“Crisis of Faith” (Genesis 1:26-31)
September 14th, 2008
Rev. Dr. David Andersen, English Language Sabbatical Interim Pastor
The first time Tony Hendra went to see Father Joe, Tony was fourteen years old and filled with trepidation. He had never been inside a monastery before and all he knew of his religion was fear and rules. In that first meeting everything changed. Father Joe conveyed to him something he had never before experienced – the Love of God. This epiphany was mediated through the embrace, the acceptance, the peace, the joy, the understanding of Father Joe. It changed everything.
Tony returned home with a new fervor for his faith. He had fallen in love with God. At first like other enthusiasms he had experienced in his life he was afraid it wouldn’t last, but it did. He regularly and willingly attended mass, kept up a regimen of daily devotions and every night after his brother had gone to sleep, he knelt beside his bed and prayed, and whenever he could he returned to the monastery and his conversations with Father Joe. His one desire, unlike any of his peers, was that one day he too would become a monk.
He lived in the aura of God’s Love. Nothing was more real to him then that. He was filled with religious fervor for his God, but then one night at sixteen as he knelt beside his bed it all came to a crashing halt. All awareness of God died. All religious feeling of the Divine Presence left him in one swell swoop. It was there…then it was gone.
He writes of that night kneeling beside his bed, “I was falling in an elevator with its cables severed, accelerating down into the blackness of the shaft…I knew even as I fell that my faith was being torn from me…I prayed desperately, please God help me…grant me a miracle but there was no help or miracle.” (Father Joe, p.88)
He writes that in this fathomless space, “there was no God nor Christ nor wraith nor hope nor certainty nor salvation and never would be ever again.” (p.88)
It made him physically ill. He said, “I begged the darkness to give me back my faith. But the darkness said nothing. There was no one there to give it back…I was utterly alone. I had never felt such loneliness.” (p.89)
All of us live and hope for some religious certainty and feeling of the Divine. We want to know Christ with us. We want to be filled with the power of His Spirit within us. We crave to know that Presence, to know the certainty of God with us, to live on the mountain top where we can see with our soul the glory of the risen Lord. We want to know Jesus in our hearts, and in many ways, God has blessed our desire. There have been moments or long periods in our life when we have been filled with the awareness of the glory of God.
But, like Tony, there has also been, for many of us, the awareness of God’s absence. We don’t have that religious feeling we once had. Something is taken away. Something is missing. There is an absence of any awareness of a Presence we once knew.
Tony felt bereft of everything that had become so important to him. He felt alienated, alone, where was the God he had loved so dearly? It wasn’t that Tony on his own had decided there was no God. He had believed in God, but it was as though he had been robbed of that belief. It wasn’t as though he had walked away from his faith; it was while he was on his knees, in the exercise of his faith, that it was taken, lifted out of him, ripped from him.
One day, after school, not even telling his parents, broken, sorrowing, unable to study or sleep, he got on a bus, and took the three hour journey to the monastery where Father Joe lived. When at last they met, Tony sobbed his confession and plight. Father Joe listened. He neither tried to cajole or argue Tony back to faith. He comforted him, gave Tony a room to spend the night, called his parents to assure them Tony was safe, then the next day, while they walked the grounds Father Joe became his counselor.
What could he possibly tell Tony? I am not Catholic but I have underlined his words of counsel. This is what he said, Tony dear, “You fell in love with God, you see, and now the romantic part is over…Feelings are a great gift, but they’re treacherous if that’s all we live for. They drive us back into ourselves, you see. What I want. What I feel. What I need.” (p.98)
Then he went on to explain how feelings can become a kind of prison. He said, “Feelings trap us in the self and all our motive begins to become a question of how does it make me feel so that even helping others begins to be motivated by how it makes us feel.” We do it expecting that it will make us feel good, and how often have you heard that as an explanation for helping others. It will make you feel good.
Likewise with our religion or our faith when we are looking for a feeling we end up evaluating Sunday School, or Bible Study, or Worship by asking ourselves, What did I get out of it? How did it make me feel? It becomes a trap where as much as we may not want to, we are still focused on the self. We have this inner barometer that is constantly on alert to how everything and everyone is affecting us and making us feel.
Father Joe was right; it becomes a kind of prison. At the end of his conversation this is what he told Tony, “God gave you a great gift that terrible night…He gave you a vision of Hell. Not that silly fire-and-brimstone stuff. True hell. Being alone with yourself for all eternity. Only your own self to hope in, only your own self to love.”
People, perhaps the reason God sometimes withdraws the awareness of His Presence as Father Joe says and the Bible says, is so that we might find His Presence beyond ourselves and the in the presence of others.
