“What have been your experiences of the mysterium tremendum?” asked Bert, a fellow in our faith-sharing group of twenty- and thirty-somethings. We had been praying with Luke 5, where Jesus invites a few dudes to “catch” people after a miraculous haul -- a passage that seems to repeatedly come up in my life for a variety of reasons1 -- and Peter’s reaction to Jesus became a focus of our lectio divina reflection.
“Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” exclaims Peter when Jesus performs the somewhat trivial miracle of catching some fish. By “trivial,” I do not mean insignificant or unimportant, but it is a bit silly at first glance, is it not? It’s not as if Jesus morphs one substance into another (as with the wedding in Cana) or reanimates corpses (as with Lazarus) or heals bodies or drives out spooky demons. He’s just enhancing the natural world a little bit, drawing natural animals from a natural place where they naturally ought to be.
This fishy2 occurrence unsettles Peter, whose spontaneous declaration simultaneously recognizes Jesus’ authority and his own unworthiness. We searched for the fruit contained within this statement, aided by Jesuit James Martin’s chapter “Gennesaret” in Jesus: A Pilgrimage, and Bert brought up Rudolph Otto’s3 insight that all things genuinely religious originate from an encounter with Mystery, which in turn prompted his question: where had we encountered Mystery? Which such encounters have sustained and fed our understanding of God?
I can point to a number of experiences in prayer and in ministry that reduced me to tears of joy or fear and trembling, wherein grace so overwhelms that I cannot help but celebrate and give thanks: making the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius over the course of thirty days in Gloucester changed the way I view and engage all things, and of course the adventure of teaching offers the typical rollercoaster of consolations and desolations.
This said, when desolation strikes, when the crushing inability to feel God’s presence dominates the lived day-to-day, how does one proceed?
The Hole that Is God
Over the past few months, I’ve felt a certain lack, or absence of God. I dunno if recent struggles have qualified as depression (caused by “first world problems,” I must admit), but I’ve thought about seeking out some therapy if the chaos of life continues to result in questioning my mental healthfulness. The best thing to cure me of a funk, I think, is to stick to routine, but the past number of weeks have been anything but routine. Thankfully, the madness of moving both myself and my parents has more or less subsided, and I think things are beginning to balance out.
To posit that the act of feeling abandonment is nothing less than feeling the reality of God...that presents a much trickier conundrum. The seeming impossibility consists in equating these two opposites, or at least identifying the Presence as dwelling within the absence.
The Hole5 Purpose
What does this God-hole do for us? Why did Saint John of the Cross write so beautifully about the dark night of the soul? Why did Mother Theresa’s journals reveal that for the majority of her ministry she felt the night so oppressively close in? Read any mystic or authentic theologian, and the same theme rears up over and over again, incessantly. Read Shusako Endo’s Silence or Karl Rahner’s Encounters with Silence, and you find authors and theologians struggling with the abyss.
Although I’ve engaged this absence before, I never realized that I’ve approached it mistakenly. When I ain’t feeling the love, I’ve stored up memories of engraced consolations -- in the words of Ignatius -- to hold on to, but the hole is a stark reminder of my own creatureliness. It forces an awareness of my own profound and total lack of self-sufficiency. It reminds that literally nothing I “have” -- neither the place or family I was born to, nor the friends I’ve made, nor my bodily health, nor my job, nor my romance -- remains under my control with any absolute certainty.
And so, the Suscipe of Ignatius becomes all the more real when directed at the God-hole:
Take, O Lord, and receive my liberty, my understanding, and my entire will. All that I have and call my own, You have given to me as untold gift. To You, Lord, I return it. Do with it according to Your will. Give me only your love and your grace, and I shall be rich enough and desire nothing more.The confusion of the apparent paradox subsides: making this offering of self to the God-hole transforms it into a Presence. Nothing, mysteriously, becomes Something.
The Sinner and the Stumbling Block
The thought occurred to me last night that the words of Peter to Jesus in the Lukan call narrative, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” loosely echo and parallel the words of Jesus to Peter in Matthew 16: “Get behind me, Satan!” A note on translation here: Jesus isn’t calling Peter the devil, but using the Hebrew term satan, which means “obstacle” or “accuser”; if we read “Satan” as such, the words immediately following make a lot more sense, where Jesus directly calls Peter a stumbling block. Peter is apparently focusing too much on worldly things, understandably refusing the possibility that his dearest friend will be murdered. Refusal becomes the obstacle.
Naming my personal sinfulness and insufficiency opens up the path to cognizance of the sheer gratuitous nature of all that fills my life. Peter’s identification as a sinner on the banks of Gennesaret lead to discipleship, whereas his all-too-human refusal leads him to deny Jesus. When I am stuck in the rut of perceiving the God-hole solely as a hole, when my vision is so limited that I fail to understand it as the restlessness, the unquenchable longing and yearning for eschatological completion, it’s then that I become an obstacle and a stumbling block.
Like Peter, my focus hones in on my own “human concerns” rather than on the “concerns of God,” as Matthew quotes the Nazarene. Human concerns still possess legitimacy, but as I’m plummeting through the God-hole, grace becomes so proximate that it challenges my willingness to fall freely.
1 I know I’ve written about this before, but this was in the context of another faith-sharing group. I know. Two faith-sharing groups. I need people to keep me on the straight and narrow.
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3 A philosopher of religion and theologian whose life bridged the 19th and 20th centuries, Otto posited that all religion begins with religious experience, the mysterium tremendum et fascinans: the earliest humans and every human thereafter experiences the numinous, the awe of that unknown which is beyond. C.S. Lewis has a lovely description of this concept in The Problem of Pain, wherein he articulates fear of the mysterium tremendum as being more like fear of a ghost than fear of a tiger. Fear of the former provokes spiritual awe, whereas fear of the latter consists of concern for bodily safety.
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4 A pastor by the name of Christian Piatt has written a fair bit on this, and although I’ve never read his work in any depth, this is the dude whom Keith referenced.↩
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