THE DEPTH AND DARKNESS

God is down. God is underneath. God is hidden. God is in the darkness. I often find myself wanting to use such metaphors to describe my experience of God. I am well aware, of course, that such imagery runs contrary to the typical ways in which God is described, at least in the evangelical Christian tradition in which I grew up. God is light or resides in the light; God reigns from above; God is there in plain sight to be found if only we are willing to open our eyes and seek—these are the types of images that are more commonly used to describe God. And I don’t deny the helpfulness and aptness of such descriptions. I just find them incomplete. It may be (and I believe that it actually is) helpful in many cases to think of God as light or in the light, but when I look to my own experience, it seems utterly clear to me that there is a very real sense in which God is also in the depth and darkness.

I should, I think, take a moment to clarify what I do not mean when I say that God is in the darkness or in the depths. People sometimes use this sort of language to describe the felt presence of God even in the worst of times: “In my darkest hour, God was with me,” or so the line might go. And again, this is certainly useful imagery, but it is not the darkness of which I speak. Rather, when I say here that God is in the depth and darkness, what I am attempting to get at is a sense of the unknown, the unknowable, the unsayable, the ineffable, the mysterious, the mystical, the infinite. It is something akin to what the anonymous Christian mystic famously referred to as “The Cloud of Unknowing”. It is the space beyond the edges of reason and certainty. That is the depth and darkness of which I speak. That is where I found God.

I did not, however, go searching for God in those dark and hidden places. After all, one cannot find what one cannot see, right? No, I was searching in the light, as any sane person would. I shined the light of reason and knowledge on all of the places I could think to look. For more than twenty years I searched that way, confident that a conclusion would be lying around some newly investigated corner. I suppose I believed—if only I read enough books, listened to enough lectures, wrote enough words, thought enough thoughts—that eventually, one way or another, my agnosticism would fall away and I would find myself ready and able to make a definitive decision regarding the reality of God. But that day never came. An answer was never lying around any corner. Uncertainty held fast despite my best efforts to eliminate it.

And then one day…I gave up. I don’t know exactly what it was that flipped the switch, but it finally occurred to me that after two decades of searching, I was no closer to a definitive, rational conclusion about the reality of God than when I started. And another year, or five years, or twenty years wasn’t going to make the difference. So I let go. I accepted the uncertainty. I turned off the inquisitive light of reason, sat down, and rested in the deep darkness of the unknown. I said earlier that I found God in that darkness, but I don’t suppose that is exactly true. I am inclined to say instead that God found me, but that’s not quite it either; God who always knows us better than we know ourselves never needs to “find” us. No, I think the best I can do is to say that it was in that darkness that I was finally able to sense God, who had been there (and everywhere) all along.

TURNING PAGES

I have refrained from telling the story that follows. I have procrastinated. I have deferred. I have deflected. I have detoured. Because I am, well… afraid. Afraid and proud. I am, I suppose you might say, trying to be something other than my true self. I am hiding. I am covering a candle with a basket. I have been called to something, and I have tried to reshape that calling into something that it is not.

A couple years ago, as you may know if you’ve come across a few of my longer posts since then, I returned to a faith and belief in Christianity after two decades of agnosticism leaning toward atheism. Much of that return to faith has been rooted in a kind of unknowing—a willingness to accept mystery and the limits of reason and rationality. And I’ve been perfectly happy to talk and write about that sort of thing. This idea of unknowing and believing that truth extends beyond the grasp of our finite rationality comes up in lots of places from art to philosophy. It is a part of my Christianity, but it tends to go over well with those who don’t necessarily agree with my religious beliefs. It can come off as both academic and artistic—and I like to be academic and artistic. So that’s quite convenient, isn’t it?