It might be that Tony was ready for the next step. God had nurtured and cared for him all along the way, inspiring Tony in his daily walk, encouraging him in his devotion and worship, giving him the warmth of His presence all along the way, allowing feelings of intimacy to develop in Tony’s love for him while he knelt beside his bed and worshiped him in the sanctuary, but then one day God said, “It’s time, Tony, for you to know me beyond yourself.” God knew that all Tony knew of Him was insular and private.
So, God in one sense withdrew, but not so Tony would feel the absence of God, but so that Tony would come to know Him in all that is.
We are the ones who separate the sacred from the secular. We are the one’s who compartmentalize religion from the rest of life. We are the ones who divide people between us and them. We are the ones who construct the barriers while all the while God is saying, “see me in the sunrise, follow me in the current of the river, hear me in the music of the composer, and touch me on the lips in the kiss of the one you love.” It is all life. It is all of God.
God is in the wind. God is in the fire. God is in the cry of the new born infant as well as the light from the most6 distant star. Christian contemplatives have understood this all through the centuries, and the psalmist extols it in the line of his hymn, “There is no place I can go where God is not.”
And most especially Christians have understood this to mean that in every human face there is the face of Jesus waiting to be recognized. So, Father Joe takes hold of the hands of the distraught Tony, looks him in the eyes and says, “My dear Tony, God is manifested in others. God is the Other. That’s why the self must find itself in love for others.” (p.99)
If right now you are living a spiritual high, if God has never been closer to you, if the awareness of God’s Spirit within you has never been more real to you, if you know what it means to say, I have been to the mountain top, I have seen the Lord, then let me say for you, “Praise God.”
But, if you are in the valley, if that religious feeling of ecstasy has faded, if you have felt the dark night of the soul, a sense of the absence of the presence of God, wondering, worrying, praying, God where are You, let me also say for you, “Praise God.”
God has not left you. God is waiting, God is inviting you to a bigger, wider world than you have imagined, God is inviting you to lose yourself by finding yourself in a bigger wider world where everything that is pulsates with Divine intention and every human face mirrors the image of His Son. God is drawing you to Himself in everything that is.
As I was preparing this sermon, however, I kept thinking to myself, we are feeling creatures and I know what it is to feel the closeness and nearness of God, but what if that nearness isn’t felt, and it is all because God is calling us outside ourselves to know Him in a wider world, beyond ourselves, to lose ourselves in the stuff and glories of life, is there then no feeling or is there another new feeling that helps us understand God’s presence in the world?
Is there any feeling that parallels the awareness of God in the world with the feelings of intimacy with the awareness of God in the soul? What can compensate for not being on the mountain top and knowing we are called into the valley, knowing that most of our lives cannot be lived on a spiritual high, we cannot sustain it, it is not ours to sustain, but what is it in the day to dayness that will make us aware and confirm God’s presence in everything that is? “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, thou art with me.” What is the feeling that can draw me to this public awareness of God? This God who is in everything and especially in the one who stands before me? How will I know Him? What will be the feeling?
The answer is in the feeling of gratitude. The public face of God is confirmed in all the gratitude we feel toward life. Feeling thankful is the greatest holistic, religious feeling you can have.
Only one healed leper returned to thank Jesus. All ten were healed but nine of them would remain insular and isolated and selfish, and it would not be too long before once again they would require another miracle to have confirmed for them that God really existed. Only the tenth, only the one who returned to say thank you, began to understand life beyond himself, a life with God at the center of all that is, a life that can only be experienced through gratitude.
You can’t say Thank you and not be aware of life beyond yourself. It forces you outside yourself and there always you will find the God you seek, a God Tony thought he had lost that night he kneeled before his bed.
Learn gratitude. The apostle Paul writes, “giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” (Eph. 5:20). In all ways, learn to be thankful. Gratitude is the greatest religious feeling you can experience. It is infused with the presence of God.
If in any way there is a sense of gratitude in your heart, you stand on Holy Ground. You are in the Presence of the Lord. God is with you, opening the eyes of your soul, helping you see a wider world, leading you to Himself, helping you see Christ in the other, showing you, there is no place you can go where God is not…in the stars, the first crocus from the ground, and especially when you look into the eyes of another…there is the nearness of God, calling you to Himself in calling you to the other. There in that gratitude you feel for the person standing next to you, you have rediscovered the presence of the Lord.
Let us pray: God, may our spirits be open to the awareness of Your Presence in all of life, in one another, and especially the one seeking our help. Amen.
