When God is unaccountably silent, unreasonably absent, apparently indifferent,

Now here's something you don't come across every day. An honest account of what it feels like when God is unaccountably silent, unreasonably absent, apparently indifferent, and our inner climate is colder than winter. That's the title of one of my favourite songs, sung by Sarah Brightman in a stunning Winter concert. The refrain is a quietly sad relinquishment, "It's colder than winter, since you closed the door."

Renita Weems writes of that experience of God not being there, not being here, not being near. There are the usual phrases, spiritual dryness, dark night of the soul, wilderness experience, and the Christian tradition acknowledges those periods when something shuts down in us. The question is what we do with what we feel. And that's a hard question because often, feeling that inner emptiness, and knowing that loss of motivation and sense of purpose, it's hard to even think about what to do, let alone do it. Life has its seasons, including winter. Weems has learned that Winter may best be lived through by waiting, and trusting that in the silence and waiting, newness and life is recovering and pushing again towards Spring."Eventually we have to accept that dying and rising, freezing and thawing, resting and rebounding, sleeping and awakening are the necessary conditions for all growth and creativity." (37)

Thinking about those previous times when 'something in me had shut down', she came to the conclusion "The soul flourishes and withers scores of times in the face of the sublime." That insight positively glows with realism. It is a recognition that life is rhythmic, that relationships can never be sustained at the apex, that passionate awareness cannot be the norm or we would be exhausted. Relationships grow in the daily fluctuations of emotional intensity, and also in the rhythms of presence and absence, words and silence. Thomas Merton, an inveterate writer of words and a brilliant converdationalist and a naturally gregarious man, struggled to fulfil his vocation as a Trappist Monk. He once said, with some irony, "Words are the sounds that interrupt my silence."

In Listening to God, Renita Weems is giving as honest an account as she can of what the silence and felt absence of God might mean, and how it feels. She has come out of the other side of guilt and feeling a failure as if those times of winter were her fault, and God's purpose is that it should always be summer. In a poem that reads like a Psalm, she tells of how she has come to understand that in the waiting is our growing, in the silence is our learning, in God's absence our heart can learn to grow fonder, or come to terms with the truth that God is not a comfort confectionery, but One whose presence need not be registered emotionally.

 

I usedta bow,

now I stand

before God's throne

 

I usedta close my eyes,

now I stare

straight ahead.

 

I usedta do what was expected,

now I do what I must

to make this faith

faithful to me.

 

I usedta be afraid of God,

now I take my chances

and wait

and wait

tapping my feet,

listening for God.

.....

There is a world of wisdom and self-knowing in those words. They are wrought out of a long wrestling with God's closeness and distance, God's words and God's silences. And they have a life-giving pastoral hopefulness for folk like the rest of us who try tive up to expectations of our own and not God's making.

Comments

[Lucy]

Mmm, thanks for sharing this. The whole ‘life is rhythmic’ thing is something I have been reflecting on and find helpful.

[Jim Gordon]

Thanks for taking the time to comment Lucy. The Summer School I'm involved in here in Aberdeen is looking at the seasons of life, and the challenges of change and transition that is involved in our growth as human beings and as Christians. The ebb and flow of the tide is another metaphor I often ponder, especially when beach walking.