Staying Still

I’ve started reading a new book called Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis by Lauren Winner.  Wow.  That’s all I can say—wow.  I had no idea that someone else has gone through a very similar experience (although I’m not sure why I should be the only one).  She has an amazing way with words and I’m finding it all very moving, validating, helpful, and it expresses so well things I’ve been thinking/feeling about the absence of God.  It has been such a relief to read this.  I’m only a little way into it, but it has been a balm to my troubled soul.  I can’t say that I feel any closer to God.  She doesn’t suggest that her book is a self-help book or that it has any “how-to’s” to get through the middle of one’s faith.  But just having someone so eloquently express the feelings is valuable.  She mentions several poets that I want to look up—Anne Harvey Sexton (whom I’ve heard about before) and W. S. Merwin.  I love poetry.  Lately poetry seems to be even more meaningful to me. 

Here are some things she’s said in her chapter “ode on god’s absence”

When you find that God is absent, you do many things. . .You wonder if you have invented the whole thing: maybe it is not that God has removed himself from you; maybe, simpler, there is no God. . .You are growing a carapace, to protect yourself from this absence. You being to turn your attention elsewhere, to any elsewhere that might pay you some attention back. . .One thing you do is wonder at your own sin. You understand that the most straightforward explanation of this, God’s absence, is that you have sinned. . .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. . .you read that for crustaceans to mature, they regularly have to shed and regrow their carapaces.  You read that when they are molting, they are most vulnerable to attack. . .Later, later on in God’s absence, in God’s silence, you think: I cannot cajole God back.  You can try to effect your own return, but you cannot cajole God.  God will return, or not, as God’s own freedom dictates, as the whims of God’s capricious grace directs. . .Later still: maybe this silence, this absence, is a gift.  Maybe what began as punishment is being converted to gift, maybe that is how God works.  Maybe this absence will become an experience of God’s strangeness, God’s mystery.  You think:  Maybe I am being shown something here, if  I would look, if I would see.  You think of these words from the prophet Zephaniah:  He will shout with joy for you, He will jump for you in jubilation, He will be silent in His love.

Wow, isn’t that amazing?  I love that last line—He will be silent in His love.  I don’t know what it means, exactly, but it seems to ring true and to be full of possible meaning.  Ms. Winner is a lot like me—she turns to books first, for answers; any type of book—“a book on gardening, though I do not garden, but maybe everything would be better if I did.”  I am so infused with something, the spirit? Emotion?  Relief? Anticipation?  And I’m only 27 pages into the 198 paged book.  I want to devour this book; I want to slowly experience the vast myriad of flavors.  I’m anxious to keep reading and I’m holding back so I can contemplate everything that I’m reading.  Here are some more quotes, from her preface:

Some days I am not sure if my faith is riddled with doubt or whether, graciously, my doubt is riddled with faith. . .Faith, after all, is supposed to sustain you through hard times—and I’m sure for many people faith does just that.  But it wasn’t so for me. . .God had been there.  God had been alive to me.  And then, it seemed, nothing was alive—not even God. . . You may arrive at the spiritual middle exhausted, in agony, in what saints of the Christian tradition have called desolation.

She quotes Mary Oliver!  “O Lord of melons, of mercy, though I am not ready, nor worthy, I am climbing toward you.”  Reading this just reinforces my deep desire to sit and ponder, read, and write.  I feel like I’m at a critical juncture in my life, a place where great growth is happening; but I want to cocoon myself up while I’m going through this transformation.  I want to immerse myself in thoughts and ideas.  I want time to really ponder things, without interruptions.  Maybe my not finding a job right now is a gift of time, time to do this very thing. 

After recently going through many days of despairing, of struggling to keep my thoughts from taking me back down, this book is giving me hope.  I’m even feeling anticipation for life; whereas 3 days ago I was wondering “why life?”  Persistence pays off (although the pessimist in me says “this too shall pass;” you won’t stay up for long).  But when I’m feeling good, I keep thinking that all of this—the ups and downs, the confusion and clarity, the hope the desolation—all of this is important and ultimately worth it, if I can just hang in there.