there) doesn’t shake me, not after years of reading and appreciating the best news. The question of futility, though, persists.
One thing faith in the invisible Father who notices each fallen sparrow teaches is that lip service is of no value. If my heart is not behind my prayers, they are not worth the time of day. But how can my heart be behind something that seems utterly absent? Yes, I know, this sounds like a classical “dark night of the soul,” and it may be, but it’s not for me a concept. It’s a current event.
Faith has always required remembering that there is more than meets the eye, but what I’m undergoing is a state when the remembering itself seems forced, fictitious. For a while I push the thoughts out of my mind, perhaps distracting myself with practical affairs (which are always available for such purposes). But later, I realize I’m free falling, not, mind you, into hedonism or even self pity. I’m falling freely with nothing—no emotion, thought, or relation—to support me.
And here is the surprising thing. I finally stop fighting it, the feeling of helplessness. I even stop worrying. Something deeper than my academic faith or my moral compass kicks in. Perhaps it doesn’t kick in so much as appear as the things that buried it are swept away.
I smile. I think, so there, mister, you can trust but you cannot trounce. You can relax, you can always get weaker, you can have this hope that the “you” that is losing its grip is not the real, naked you. It’s a pretender who has tried to make things work instead of letting the invisible God work them out in his time, his way.
On the emotional plane, my weakness assures me that I’ll wait and see the grace of God.
Occasionally, I think of Peter’s words that trials come to us “so that the proven genuineness of your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.” So this is what’s happening…things are being stripped away to reveal genuine faith. If so, and I think it so, I no longer need to worry. Wince, perhaps, but not worry.
In a lesser known (and I think wonderful) essay, C.S. Lewis makes a case for the virtue of obstinacy when it comes to our belief in Jesus. As one of my friends quickly pointed out, “obstinacy” is generally regarded as a character defect. It usually means a person is holding onto the wrong idea or conviction for the wrong reasons…from pure stubbornness, perhaps.
But as Lewis writes in On Obstinacy in Belief, it is the lifeblood of a good relationship under duress.
The argument unfolds on two main points. First, Christianity never asks us to believe the message without good reason. That reason can be a personal revelation that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, or it can be less dramatic, a realization that the scriptures provide a crucial, missing piece to our search for meaning in this life. In my case, both reasons apply. Lewis adds another aspect: that each generation supplies a different argument why Christianity is not true, a tacit acknowledgement that its claims merit a constant attack. He says this all much better of course, but I’m moving quickly toward the bit about obstinacy.
While we are never asked to believe in any truth without good reason, we will all come to places where those reasons seem insubstantial as our feelings and perceptions whither away. And here is where obstinacy comes into play. Consider a human relationship, say a marriage. While adultery does occur among marriages, it would be a fault for a wife to accuse her husband of infidelity on the first shred of evidence—the kind of evidence that could be construed to mean many things. The obstinacy to trust the husband (until proven wrong) is similarly important in all sorts of relationships where distrust ruins all.
A humorous example of evidential adultery occurred in the life of David and Nancy French. When they moved to New York, Nancy began receiving too many phone calls from women asking for David. I do not know how long this went on, but it was resolved (and the marriage survived) after they learned that their New York phone number had previously belonged to the rock singer David Lee Roth (who of course shared the same first name as Nancy’s husband).
Lewis writes, “There are times when we can do all that a fellow creature needs if only he will trust us. In getting a dog out of a trap, in extracting a thorn from a child’s finger, in teaching a boy to swim or rescuing one who can’t, in getting a frightened beginner over a nasty place on a mountain, the one fatal obstacle may be their distrust. We are asking them to trust us in the teeth of their senses, their imagination, and their intelligence. We ask them to believe that what is painful will relieve their pain and that what looks dangerous is their only safety. . . .” The passage goes on but the point is clear: we are the one in need of help and we cannot see how the present silence or emptiness is part of the answer, but if we do not trust, we will not receive the aid.
In particular, my free fall is beginning to show the outline of something needed. I started out the year writing that trust not trying will be my way of life. Occasions have arisen that make me want to put things together or to change things while, at the same time, I realize I cannot, not if the outcome is to be more than a scaffold built by worry and fear. And so I let go. It’s not my hands that hold me. If my Father is as Jesus said, his hands…that is, his invisible power will keep me and make me more alive than all my machinations could ever achieve.