A Deep and Holy Darkness

Perhaps, indeed, the better the gift we pray for, the more time is necessary for its arrival. To give us the spiritual gift we desire, God may have to begin far back in our spirit, in regions unknown to us, and do much work that we can be aware of only in the results; for our consciousness is to the extent of our being but as the flame of the volcano to the world-gulf whence it issues; in the gulf of our unknown being God works behind our consciousness.

With His holy influence, with His own presence (the one thing for which we most earnestly cry) He may be approaching our consciousness from behind, coming forward through regions of our darkness into our light, long before we begin to be aware that He is answering our request—has answered it, and is visiting his child.

George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons

Reflection – Another day with this good Scottish preacher man! I understand from reading C.S. Lewis’ introduction to the anthology where I found this quote that MacDonald was perhaps most profoundly shaped in his life by an exceptionally good relationship with his own father, who from the sound of it was a man of sterling character and genuine goodness. Certainly when you delve into MacDonald’s works you cannot help but be struck with the note of utter trust and certainty in the goodness of God and absolute confidence in His beneficence towards us. It is indeed helpful to have experienced that sort of thing on a human scale from one’s own father, en route to getting there with the Father of all.

Here, we see what I think is just about a perfect description of the efficacy of prayer and its mysterious workings. It is true that there is so much more to our inner selves than what our consciousness knows of itself—we did not really need Sigmund Freud to inform us that a great deal goes on below the level of conscious deliberation and choice.

And the grace of God is flowing and moving at these deep levels of our being in ways we can hardly begin to even dimly know. For example, a question that comes up in spiritual direction fairly often is that of whether or not someone has ‘a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.’ I don’t tend to put things that way myself, but the language is used generally, and so it comes up in the direction context.

My own answer to that question is very simple. I don’t actually know if I have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. What I know with absolute certainty is that Jesus Christ has a personal relationship with me. The first strikes me as somewhat presumptuous, like the fact that I have all sorts of strong emotions and nice thoughts and talk to the Man frequently (all of which is true) somehow makes it certain that I am ‘in with Him.’ How should I know that, and would it not be a trifle arrogant of me to assume it?

The second formulation is simply a matter of faith, that Jesus my Lord is working away in me and at me, not because I’m some special precious snowflake (which is a hilarious metaphor, by the way, at this point of the mega-winter of 2013-14), but because He is at work in and at and on every human being who is, because He loves us.

All of it is happening at such a deep level of our being far below our level of consciousness. It is a rare and mystic soul who is given to know the action of grace clearly and habitually, and that kind of thing is usually given to a person at great cost of suffering, and so that they may offer instruction and guidance to others.

No, most of us live in the grace of God in a deep and holy darkness which quite often (and especially in times of suffering) feels to us like, rather, a bleak and lowly darkness. And it must be so—again this is where trust comes in—God knows what He is doing, and if it would be better for us that His workings in our soul be laid bare and clear and plain, that is how He would do it. 

Clearly, it is not, and our constant call is to pray without seeing the results, to ask and know we are receiving even though a great deal of the time that reception is occurring in the most deep and hidden recesses of our being. To seek and trust that the finding is happening in a way that feels more like being lost, to knock and have absolute confidence that the door is opened… even though to all our perceptions it appears that the door is shut and barred in our face.

Trust, trust, trust… and the only reliable sign possibly given to us that all this is in fact happening is the results of our prayer, and the only result that we can have any reliance on is our ability to keep loving, to keep believing, to keep going in fidelity and perseverance in the path God has set before us.

Stay Thirsty, My Friends

“I cannot see what harm would come of letting us know a little—as much at least as might serve to assure us that there was more of something on the other side.”

“Just this; that, their fears allayed, their hopes encouraged from any lower quarter, men would (as usual) turn away from the Fountain, to the cistern of life…

“That there are thousands who would forget God if they could but be assured of such a tolerable state of things beyond the grave as even this wherein we now live, is plainly to be anticipated from the fact that the doubts of so many in respect of religion concentrate themselves nowadays upon the question whether there is any life beyond the grave; a question which… does not immediately belong to religion at all.

“Satisfy such people, if you can, that they shall live, and what have they gained? A little comfort perhaps—but a comfort not from the highest source, and possibly gained too soon for their well-being. Does it bring them any nearer to God than they were before? Is He filling one cranny more of their hearts in consequence?”

George MacDonald, Thomas Wingfold, Curate

Reflection – Our journey this week with great Protestant writers takes us from Bonhoeffer yesterday in Nazi Germany to 19^th century Scotland and the great Presbyterian minister and author George MacDonald (Updated to correct: by the end of his life, he had become Church of England). Known today primarily for his children’s stories (The Princess and the Goblin, etc.), and for his influence on C.S. Lewis, he was a prolific novelist and writer of Christian theology.

This excerpt, plucked more or less at random from an anthology of his writings edited by Lewis, raises very profound questions within the context of the silence of God and the demands of faith as opposed to absolute knowledge.

The fact is, all the testimony of Scripture set aside, along with all the various visions vouchsafed to mystics over the centuries, the simple truth is neither you nor I nor anyone really knows what happens to us the minute after we die. We can believe all we like about it, and we can (and have) crafted rather strong philosophical arguments in favor of the existence of something immaterial in the human person that can then credibly be held to survive the death of the material body.

But we don’t know, and even if our philosophical understanding is strong enough that we assert actual knowledge of the immortal soul (which I think we can), we really don’t know what happens afterwards, what immortality would look like, and any specifics of the afterlife. Even the Scriptures are very scarce on details, of course.

