Someone recently contacted me looking for a place to go
on a spiritual retreat. They had a checklist for what they wanted a place to
have, and as I put down the phone from talking with them, I felt as though I
was helping them shop for a car or stove.
“I want it to have this feature; I don’t want that feature. . .” I hear
similar lists of wants/don’t wants as people discuss worship. I wonder if we
are often blind to the ways we attempt to dictate the time, place and method of
encountering God.
Ironically, I’ve been listening to a series of
conferences of John of the Cross, the Spanish mystic who gave us the concept of
the dark night of the soul. John speaks of the dark night of the senses, which
is when you no longer have a sensed presence of God. Many of us have
experienced some sort of assurance of God’s presence through our senses—we see
or hear or feel something that affirms God for us.
Without a felt sense of God’s presence, especially after
have had such experiences, one may wonder if God’s presence has withdrawn from
them. Unfortunately, much of our contemporary Christian spirituality is
dependent on felt experience. So when you no longer receive a felt experience,
you may change your spiritual practices to attempt to reclaim the “rush” you
are missing.
The experience of what some mystics call “spiritual aridity”
may leave us casting about for something new to recreate the buzz we are
missing. But when our interest in spiritual matters is precipitated by felt
experience, then our focus is not on God, but on ourselves. Spiritual
experience can feed the ego, and ego is exactly what blocks our view of God.
There is no formulaic way to an encounter with God.
Growth in our faith happens as we are content to know God present with us
without the felt experience of God. Our faith grows not as we receive
affirmation through a felt spiritual experience but through keeping faith even
in the darkness, when we have no option than to simply trust that God is
present with us.
No comments:
Post a Comment