But the story that I am about to tell, that I must say I feel utterly compelled to tell, does not allow me to simply wrap myself in the comfortable clothes of the artist/academic. It requires me to attest to a belief in the supernatural, the miraculous, the direct intervention of the divine in the real world, and thus it opens me up—or at least i feel (fear) that it does—to a kind of critique that I would very much prefer to avoid: that I am foolish, deluded, childish. I would like to protest. I would like to say that I did not sign up for that, but I suppose that’s not altogether true, is it? “He called a child, whom he put among them, and said ‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” (Matt. 18:2-4)

So…

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“I have known only one person in my life who claimed to have seen a ghost. It was a woman; and the interesting thing is that she disbelieved in the immortality of the soul before seeing the ghost and still disbelieves after having seen it. She thinks it was a hallucination. In other words, seeing is not believing. This is the first thing to get clear in talking about miracles. Whatever experiences we may have, we shall not regard them as miraculous if we already hold a philosophy which excludes the supernatural.”

C.S. Lewis from “Miracles” in God in the Dock

I was eighteen—maybe nineteen—years old when I experienced what I took to be a miracle. I was out of high school, taking some time off before college, still living at home with my family in the parsonage of the church where my stepfather was (and still is) the pastor. It was late. Everyone else in the house was asleep and I was upstairs in my room reading my Bible. I don’t recall for certain what I was reading—the Gospel of John, I think? . I had looked away from the Bible to think, perhaps to pray. Not for long. A matter of minutes. Maybe less than a minute. And when I looked back to the Bible, it was open to a completely different page. I was lying in bed, propped on my elbows, the Bible right under my face and I hadn’t noticed any turning pages. It was as if the pages had just…changed.

Now, I am and always have been a skeptic by nature, so I immediately began looking for a natural, rational explanation. I tried bumping and brushing up against the Bible, but the pages stayed put; it was clear that it would have taken much more than an unnoticeable nudge to turn them. I stood on a chair and checked the vent on the ceiling; air was blowing but it was having no noticeable effect on the pages. I searched and thought, but ultimately failed to come up with anything that would adequately explain the changing of those pages. And so, not knowing what I was looking for, I turned my attention back to the Bible and I began to read until I came to this:

”But get up and stand on your feet; for I have appeared to you for this purpose, to appoint you to serve and testify to the things in which you have seen me and to those in which I will appear to you.” (Acts 26:16)

It is an excerpt from the apostle Paul’s recounting of his conversion experience. But for me in that moment it was a calling—God reaching out into the world to speak directly to me. It was a pivotal, meaningful moment that gave me a sense of purpose. It was an answer to prayer.

A few short years later, however, I would come to dismiss it altogether, its memory relegated to a dark, quiet room at the back of my mind where it would reside comfortably for more than two decades. You see, over the course of the few years following the event which I just described, I came to a point at which I felt I had to abandon my faith. In retrospect, I suppose I would actually say that what I abandoned was not really faith at all, but rather a strictly intellectual belief system that I felt had been irreparably undermined. I could go into much greater detail about the process that led me to unbelief and about this idea of the differentiation between belief and faith, but I will mostly save those discussions for another time. For now, it will suffice to say that I came to possess a worldview that did not allow for miraculous page turnings, hence that memory’s relegation to its comfortable room. It was not forgotten; it simply lost its meaning and import. I didn’t explain it away. I didn’t have to. My philosophy insisted that a natural explanation must exist whether I could find it or not. There were, as I had come to see it, no other possibilities. Case closed. Enjoy your quiet room, dear memory.

But, of course, things change, don’t they?

In August 2019, I found a renewed faith and belief in God and Christianity as the result of events which I have detailed elsewhere and which I experienced as the undeniable voice of God speaking into my life. It was not long after that that the old memory of the pages turning began to stir, to move out of its dark room, to speak, to remind:

“But get up and stand on your feet…”

I was not immediately sure how much attention to pay it. After all, belief in God does not entail belief in supernatural occurrences. Nor does belief in supernatural occurrences entail belief in all purported experiences of them. In other words, my newly discovered faith and belief in God did not mean that I was required to accept the reality of that miracle which I had long ago dismissed. Perhaps the memory would return to its room. Perhaps that is where it belonged.

