Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis

by Lauren F. Winner

“When the Word left me,” Bernard of Clairvaux wrote, it was as though “you had taken the fire from under a boiling pot.” Time passes. Another thing you think, when you have come to God’s absence, is this: it is not God who is absent at all, it is you who are absent.

Or: he travels to meet himself in what is always other, eager to recognize his own joy and beauty in the distinctness of what is not God’s self. However we put it—there are countless ways—God’s loving kindness is there ahead of us. Forgiveness is never a matter of persuading God of something but of discovering for myself that there is no distance to be crossed, except that longest journey to that which gives truth and reality to my very self.

I am torn in two but I will conquer myself. I will dig up the pride. I will take scissors and cut out the beggar. I will take a crowbar and pry out the broken pieces of God in me.

How many pieces? It feels like thousands.

Perhaps to say this is to turn religion into therapy.

But church is therapy, that is one of many things it is, and, as my friend Mike once told me, the real problem lies not in recognizing the therapeutic balm in the gospel; the real problem is going through life thinking that the health you need can be found anywhere else.

Mike is a wise man.

Surely the darkness will cover me, and the light around me turn to night, we say. Darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day; darkness and light to you are both alike.

The official reason that this is an Epiphany story is that after Jesus is baptized, a dove alights, and a voice comes from heaven declaring, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” The voice is taken to be the answer to Epiphany’s question: this is who Jesus is—he is God’s well-beloved and pleasing son. But this year, hearing in church again about Jesus’ baptism, I wonder if, before the voice from heaven and the celestial dove, it is also Jesus’ standing in line by the river that tells us who he is. At Christmastime, the church called Jesus Emmanuel, which means God-with-us—and now he is with us in the baptismal queue. He is the One who stands with humanity in this line that is all about our sinning, our shame.

they each take a wafer from the priest; and when I come to them with the chalice, the wife dips as I say “The Blood of Christ keep you in everlasting life,” and she eats her wafer, and then her husband likewise intincts his round of Christ’s Body into the wine and then he hands the round of Body and Blood to his wife and she eats his wafer for him. There at the Communion rail, I don’t yet know what illness lies behind this gesture, I know only the couple’s hands and mouths, and that I am seeing one flesh. I have read about this, heard sermons about a man and a woman becoming one flesh; and here at the altar, I see that perhaps this is the way I come to know such intimacy myself: as part of the body of Christ, this body that numbers among its cells and sinews an octogenarian husband and wife who are Communion.

“Unresting anxiety is the greatest evil which can happen to the soul, sin only excepted.” The anxious heart, in its flailings, loses its hold on whatever graces God has bestowed upon it, and is sapped of the strength “to resist the temptations of the Evil One, who is all the more ready to fish . . . in troubled waters.”

De Sales’s antidote to anxiety is twofold, half positive, half negative: do pray, and do not do anything that might actually address the object of your anxiety (do not get online and check your bank balance; the action, far from steadying you, will just make you more frantic). “When you are conscious that you are growing anxious, commend yourself to God, and resolve steadfastly not to take any steps whatever to obtain the result you desire, until your disturbed state of mind is altogether quieted.”

This Lent, I say my ones slowly. It is a simple, soothing sound, and it does not escape me that one is a spiritual word, that one is what God is, that one is unity and wholeness; that my ones are not just a palliative litany, but some kind of truthfulness and a statement of hope, too. I have been saying ones for several years now, but I am just starting to realize they are prayers.

“O God of peace, who hast taught us that in returning and rest we shall be saved, in quietness and in confidence shall be our strength: By the might of thy Spirit lift us, we pray thee, to thy presence, where we may be still and know that thou art God.”

In class we are discussing Richard Hooker’s theology of the Eucharist, his claim that you can no more give an unbaptized person the Eucharist than you can feed a corpse.

Be pleased, O LORD, to deliver me; O LORD, make haste to help me.

There, crouched by the lily pond like a soccer ball, I know I look crazy, but the panic about my stove seems very real. I know I look like a desperate crazy lady talking to herself, rocking back and forth; but maybe this is just how demons attack. I am there, it seems, for a long while, repeating these words from the psalms. I mean them as I have meant very few things in my life, and I determine that I will stay by the pond for as many minutes, hours, as it takes, that I will not race home to behold my standing-up house, my not-on-fire kitchen, my half-eaten bowl of oatmeal resting calmly in the sink.

Slowly, I am beginning to see what this anxiety is about, to see its lineaments: it has something to do with being left alone to handle a situation I am not competent to handle; it has something to do with being known and unknown, with the sense that I go through life hidden, masked (all this first-person prose, even—I write it to hide in plain sight). And to the degree that I am masked I always risk being left alone—for once the mask comes off, once my friends and intimates, my charmed students, even my beloved, loving aunts see the corruptions and shames of my real heart, they will vanish, and I will be left alone with the tea-steeping house fire, left alone outside my stepmother’s farm with the avian flu, alone. Be pleased, O Lord, from this to deliver me.

Mostly I look at Updike’s scribble of Augustine and I take it as a good word from a ghost, from someone entered into glory, joined up to the communion of saints; I take it as a benediction from one so keenly aware of the gulch between God and God’s creatures: God is here through our longing for God; God gives us many gifts, but God is He Who gives God.

“Laziness may have been a problem for nineteen hundred years but not anymore. Busyness is the new sloth.”

Busyness, my BlackBerry, the feeling of never being caught up, the fantasies about myself that the busyness fosters—this busyness is just as disorienting, just as deadly as the traditional seven. I am deeply slothful, undisciplined and always staring off into space or slinking away with a novel. And yet, busyness as often as laziness supplies my excuse: I am too busy to go to church, too busy to pray; there’s not enough time to pray, not enough time to hold body together, let alone soul. I am too lazy to do what’s important, or hard, so I stay busy with everything else.

From deep in the tradition, from The Cloud of Unknowing, a fourteenth-century text from an unnamed English monk: “You only need a tiny scrap of time to move toward God.” The words slap. Busyness is not much of an excuse if it only takes a minute or two to move toward God. But the monk’s words console, too. For, of time and person, it seems that scraps are all I have to bring forward. That my ways of coming to God these days are all scraps.

“What you promise when you are confirmed,” said Julian’s father, “is not that you will believe this forever. What you promise when you are confirmed is that that is the story you will wrestle with forever.”

“Stories . . . told with . . . heroes at the centre of them . . . are told to laud the virtues of the heroes—for if the hero failed, all would be lost. By contrast, a saint can fail in a way that the hero can’t, because the failure of the saint reveals the forgiveness and the new possibilities made in God, and the saint is just a small character in a story that’s always fundamentally about God.” I am not a saint. I am, however, beginning to learn that I am a small character in a story that is always fundamentally about God.

And I have heard that some people eventually leave the middle and arrive at an end. I have heard that this end is a place of wisdom, of beatitude. I have heard it is a place of unself-consciousness. I have heard there is a lot of give in the fabric there.

sounds like the saints of Maundy Thursday I recently wrote about http://bit.ly/J2eUPB

when she prays, I believe her, and she is the kind of Christian I hope one day to become. It is like the gospel and Jesus are so much in her that she doesn’t have to worry about being a Christian anymore, she doesn’t have to worry about it, she is just in that story and it is in her. At least, that’s how it looks to me, from the outside. I’m sure she’d tell it differently, but that is how it looks to me. I expect it takes a long time to get there.