Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
Job 23:1-9, 16-17
23Then Job answered:
2 'Today also my complaint is bitter;
his hand is heavy despite my groaning.
3 O that I knew where I might find him,
that I might come even to his dwelling!
4 I would lay my case before him,
and fill my mouth with arguments.
5 I would learn what he would answer me,
and understand what he would say to me.
6 Would he contend with me in the greatness of his power?
No; but he would give heed to me.
7 There an upright person could reason with him,
and I should be acquitted for ever by my judge.
8 'If I go forward, he is not there;
or backward, I cannot perceive him;
9 on the left he hides, and I cannot behold him;
I turn to the right, but I cannot see him.
16 God has made my heart faint;
the Almighty has terrified me;
17 If only I could vanish in darkness,
and thick darkness would cover my face!
Prior to her death in 1997, Mother Theresa was one of the world's most undisputed spiritual icons. In fact, in 1997 she and the Dalai Lama may have been the two people on the top of that list, ahead of even the pope. So it is no surprise that Mother Theresa is now on what might be considered to be the fast track for recognition by the Catholic Church as a saint. Her charitable work with the poor and sick of Calcutta has already won her the Nobel Peace Prize and recognition the world over for her selfless compassion.
But a few years after her death, in 2002, her diary was published, against her dying wishes. She had wanted her diary and personal papers burned upon her death but instead her personal thoughts and feelings were made public. What these papers revealed came as a shock to many who had viewed her as a paragon of faith.
She recorded her feelings of despair and loneliness and for 40 years she said that she had no feeling of the presence of God. She said, "As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear."
When she was young, she had a strong sense of calling to be a nun. She had the religious experiences and enthusiasm that many of us who grew up in the heart of the church can recall, but what she was willing to say in private she was not willing to say in public though many other spiritual writers before her had said, more or less, the same things.
When we are young and impressionable, we tend to take religious teachings very literally and we tend to have the feelings and experiences that we have been taught to expect to have... such is the power of suggestion. As we mature, provided that growing older also includes maturity.... That is not a certainty, unfortunately, but it is a hope that with time our critical thinking skills help us to be more discerning, more analytic about faith and everything else of importance.
Rather than tarnishing Mother Theresa's halo, her record of perseverance in the absence of self-deceiving feelings bolstered her character in my view.
Though the Bible is full of accounts of the miraculous as is much of the religious writing of other faith traditions, our Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, has managed to also preserve what might be called the "minority report" of the Jewish cult. We have some examples of more naked honesty about the absence of God, the silence, the inaction from on high that comes closer to telling the truth about our mature, adult, experience of life.
Our reading from Job today, the ancient philosopher bemoans:
8 'If I go forward, he is not there;
or backward, I cannot perceive him;
9 on the left he hides, and I cannot behold him;
I turn to the right, but I cannot see him.
Now, let me be quick to say that the text of Job did not survive without many attempts at editing it to be more sympathetic with the larger context of the Hebrew Bible. Job is 42 chapters long and I believe that somewhere between a third to a half of its current 42 chapters were added centuries after the original author penned these desperately honest lines.
The faith community cannot always stand too much honesty. And it is one of the real perils of progressive faith. When you start to get honest about religion. When you acknowledge that God doesn't write books and that most of what people call prayer is little more than wishing, when you accept that whatever intervention that God makes into human history takes place only when people of faith choose to act in accordance with the heart and the ethics of their faith, most people just look for the exit.
Take away the carrot and the stick of heaven and hell, expose the magical thinking of intercessory prayer, and the symbolic nature of sacraments and many people will simply assume that the whole thing is just a charade and they give up on religion entirely.
It is significant to note then, that for 40 years, Mother Theresa kept caring for the poor and dying of Calcutta, when she no longer felt the presence of an imaginary friend. Everything that made Mother Theresa famous, what made the BBC do a special series of reports on her life, what earned the Nobel Prize and made her image immediately recognizable to the world, all of that came while she did not feel the religious confidence she had enjoyed when she was a child.
The world hardly recognized her death, and that is so for the very simple and indicting reason that she died the same week as Princes Diana. Theresa was an icon of faith, character, radical compassion, and charitable accomplishment.... Princes Diana was an icon of beauty and wealth and the media tends to report on what the society genuinely values.
Though I have generally disparaged my first book, Christian Wisdom for Today, for being way too specifically Christian, the part of it that I would still defend, twenty years later, is that the significant stage of faith doesn't start until you have allowed the faith of your childhood to die a natural death and you have experienced the dry nothingness of continually doing just what Job described....
8 'If I go forward, he is not there;It is not until you have the distinct feeling that when you pray that not only is no one answering but that, in fact, no one is listening. It is after what St. John of the Cross called "the dark night of the soul," in the silence and void that you discover what we mean by the practice of faith. The practice of your convictions.
or backward, I cannot perceive him;
9 on the left he hides, and I cannot behold him;
I turn to the right, but I cannot see him.
It is like the old adage that says that character is what you do when you are certain that no one is watching. People who change their behavior or who engage in worship and religious observances out of fear of hell, or desire for eternal life in heaven, or even for the more venial rewards of good luck with their annual physical or increasing their chances of winning the lottery are not really spiritual.... They are just narcissistic in a magical thinking sort of way.
Real faith begins when you have given up on magic and superstition and you are seeking to be and to do what you believe is right and has meaning and substance. The Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, is famous for saying, "People believe that walking on water is a miracle. To me, walking peacefully on earth is the real miracle."
I get that many people will be disillusioned initially when they lose their childhood faith.
And with some regret, I accept that the majority of people will never continue to search until they find a faith that has greater substance beyond the void and the darkness of a silent sky. But for those who will practice without need for either invisible or felt reward, who can practice their faith without prompting from either fear or guilt, then, I believe, the world can be full of miracles that come from living a life of compassion, forgiveness, sincere love, and true friendship.
And this is a matter of evidence based faith because you only have to try it to discover that I am telling you the absolute and unvarnished truth.