“But get up and stand on your feet; for I have appeared to you for this purpose…”

But the reminders remained present and persistent in my consciousness—a return to mental obscurity seeming increasingly unlikely—as my once quiet, innocuous, little memory set up camp in broad daylight and announced itself loudly, clearly, and constantly right at the front of my mind. I found myself continually returning to the words I had read all those years before:

“But get up and stand on your feet; for I have appeared to you for this purpose, to appoint you to serve and testify to the things in which you have seen me and to those in which I will appear to you.”

And ultimately, I came to re-embrace the supernatural quality of the miraculous page turning for two primary reasons.

First, I had never adequately explained it away. I hadn’t even inadequately explained it away. I simply had no explanation. And when I began to really reconsider the memory of that experience, I recalled just how inexplicable and miraculous it felt in the moment. On that night in that room I was skeptical, awake, and aware, and despite my best efforts, I could not find a plausible natural explanation for what happened.

My second reason for accepting that the page turning was indeed supernatural is a bit more difficult to put into words. It is less rational, but perhaps more important and convincing. I suppose I might put it this way: both the experience I had and the calling that came along with it have the ring of truth to them. And not just truth, but divine truth. They strike me internally as possessing a weight, a depth of meaning and reality, an undeniable glimmer of that which is sacred, holy, transcendent. When I consider the memory of that experience, I find myself filled with a deep sense of assurance that goes beyond rational grounding. It is this internal sense of assurance, I think, that provides the ground of faith—the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. (Heb. 11:1)

I am left then with the question of what to do with a calling: “…I have appeared to you for this purpose, to appoint you to serve and testify to the things in which you have seen me and to those in which I will appear to you.” What does that entail? What is required of me? Rest assured, I have had ideas and plans over the last year or so—a book, a series of talks, a concept album, a show that tells my story through both music and spoken word, etc.. Lots of thinking. Lots of planning. Lots of waiting… Not, however, an awful lot of doing. And my planning seems to always end in frustration. It may be the case that some of these ideas that I’ve had will come to fruition at some point, but I am finding that in moments of silence and clarity I keep feeling a call to simplicity, a call to stop over-complicating and under-delivering, to simply say what I’m meant to say and trust that doing so will be enough, to take a small first step and know that the next step will become clear in good time.

And so I am trying here to take that simple first step by writing this and putting it into the world—“…to serve and testify to the things in which you have seen me…” And it occurs to me only now that some of my planning and waiting might be better characterized as pride and procrastination. Because if I’m honest, I have to admit that there is a part of me—perhaps a more significant part than I would like to admit—that would rather not say these things. It is surely no accident that for more than twenty-five years, I haven’t really spoken to anyone about what happened that night in my room. That is, no doubt, partly due to the fact that for so long I didn’t believe in the possibility of the supernatural. But even now, having come to a new faith and belief in Christianity, I have kept this story mostly under wraps. In fact, I have had all of this mostly written for months and have done exactly nothing with it. And I think that it also has something to do with my own pride and wanting to be thought of by certain people in a certain way. It is one thing to profess Christianity, broadly speaking. It is quite another to go around talking about believing in miracles.

But here I am.

Of course, you are completely at liberty to dismiss all of this. You may think I am sadly deluded. And if, in fact, that is what you think, well it isn’t so long ago that I would have agreed with you. And even now I have no proof that you are wrong. Proofs are not available here. There is only testimony—my anecdotal memories and my claims of faith and internal assurance. That is what I have to offer, however imperfectly. That is what I feel called to tell you. And so with uncertainty and trepidation I submit this to you—without a clear sense of purpose, without an expected result. All I can do is say—to you and to God—“Do with it what you will.” I hope, trust, and pray that some good comes of it.

Peace.