The Contemplative Crisis

We have all been given two ears to listen with.
In one ear, we have heard the voice of those who criticise us and say,
‘You’ll never be any good’,
or that, ‘You messed that up’,
or ‘You’ll never learn’,
or ‘You’re not able to be a leader’.
It might have been our family which has told us this,
with sometimes just a look,
sometimes at the top of their voice,
the message we hear is loud and clear.
It might have been a boss,
a leader who is stressed and frustrated and tired
and has taken their anger out on you.
But we must turn down the volume of that voice in our ear
and listen with our other ear to God’s voice which
we hear in Scripture
we hear in the voice of encouragement by friends
we hear from those who walk beside us at our pace
we hear from strangers who comment on our abilities which we shyly deny
although God has impressed them into us from our birth.
We must listen to the voice of God in our other ear which says
‘You are deeply loved by me.’
‘You have been chosen by me and are precious in my sight.’  (Is 43:4)
‘You are the apple of my eye.’  (Ps 17:8)
‘Your days are written by me before anyone of them has come to pass.’  (139:16)
and
‘I have appointed you to go and bear fruit which will last.’ (Jn 15:16)
We must do this everyday
in the morning
before we turn on the radio
before we read the newspaper
before we use the internet
before we watch the television
before we forget to listen to God’s voice
in the silence, in solitude and in our prayer
because it is in this place that we find our renewal.

The book of Psalms, I’ve recently discovered, are often ignored by those who should know better. Two recent experiences have highlighted that some Christians either don’t know their content, or don’t appreciate their richness in our daily life and their contribution to helping us pray. The first was a reasonably biblically literate woman who hadn’t read Ps 137 before. I had read it to a bible study group which meets each week and they were amazed and shocked with its content. On reading it this woman had been confronted with its  raw emotion and the theological issue of how can this material be included in the Bible.  (Ps 137 records the vengeance upon the Edomites which the Israelites looked forward to. It is brutally honest in recording the hatred the Israelites had for the Edomites and the Babylonians for their destruction of Jerusalem.  It does not conform to our expectations (often polite and sanitised), of how God’s people should pray.  It concludes with the shocking words: ‘. . . blessed shall he be who repays you with what you have done to us! Blessed shall he be who takes your little one and dashes them against the rock! (137:8-9) (ESV)

The second experience was at the side of a hospital bed when the person I was reading a Psalm to, ‘heard’ it speaking right into their heart and situation. It brought great comfort and deep assurance that God could be trusted through this period in which they found themselves in a difficult place, confined to a hospital bed with uncertainty about their medical condition. Across the years, many of the Psalms have become very special and significant due to the way they have spoken to my condition at the time. I would like to give you a brief history, one which is unashamedly personal, of the ones which have been significant.

I remember the first time I heard Psalm 88 read, but I can’t remember the details exactly of the person who opened my eyes to its meaning. I am sure I’d read this Psalm on many occasions before, but this time, the context was different. I was in a Bible college, it was the beginning of the term and we had been put into a fellowship group for mutual support and prayer for the remainder of the year. Various people had shared to introduce themselves to the group. Nothing too deep had been revealed. Then an overweight woman in her mid twenties, who was not particularly attractive, said that she would like to read Ps 88 to us. Sure go ahead we all thought.

But no one had read this Psalm the way she read it to us, deliberately, at a slow pace in which we heard her pain, abandonment and desolation. I sat there wondering why I’d never noticed this Psalm before. (We had studied the next Psalm, Ps 89, extensively when doing the Davidic kingdom and covenant in Old Testament studies.) When she finished she briefly explained why she had chosen this Psalm. She was in her early twenties and had suffered depression intolerably since her mid-teens. On several occasions she had attempted suicide seeking relief from the interminable emotional pain. This Psalm was her story, her journey, her life. It was not only describing her experience of depression but her experience of God – who was often felt to be absent. We were silent. We hadn’t known her background until now. We felt privileged to have heard her heart cry to God and the only way I can describe it was that we had a sense of standing on holy ground. Psalm 88 is the only Psalm out of the one hundred and fifty which comprise the book in which there is no hope, no ultimate turning to God, no deliverance or redemption. There is no interior shift toward God which results in hope. Only desolation. God is silent and he is accused of being the agent who has caused her imprisonment in this depression (vs 6, ‘You have put me in the depths of the Pit . . .’ and vs 8, ‘You have caused my companions to shun me . . . ‘)

I have just returned to work after three weeks of holiday. Each time I meet someone they ask, ‘How was it?’ My best reply is that it was a mixed blessing. It wasn’t the happiest of times. My lower back was strained on Christmas Eve and its only just come good after a box of anti-inflammatory drugs, physiotherapy and persistent exercises the physiotherapist taught me, so a good deal of the holiday was focused on getting better. The cause of my sore back was carrying shopping bags, but the deeper cause was my body was saying it had had enough. After a busy year and the approaching Christmas demands and church services, it (my back) ‘went’. I painfully worked through the next two Sunday services, including a New Year’s service, and finished off organising things which need to be attended to while I was away and then went on holidays. I should have recognised the signs earlier, but didn’t.

