A quote from Spiral Staircase,
"I knew that a good nun must be ready to give up everything and count the world well lost for God. But what had happened to God? My life had been turned upside down, but God should still be the same...My heart and mind both seemed numb..., but God seemed to gone too. In the place that he had occupied in my mind there was now a curious blank.
"Or perhaps it was only now that I could admit to this God-shaped gap in my consciousness. One of the most painful failures of my convent life had been my inability to pray. Our whole existence had had God as its pivotal point. The silence of our days had been designed to enable us to listen to him. But he had never spoken to me."
A few short years ago, I would have thought this statement of the "curious blank" a sure sign of being "lost" (church code for someone who has not prayed a prayer and walked an aisle). It would have seemed to me that this person was merely confused and, according to the advice of a pastor to me during my early days of the Great Awakening,using the epistle of I John, simply did not know for certain of their salvation and therefore lost. I was told that if there was any doubts of my salvation, that it must be the Holy Spirit because the devil could not conjure up assurances of salvation.
Fast forward a few years. I now completely understand and have in fact experienced and am experiencing the "curious blank". I now see this more as a positive than a negative. I will admit, it is very difficult to resign to the fact that I may not have been right about a great many things, but one thing is for certain, it is a very humbling experience.
Honesty is good for the soul, so here goes, I can't recall a single time when God said anything to me....that felt good to say out loud (so to speak). I am not advocating the non-existence of God, in fact, I still believe in God. I am simply stating that he/she has not spoken to me. Sure its easy to use the words, "God said for me to do such and such" or something similar, when you are surrounded by a group of people who use these phrases constantly. Why? Because if you don't, and are the spiritual advisor to others, where are you getting your direction from? Yourself? Are you mad? Certainly you are pious enough to sit in constant vigil eagerly awaiting your next command. Is God really that interested in the color of carpet? If you should or should not pave the parking lot? When to have VBS?
To be truthful, I really do not believe that God is that interested in such trivial things. I do believe that God is interested in such things as love, honesty, and truthfulness. I believe that God cares a great deal about how I treat every person that I come into contact with. These things have, in my humble opinion, lasting effects. But who really knows for certain. Can anyone honestly say that they have been to the great beyond, chronicled their journey in both print and video, returned, and under heavy scrutiny, been proven that this experience has in fact taken place? Honestly, if someone would make the claim, I would think they were a few cards short of a deck.
Well, to each is own I guess. In the mean time, anyone up for a game of Mad Libs?
1 comment:
Talk about brutal honesty, huh? LOL. I must too confess that the clouds have never parted with a ray of light beaming down on me while angels sang and God's booming words echoed in my ears with the voice of Charlton Heston. I'm never even heard a whisper. I think at least while I was still in the same mindset as those that say things like "God told me such and such," I think "hearing from God" was must more akin to having a feeling or intuition.
I think prayer for direction has value, if only pausing long enough for your own rattled thoughts to settle and enable a better decision. But people who say that God tells them to do things even made me nervous while I was still in the church.
I remember a very old man in the church who befriended me sharing his story. He struggled for years as a young man over "speaking in tongues," like others in his church family at the time. He told me one day that he knelt down on a dirt road in the woods while hauling timber and cried out to God to let him speak in tongues. After a few moments, he believed that God told him, "Get up and be as you are!" So he did and never worried about speaking in tongues again. Whether or not it was God that spoke to him, I don't know, but the wisdom is timeless. Just "be as you are," the rest will follow.
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