Month: July 2014

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How Long Must We Endure?

Today is a really, really, really hard day to be Catholic in Minnesota! If you care to read the details that leave me somewhere between exasperated on the way to enraged you can find them [here].

Let me simply summarize by saying that I called for the resignation of John Neinstedt as Archbishop of St Paul & Minneapolis [here] one month ago today. Now I am confident that it will only be a matter of time!  But how long, oh Lord?  How long?

Perhaps this is perfect context in which to reaffirm that our Christian faith is grounded — not in humans, not in a church or any authority, not even in any human interpretation of Scripture — but ultimately and solely in God alone.

So today is a day in which I feel the cost, challenge and pain of loving a church that is corrupt, sinful and in desperate need of a thorough house-cleaning! All the more need to keep my eyes focused on God alone! All the more reason to stay with the very same theme I had planned for today — living in the dark!

Yesterday, before the bomb shell news report, I could never have anticipated how I would come to value Barbara Brown Taylor’s quote from the 14th century classic, The Cloud of Unknowing: “… darkness and cloud is always between you and God, no matter what you do.”

Let me be clear, the anonymous author of this Christian classic was speaking of “darkness” as that intriguing, beguiling, frustrating mystery of God that is as impenetrable as its opposite, trying to look directly into the sun. This darkness — only metaphorically apprehended in what mystics express as a “dark night of the soul” — is the direct polar opposite of the sin and corruption we so vividly see in the Church of St Paul and Minneapolis.

Keeping our sights singularly fixed on God alone, we acknowledge that some things we will simply never be able to see by the light of human understanding. At times — thankfully not most of the time — faith feels like a forced exile, if not a long captivity, the spiritual life weighs like an imposing burden.

The anonymous text from the 14th century remains a classic because of its incomparable ability to express our universal and perennial experience. Ultimately, like the penultimate lawgiver, Moses, we are able to encounter or “see” the Holy One — if at all — only from within a cloud of luminous darkness.

Moses never made it to the Promised Land, being given only the gift of seeing it beckoning on the horizon. Others lead the People’s crossing over from slavery into freedom.

How long, oh Lord? How long!!! Our trust rests in you alone.

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Barbara Brown Taylor’s reference on p 48 of Learning to Walk in the Dark is from The Cloud of Unknowing, ed. Emilie Griffin.  HarperSan-Francisco, 1981. p 15.

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Going Over to the Dark Side

A woman from Georgia has more to say to me about God than anyone else I know. With feet firmly planted in a working farm she tends with her husband, she simultaneously culls Moses, fourth century Cappadocian monk Gregory of Nyssa and the anonymous fourteenth century author of The Cloud of Unknowing for wisdom.

Please… before dismissing her as pious or preachy, you must know that she writes for those of us who are “in deep need of faith right now, but the kind you inherited from your parents is not cutting it. You want something that asks more of you than to sit and listen quietly while someone else tells you how to live.”

I eagerly await everything Barbara Brown Taylor writes. We are about the same age. She served a good part of her life as an Episcopal priest. Having left active ministry I resonate with her honesty: “I also discovered a number of things about my Christian tradition that had not been apparent to me while I was busy upholding it.”

In her most recent spiritual memoir, Learning to Walk in the Dark, Barbara Brown Taylor says chief among these is the way Christian teaching thrives on dividing reality into opposed pairs: good/evil, church/world, spirit/flesh, sacred/profane, light/dark. Keeps life simple… you don’t even have to be Christian to know who are the “winners” and the “losers.”

Separating the world into opposing camps makes it easy to know who is closer to God and who isn’t. This really simplifies life for those who don’t care to spend much time thinking about whether their categories hold (or are even Christian). Such clarity provides a strong sense of purpose by focusing daily battles they will take on as their moral duty. The more we beat back the powers of the flesh or of darkness the closer we get to God.

BBT brilliantly coins this as “a bad case of solar affective disorder” or “full solar spirituality. She suggests we can usually recognize a full solar church by its emphasis on the “perks” of faith — a sure sense of God’s presence, certainty of belief, divine guidance in all things, and reliable answers to prayer. Members strive to be positive in attitude, firm in conviction, helpful in relationship, and unwavering in faith.  She asks, who wouldn’t want to dwell in God’s light 24/7?

But then life happens — Christian life happens! You lose your job, maybe your house. Your marriage turns sour. A grandchild is born with a serious genetic disorder. Sure, the full-solar Christians will be there for you and express genuine care. But the shady side of life will soon exhaust their resources. Too many of us are woefully ill prepared to enter the dark-side of life without putting our own faith at risk. We are prepared to deliver a hot-dish casserole when human hungers are so much more insatiable!

The great thing about BBT is that her profound observations are never a self-righteous judgment or divisive condemnation. If it were she would be guilty of the very dualistic thinking and separating into “winners” or “losers” she bemoans. Rather, Learning to Walk in the Dark is a refreshing invitation to embrace “lunar spirituality,” a realistic true-to-life faith that recognizes that the divine light available at any given time waxes and wanes with the seasons of our lives.

It’s not whether we have enough faith to explore the darkness — life itself provides more than enough incentive — but whether we are willing to bump into the things that frighten us and ask the darkness to teach us what we need to know.

Christian faith professes that Jesus was crucified, died and was buried, descended into hell, on the third day rose from the dead and only then ascended into heaven. Sounds like pretty intense darkness to me! Does this not proclaim the way and the truth of our lives?  Should we really expect it to be any different?

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This reflection is largely based on the Introduction to Learning to Walk in the Dark by Barbara Brown Taylor. HarperOne, 2014.