Well, MacDonald suggests to us here that it would actually be pretty bad for us, spiritually and morally, if we did have a positive and definite knowledge of these matters that was vouchsafed to humanity in general. And in this, he is making a very perceptive statement about the nature of God, of faith, of humanity, that takes us beyond the specific question of life after death into much broader fields.

C.S. Lewis broached this question in one of his last works, the magnificent Til We Have Faces, which I always rank among my all time favorite books. ‘Why are holy places dark places?’ is his formulation of it. Why is God hidden from man? Why the mystery, why the lack of positive, definite knowledge? Why doesn’t God just show Himself plainly and speak plainly and make His existence and will so utterly clear and lucid to us that everyone can see what it is and act accordingly? What’s with all the hide and seek? Is God playing games with us? Because… with all due respect, it’s not a very fun game, Lord!

I will leave you to discover C.S. Lewis’ answer to that question in that book, if you haven’t already (it is, in my view, his greatest work, and well worth tracking down). But MacDonald suggests here, in the context of life after death, that it simply would not be good for us to know too much, to have too much certainty at this point of our spiritual journey.

Too much knowledge at too soon a stage is not necessarily a good thing. We have all seen (and perhaps, alas, know from first hand) that a child who is exposed to too much knowledge about the world and its ways at too young an age does not grow well. Jaundiced cynicism, that sad parody of wisdom, is the result. Children should be given knowledge of the world and all its good and evil gradually and according to their capacity to absorb it.

Well, we are all, spiritually, children, whether we like to admit it or not. And it is the wisdom of our Father in heaven that it simply would not be good for us to know too much about the deep mysteries of life and death right now. In our perverse wills and fallen intellects, too much knowledge would coarsen us or make us complacent or indifferent or blasé.

‘Familiarity breeds contempt’. God never allows us to become familiar with Him, and this is a very good thing for us. ‘Stay thirsty, my friends,’ says the Most Interesting Man in the World (ahem), and this is good wisdom found, oddly, in the genre of a beer advertisement.

Our Father keeps us thirsty, keeps us searching, keeps us alert and vigilant, and above all keeps us in a situation where the bottom line is always, forever, and gloriously, one of needing to place our trust in Him and in His Son Jesus. He knows what He is doing, and what He is doing is what is best for us and what we need at this stage of our spiritual childhood.

Marvelling at Forsaken Cornfields

The Father said, 'That is a stone.' The Son would not say, 'That is a loaf.' No one creative fiat shall contradict another. TheFather and the Son are of one mind. The Lord could hunger, could starve, but would not change into another thing what His Father had made one thing.

 There was no such change in the feeding of the multitudes. The fish and the bread were fish and bread before... there was in these miracles, and I think in all, only a hastening of appearances: the doing of that in a day which may ordinarily take a thousand years, for with God times in not what it is with us.

He makes it... Nor does it render the process one whit more miraculous. Indeed, the wonder of the growing corn is to me greater than the wonder of feeding the thousands. It is easier to understand the creative power going forth at once - immediately - than throught he countless, the lovely, the seemingly forsaken wonders of the cornfield.

George MacDonald,  Unspoken Sermons, Vol 1

Reflection - Well, after all the papal excitement of recent days, let's settle back into something different. I just plucked the above book, or rather an anthology of selections from it, off the shelf of the MH England library. I had read MacDonald's fairy tales, which are delightful, and knew of his influence on C.S. Lewis, which was profound, but had never experienced his prose style.

It seems to me that this sermon from the late 19th century could have been given in the year 2013 without much need for change. The whole modern world is dedicated to turning stones into bread - to making something God made one thing into something quite other.

For example, human beings are persons, not medicine. So embryos can not be harvested for stem cell research. A person is one thing; medicine is another. This is roughly the same argument used for why cannibalism is wrong - my brother is my life, not my lunch. I suppose in time, having pursued the use of embryos for medical research, we will come around to using them as appetizers.

Sorry to be distasteful, but the distastefulness is not mine, after all. Underneath this modern attitude which is so prevalent, this rejection of God's created order, this utter incapacity to distinguish between one thing-making something injured or ill well-and another-making something to be what it is not-is a fundamental rejection of God the Creator, God the Father, and a terminal inability or refusal to trust Him as such.

Meanwhile, besides holding out the Son's total acceptance of the will of the Father as our model, MacDonald calls us to a whole-hearted delight in the actual force of life and wholeness that is inherent in creation itself. The cornfield does burgeon and blossom and produce the full ear, the mature plant heavy with nourishment and life. There are, in fact, medical advances with adult stem cell therapies, which simply use the potentialities of the patient's own body to speed or strengthen the healing process, something our bodies are designed to do by their own created power.

God's created order is good, and the deep solutions to our difficulties and sorrows lie within a joyful acceptance of it and embrace of its true goodness and life. And even though death is inevitable, and suffering may proceed it, even there God comes to meet his creature and lead us into a fuller yet reception of life and beauty. The passage through suffering and death, when it comes to us and cannot be withstood by our godly use of intellect and will, is a passage into Christ's own life, death, and resurrection.

I like this MacDonald fellow, and will be adding him to my rogue's gallery on the side when I get back to Combermere, along with that new pope fellow in Rome whassisname. Meantime, let us spend the day marvelling at the forsaken cornfields and their lovely, miraculous fecundity.