What do you do when you feel God is absent? Pull away? Try harder to connect? Busy yourself with other things? Shut down?
In this meditation, Winner often returns to the refrain "Time passes." How does the passing of time shape your spiritual life?
When Winner tells a friend she is having marital trouble, her friend tells her: "I don't know if you will get divorced...I do know that, if you do, two years later you will some things about God that you don't know now" (p. 19). How do loss, absence, and emptiness sometimes give us a fuller understanding of God?
5 comments:
Perhaps I'm stating the obvious, but what has struck me throughout the first 20+ pages is how damaging it is when the Church (its representatives and constituents) defines how we must act and determines when/if we've failed God. Over time, I've come to learn that whenever the Church distances itself from me (I am the one who leaves the physical space, but the Church has pushed by refusing to accept my nature or actions as worthy of it), God is still there, not absent, always loving, always accepting. It has taken a very long time (and many years in the wilderness) to come to that understanding. I return, from time to time, to that wilderness, but each time it is more familiar and I find it easier to find my way out again and back to God, with, if only out of necessity, a much more resilient carapace – one I am fully aware will be shed again, not necessarily as I outgrow it, but as my shape changes within it.
Hrumph. I have very mixed responses to this section.
Catherine: I agree--the Church, by nature of its origins, is human and flawed, yet still somehow sacred and true. It's where the Church has and always will be messy--the humanness of it all. I love what you say about the wilderness and familiarity and God and resilience. It all rings true for me.
What I struggled with in this section is what I struggle with in much of Winner's writings. She comes across as painfully narcissistic (I know, I know, it's a memoir, it's narcissistic by nature). Something about the 2.5 hour session with the priest just rubs me the wrong way (does any priest really book 2.5 hours for a meeting with one person? I mean, come on. There are boilers to bleed and hospital visits to make and budgets to balance. Something's amiss there, but I digress). The priest comes off as an a*hole. I fully believe some marriages are best ended. And to call someone a liar for having a failed marriage is just bad. But something about this whole section rings an untrue for me. Perhaps that my own defense mechanism kicking in--I don't know.
I will say, I appreciate the phrase "time passes." It's one I remind myself of a lot when I'm struggling. Mine is "this will not last forever."
Winner remarks that "You wonder if you have invented the whole thing:"...definitely a position of uncertainty. C.S. Lewis proposes, in the Screwtape Letters, that we are the most vulnerable when our minds are in the maximum uncertainty...there is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human's mind against God. (Somewhat paraphrasing)
She looks elsewhere for some attention and perhaps that is the key to her existential angst. So far, "it" has been about her... forgetting that our nature is to be a part of God's creation, to be in congruence with God rather than to put ourselves in the place of God. Her pain seems to move her to the center of action.
And, to Catherine's point, the Church has indeed failed her in that the mission of the Church is to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.
Time does pass; but not so much in the void that the author alludes. I think she is so busy with the noise of her life that she has missed the action that was in the periphery. I'm reminded of the John Cage composition that simply has the pianist sit at the bench for specified duration of time. No music is played, the audience sits quietly for a brief period of time...then movement, motion, sound.
For me, when life is challenging I am reminded of the time my father tried to show me how to fish. He eventually gave up chiding me that I talked to much...so I try not to talk to much to God and try to listen more and to pay attention to those liminal moments.
I find that when God feels absent it is usually because I have gotten in the way of God being present. I look at the lake or the trees in the park or the clouds in the sky or my cats. Sometimes a spend extra time with a patient who is sad or lonely or confused or I volunteer time doing something for someone in need. If none of these work I call my spiritual director.
Being the eldest of those contributing to this blog I can say that the passage of time is vital for the spiritual life for it is a journey through wilderness and verdant pastures. Oh how things change as one gets older some for the better some for the worse. It takes time, sometimes a lot of it, to grow spiritually. It reminds me of that wonderful poem about the seasons of life - a time for sowing and a time for reaping, a time for tears and a time for joy, a time to build and a time to tear down . . .
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