Quite soon after commencing my holidays I drifted into a place which I like to call ‘unfaith’. It is not that I would deny the Creed; it is rather that I lacked the motivation and the heart to affirm it. People who enter this place are indifferent to the things of God. Something had come and taken me captive. My heart, emotions, mind and spirit felt dead. This condition is well known and documented, but rarely spoken of in the church, where a triumphalism underlies much of its life and activities. When called ‘spiritual depression’ as I have heard some call it, it sounds as bad as a catching a cold. It’s not. It’s more like developing influenza and sometimes it has fatal consequences to the Christian taken down by it. It was not that I now blatantly disbelieved in God; it was that he had become remote, even irrelevant. I now found myself in a place where I struggled to believe.

This condition which I call, ‘unfaith’ is not an active unbelief, but a half way house of not being active in my belief in Jesus, the church, miracles, God’s activity in the world and all that stuff. Unfaith is both a feeling and a disposition toward God of indifference in spite of continuing to claim to know something of God. ‘Unfaith’ has a range of expressions and degrees in its condition. At its worst, it’s an indulgence in being passive, waiting for proof by the proud. A milder version is sensed in the testimony of those at church who have had God do some amazing miracle in their lives which provided them with proof of his existence, (or even some mighty deliverance), but now they seem so lifeless in their faith. Their desperate prayer was answered – but now there seems a hollow commitment to a life of pursuing an intimacy with God. The lights have gone out although they continue to go through the motions. I think it strikes those who read questionable theological material which corrodes their faith and leaves them in a place of nowhere, uncertain about anything. Unfaith is probably lurking the in the background as the reason why some leave the institutional church. Due to hurt and pride, they move from being able to say ‘we believe in the holy catholic church’ to ‘we believe that our own individual faith is the only true position’ and leave to search for something which is found beyond the church.

This place of unfaith was not a place I was unfamiliar with however. I had entered this place from time to time in the past, and I had noticed that each time it has been due to exhaustion, be it my mind (from study), my body (from long hours of physical work as a carpenter), my heart and spirituality (from ministry), or my emotions (from draining and difficult pastoral situations). Unfaith is not doubt; doubt is actively questioning, standing outside and judging the truths of Christianity, whereas unfaith is a place where we would like to exercise our faith, but feel dead, weighed down by a shadowy feeling. Unfaith is a place we are taken to and held captive by exhaustion, lethargy; it is a spiritual torpor. It is the place which Elijah experienced under the broom tree (1 Kings 19:4) following a major demonstration of God’s power and answer to prayer. Elijah has a belief in God enough to pray – that his life would be taken, but not enough faith to remember the goodness of God, God’s covenant faithfulness, his call and God’s protection. This malaise of unfaith is often erroneously labelled ‘demonic oppression’ by the overzealous. It is not a lack of mental assent to Christian doctrine, but a condition of the heart whose channels have been well charted by Ignatius of Loyola in his retreat guide: The Spiritual Exercises, in which he notes that we experience alternating periods of desolation and consolation in our relationship with God. In a subsection of The Spiritual Exercises, called “The Rules for Discernment of Spirits”, he notes the symptoms of desolation, the ways of dealing with it when it strikes, the benefits of this condition and how to prepare ourselves for the time when we will enter it for it will surely strike sooner or later.

So at the commencement of my holidays I felt as if I had been led into a wilderness experience: being immersed in a place of barrenness, of silence and feeling remote from day to day life back in civilization. The wilderness was where the children of God spent forty years; it is where Elijah ended up, where Jesus went and countless others throughout history have traversed the dangerous journey through it. We even speak of ‘the political wilderness’ when a leading politician makes a bid for the leadership of their party and fails. They go to the back bench of parliament to lick their wounds and to plot another attempt at getting the numbers.

