For the past month, I've been in a state of prolonged bleakness.
What has this looked like? I've wrestled with intense depression. My emotions have been up and down, and the emotional resilience that I've spent five years building seems to have deserted me. I find myself on edge, either angry or sad, at minor comments that wouldn't normally phase me.
Mostly, I've felt an acute sense of shame and the almost utter absence of God.
I've struggled to talk about this, because while I was deep in it I couldn't get the necessary distance to put what I was going through in perspective or to extract any lessons from it (for myself, let alone for anyone else). I'm still in it. But a conversation with a friend shifted how I saw my experience this past weekend, and now I feel that I have enough perspective to put some thoughts down on paper.
(Note: unlike many Heal the West pieces, this piece represents less my polished thoughts and more of an ongoing wrestling with this topic. I publish it in the hopes that said wrestling may be useful to someone else).
First off, what's going on?
I think this time of bleakness is God pushing me—rather abruptly—into deeper spiritual waters than I feel consciously ready for.
For years I've wrestled with a feeling of shame. On a foundational level, I thought that I was broken and less than other people.
My connection to God largely covered this feeling. Here's the metaphor I've come up with to describe this. Imagine that I've been body surfing down a river. The feeling of shame is the sharp rocks at the bottom of the river, which can cut and gash me if I touch them. I think of my connection to God as the water flowing and swirling for several feet over the top of those rocks, separating me from them. The rocks were still there. But they were deeply submerged to the point where I only occasionally noticed them and they only occasionally hurt me.
But now, I feel God calling that sense of shame to the surface so that I can face it down directly—and, perhaps, be finally free of it. In the short term, this has felt like all the water vanishing from the river. I've been body surfing directly on very sharp and pointy rocks. It has not been fun.
So how do I know that this experience—of the shame rising up in me so that I can combat it directly, and hurting intensely as it does so—is from God? How do I know the pain of the past month, and the sense of disconnection from God, doesn't just mean I've taken a dastardly wrong turn in my spiritual path?
I suppose I don't, not completely. Bu I suspect that this is from God, for three reasons.
First, it makes intuitive psychological sense to me. I think that negative scripts and beliefs (such as "I am broken and less than other people") can only be truly broken when they are confronted directly. Pushing them down, even down below something as wondrous as God's love, can only get me so far. If I want to truly be free of my demons, there comes a point when I have to confront them head-on.
Second, I've read other Christian writers who describe the process I think I'm going through. Here's how C.S. Lewis puts it in Mere Christianity:
"Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently he starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of—throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself."
For the past month, I believe that I have been in the "hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense" phase of what Lewis describes.
Third: interspersed with the despair and gloom and shame have been experiences of deep transcendence with God that I think are Him telling me that I'm on the right track. The morning one Saturday where I felt such intense love for every human being that I wanted to cry. The cumulative hours where I could feel the utter beauty in the present moment. The dreams that seem to be from God, which were quite unlike my regular dreams and which seemed to be Him telling me that the best years of my life by far were still to come if I just had the courage to keep walking this path. I have taken these experiences to be breadcrumbs from God, a still and quiet trail in the midst of my suffering telling me that I am on the right track and that something good will come of all of this.
So what have I learned so far from this time of bleakness? Like I said, I'm still in the midst of it; but I think I've gotten enough perspective from it to put three tentative ideas down on the page.
1) As a church, we need to talk more openly about these times of bleakness. I've seen a fair number of Christians (and perhaps members of other faiths are guilty of this same flaw) who just want to whitewash pain and suffering. We assume that if we are truly walking with God, then life will be all bunnies and roses. As Richard Foster writes in Celebration of Discipline, "The notion, often heard today, that such [negative] experiences should be avoided and that we always should live in peace and comfort, joy, and celebration only betrays the fact that much contemporary experience is surface slush."
I've been tempted to partake in this spiritual bypassing—just connect deeper with God, and everything will be perfect and you will never suffer!—myself. When I do it, I'm coming from a place of insecurity. I do not want to grapple with the fact that a life with God might involve suffering, and so I find ways to handwave away accounts of suffering as though the sufferers just need to connect with God on a deeper level in order to be healed.
I've sort of developed a reputation as the guy who talks about how a connection to God can improve our mental health (I'm actually writing a book on that topic). And I stand by that thesis. But there are wrinkles that I am only beginning to grasp (and others, I am sure, that I do not yet grasp). One is that we can walk deeply with God and still suffer, especially if God is calling us into that suffering in order to help us to let go of the world and cling more tightly to Him. As Foster writes, "it is quite possible to fear, obey, trust, and rely upon the Lord and still 'walk in darkness and have no light.'" Another wrinkle is that every single one of us grapples, to some extent or other, with fear and guilt and shame. God can drive out those emotions; when I am deeply with Him, I feel an utter absence of fear/guilt/shame. But the corollary is that those emotions can also drive out God. When I am deep in a feeling of shame, it is harder for me to hear God's voice and therefore to receive God's internal healing.
Perhaps those of us on a spiritual path should be more open to hearing the pain and despair of our fellow seekers, without responding (as I have sometimes been tempted to do) with pablum such as "have you just tried praying more?"
2) Over the course of this past month, I can feel myself developing a lot more emotional resilience. This is odd; because, like I said in the beginning of this post, I've often felt more fragile and reactive. But underneath that, I get the sense that the suffering I am experiencing is expanding my capacity to suffer well, which is an extremely useful skill.
As one example, one Friday night I was in so much emotional pain that I longed for the oblivion of sleep. But I was haunted by the fact that said oblivion would be a temporary reprieve; the next morning I would wake up and the excruciating pain would be back. As I half-joked half-snarled at God that night, "You know, if Your plan for me is to get tortured like the early Church martyrs in order to advance Your kingdom, this is probably pretty good training."
3) And yet, through all of this I've found my faith deepening. I know that I'm in pain now, and that God led me here; but I also know that He will lead me out. To borrow Lewis' metaphor: even though I'm in the phase that "hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense," I trust the master carpenter who's doing the work. I know that there will come a time when I am extremely grateful for this work having been done on me.
Or to put it another way: on a deeper level than I ever have before, I trust my life and my soul to God. I know that His plans for me are infinitely better than my plans; and also that short-term suffering can be worth it for any number of reasons. This trust is not predicated on naïveté. Instead, it is predicated on four years of experience of walking with God through what have sometimes been hard times. When I moved to Kenya; when I lived in a neighborhood with daily fist fights outside my front door, and another neighborhood with weekly bomb threats; when I left my cushy corporate job with no plan and few savings, just because I felt God calling me to; when I trusted God with hard conversations with my wife or closest friends; He came through for me. Every time in the past four years that it looked like things were falling apart, it turned out in hindsight that He had dissolved something good in order to make way for something better.
I have the (budding) faith, not of a child who clings to a spiritual stuffed animal, but of experience: that after everything God has done for me, He will not choose this moment to abandon me. I can trust Him now, because I trusted Him last time, and the time before that, and He came through for me.
My faith in God is nascent, but through this time of bleakness I can feel it growing. Perhaps that's the biggest blessing in all of this.
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Praying for you, Julian.
Thank you for courageously sharing this, Julian. You are a brave and beautiful soul. I know exactly what you mean and have been walking through that valley, too. It is a great comfort to know that you and others see the need for a deeper spiritual practice in the church and to cease these happy shiny fake supportive gestures. Christ knew what the worst suffering was and no trite words comforted him. He showed us the way and meditating on his path is the way for the church to become truly deep and relevant once more. Sending prayers and love your way, my brother…we all walk with you who have been and will return to the Valley.