But unfaith is a normal experience for the Christian that brings with it, some benefits, albeit that it is an unpleasant experience to undergo. It is the place in which we are purged, where we are weaned from our unconscious addiction to adrenalin which is released each time we engage in a ministry situation, even those situations in which both parties are blessed by God. The body’s loss of being regularly flooded with adrenalin sends shockwaves throughout it as withdrawal takes place. Because we do not live as disembodied spirits, our minds, heart, cardio-vascular system and psyche experience a low level shock in response to not having this constant stimulation of adrenalin. (I had to visit the doctor to obtain a new script for my blood pressure tablets and discovered that my blood pressure was about 10 points lower on holidays. I didn’t feel any better, I felt terrible, but my body blood pressure level was saying it was good for me to be away from stress, even good stress and the adrenalin.) It’s good for us physically to withdrawal from this over stimulation or long term health issues will emerge that can remain masked behind a busy and hectic lifestyle. A benefit of this place of unfaith is that we are taught or rather, brought back to earth and brought back to face our humanity again. We are after all, only unworthy servants of our master who are expected to do nothing more and nothing less than what he requires (Lk 17:10), and his yoke is easy and his burden is light (Matt 11:28-29), although we are inclined to forget this as we undertake projects which are beyond our powers or for causes which we assume are God’s causes. The painful experience of being broken free from our ego driven agendas and programs is experienced as unfaith because we end up in a place waiting around for a new assignment from the Lord. It’s not comfortable waiting in recovery. The terse but poignant reflections by Henri Nouwen of his experience of this place are profoundly beautiful and perhaps the best work he ever produced. (The Inner Voice Of Love: A Journey Through Anguish To Freedom”, 1996).

Our experience of unfaith helps reconnect us with the fact that we need to be compassionate toward those broken, exhausted or worn down by life’s struggles and the need to express some compassion toward ourselves as well. In this place of unfaith we relearn again what we have forgotten deep down, that we are saved by grace and not by what we do. It jolts us back into the awareness that we have been given a ministry, not because we are anyone special, or possess superior abilities, intelligence, looks or giftedness, but simply because of God’s love, sovereign choice (election) and grace (1 Cor 1:26-31). This newly recovered awareness helps break the confusion we so often and so easily slip into making between who we are and what we do (our performance), in this place, painful as it is. Due to this experience, the Psalms take on a whole new dimension and we discover that the Bible is not only a faithful record of God’s acts and revelation of his character, but is a faithful record by God’s people of their own responses as they struggle in their faith and trust in God. The Psalms in particular, express the yearnings and disappointments God’s people had with God. In this place of ‘unfaith’ the richness of the Psalms is rediscovered and we are again immersed in the honesty of their authors and touched by their willingness to be so vulnerable, so naked, in their condition and struggle which would be covered up in our modern church. (See for example: Ps 30:1-12; Ps 22:6; Ps 88:15; Ps 119:71 and Ps 77.)

Can we find our way back again out of this deadening condition, to safety, to where God is experienced again? Yes and no. There are a number of things we can do. When lost in the Australian bush, the best thing to do is sit down and wait to be found. Going against all our instincts to find our way home, we must not, but sit and wait. Those who panic and allow fear to take control of them, rush off through the bush and get more lost, over heat and then throw off their clothes to cool down. Searchers just follow the line of cast off clothes from one item to another in order to find them. If they are fortunate, they will be found only suffering from the embarrassment of being lost. The more severe, from hypothermia and dehydration. The best thing to do is wait for God, like the watchman on walls of Jerusalem looking for the first signs in the sky that the dawn was about to break over the horizon (Ps 130:6). We need to wait for our emotions to recover again and not to panic. It is a normal Christian experience as the Psalms testify. It is also good to remember that the deserts are where we begin to hear the voice of God again, not just in the hectic busyness of life and ministry commitments.

Slowly picking up our regular spiritual disciplines are helpful, but without over doing it. Regular everything is good; patterns help re-establish our equilibrium again. Pray a little, but often. Go easy on yourself because you will eventually be brought out into the ‘spacious place’ again (Ps 18:19). The Psalmist is correct in recognising that his deliverance will not come from his own efforts or by whipping himself with guilt or by undertaking a frenzy of religious activities (our natural inclination). It will come from the LORD with whom is constant love and redemption from this place of death and desolation. This place of unfaith is not one I would like to experience again for quite a while, and generally diligence and attention to one’s lifestyle, spiritual disciplines and the number of commitments undertaken are the best protection for being led into this place again, but occasionally its necessary for God himself to take us into this place, if only to discover, that its him alone that we seek and whom we serve.

What did I do on my holidays? Lots of things, from house maintenance, to bogie boarding on the surf; camping, to swimming in a river. The two main things I did work on throughout my holidays was recovering from a sore back which occurred on Christmas Eve; and the other, was to wait for the Lord again, to bring restoration after a demanding year in 2009. My holidays were basically spent in this place of unfaith, recovering. Like the Psalmist of 130, I have also come into the place of hope too – in what God has done and will do in my life this year. The sense of life and communion with God is returning, but it’s taken time and I’m still a work in progress.