DEALING WITH DOUBTS - NO GOD

Dealing with Doubts: No God


Doubts about God's willingness or ability to answer prayer are one thing; doubts about the very presence of God in prayer is another. Experienced prayers know there are times when God's absence is about the only thing they experience in prayer. And thus we come to the second great question we ask: "Where is God when I pray?"

"Dark Night of the Soul"

This is one of the strange aspects of prayer: Although prayer is designed to help us experience God, one experience of it is the experience of God's absence. In fact, the longer we pray and the more spiritually mature we become, the more likely it is that we will experience not just days, but even weeks and months when we feel that God is more absent than he is present.

This has been the experience of the great prayers of history. Look at the writings of any one of them Theresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Madam Guyon, John Bunyan and you'll find passages in which they describe "long periods of privation" where they find themselves locked out by God and "insensible to his mercies." It was even experienced by Jesus himself, whose intimacy with his heavenly Father can hardly be questioned: On the cross he cried out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

The sense of God's absence is accompanied by other negative feelings: despair, hopelessness, discouragement, listlessness, and so on. This is such a common experience, and such an integral part of the prayer life, that many prayer books devote an entire chapter to it. One writer, John of the Cross, wrote a whole book about it, which became a spiritual classic; its title has become the name by which many people call the experience: The Dark Night of the Soul.

Why do prayers who, after all, are giving themselves to God sacrificially have to endure such an experience? It can mean a number of things, but we'll cover the three most common.


1 Too Tired to Feel Anything

Let's start with the most common, the most overlooked, and the most easily solved cause: fatigue.

We recognize early in life that fatigue has detrimental effects on us. Irritability is the first sign that I've been pushing myself too hard and haven't been getting enough sleep. I'm impatient in grocery checkout lines; I drive hurriedly (and carelessly); I snap at my children; I yell at the dog; I scold myself for the simplest mistakes (such as forgetting my lunch or leaving the lights on).

Sometimes I can ride through the irritation and even get it under control, only to then be attacked by a low-grade depression. I lose energy. I don't have a lot of optimism about projects I'm working on. I just feel like vegging all day.

I used to spend a lot of time analyzing why exactly I was irritable or depressed. I'd write in my journal, explore my past, examine my current situation, pray for healing, and so on. I'd bludgeon myself for not being a good father and husband, for being slothful, for not living up to my beliefs.

Then one day I discovered that the problem wasn't always spiritual or emotional or moral. Sometimes it was physical: I was tired. I needed to get more sleep. I can pray until I'm blue in the knees, but it won't make a dent in irritation or depression until I get eight hours of sleep a night. The dark night of the soul is often brought on by too many late nights for the body.

2 Secret Sins

Another cause of the dark night of the soul is darkness within the soul. We cannot very well expect to have an ongoing experience of God while we're angry or resentful, or participating in some destructive habit, or harboring some sin. We cannot experience God if we're living in a way that is ''un-Godly." You cannot enjoy the game of basketball, for instance, if you're trying to play it with a football. It just won't work.

It's not that God doesn't want to have anything to do with us unless we're perfect. Far from it. But we cannot simply wallow in anger and sin and try to pretend it doesn't matter which usually means not even mentioning it in prayer. We don't have to wait until we're morally unstuck before we can experience God in prayer. We simply have to acknowledge in prayer what a mess we've made of things.

3 Affliction

Simone Weil, a twentieth-century writer and mystic, put it this way: "Affliction makes God appear to be absent for a time, more absent than a dead man, more absent than light in the utter darkness of a cell. A kind of horror submerges the whole soul. During this absence there is nothing to love."

It doesn't take much to get us spiritually off-center. A project at work fails. A friend moves far away. An argument erupts with your spouse. At such times we realize afresh how we depend on an orderly and good life to bolster our spiritual feelings. When things go wrong, we just don't feel spiritual.

And when we're dealt a major blow unemployment, death, disease, severe depression we can really sink into profound spiritual discouragement. Though some people feel God's presence more than ever during a crisis, others feel completely abandoned and ask, "Why, God, have you abandoned me?"

So What's Going On?

In truth, God cannot abandon us any more than we can be abandoned by the air around us. But the experience of prayers suggests that he does at times withdraw a sense of his presence which, from our point of view, is devastating enough. Yes, I'm saying that although we bring this upon ourselves sometimes (through fatigue and sin), there are times when God allows and perhaps even arranges this experience.

So why would God, who has designed prayer so that we might become intimate with him, sometimes withdraw himself from us as we pray?

Philosopher Sfren Kierkegaard had this take on the experience: "He who dreams must be awakened, and the deeper the man is who slumbers, or the deeper he slumbers, the more important it is that he be awakened, and the more powerfully must he be awakened." In other words, our lives fall into easy patterns, and this is also true of prayer. Sometimes the only way to deepen our intimacy with God is to experience the distance of God. Again, let's listen to Kierkegaard in his Christian Discourses, who was very wise on this point:

"Then comes affliction to awaken the dreamer, affliction which like a storm tears off the blossoms, affliction which nevertheless does not bereave of hope, but recruits hope. Affliction is able to drown out every earthly voice, that is precisely what it is to do, but the voice of eternity within a man it cannot drown. . . . When by the aid of affliction all irrelevant voices are brought to silence, it can be heard, this voice within."

Sometimes the experience of God can be so pleasurable that we imagine that the joy we experience is God himself. When that happens, God withdraws himself to show that he is more than the emotion we experience, and that he is to be loved beyond and behind the emotion. Evelyn Underhill called this the "great negation," and said it was "the great sorting house of the spiritual life."


The Way Back

So what is to be done when God seems absent and the idea of loving God or pursuing the life of prayer is about the last thing you feel like doing?

The advice of the great men and women of prayer seems to be this: Keep loving, keep praying. This is not cheap advice as much as it is spiritual survival.

In terms of love, Simone Weil, in her book Waiting for God, said it best:

"What is terrible is that if, in this darkness, where there is nothing to love, the soul ceases to love, God's absence becomes final. The soul has to go on loving in the emptiness, or at least to go on wanting to love, though it may only be with an infinitesimal part of itself. Then, one day, God will come to show himself to this soul and to reveal the beauty of the world to it. . . . But if the soul stops loving, it falls, even in this life, into something almost equivalent to hell."

Sometimes this means persevering in praise and adoration, as strange as that may seem as such times. Joni Eareckson Tada was paralyzed in a swimming accident in her teens. She's a woman who knows affliction and the absence of God, and in her book Secret Strength for Those Who Search she writes eloquently on the need to persevere at such times:

"We will be compelled to voice our words of praise firmly and precisely, even as our logic screams that God has no idea what he's doing. Most of the verses written about praise in God's word were penned by men and women who faced crushing heartaches, injustice, treachery, slander, and scores of other intolerable situations."

This loving of God during affliction will take some unusual forms. It doesn't necessarily mean a quiet and humble acceptance of anything that comes your way. This is certainly not the way the Psalmist went through such a period:

O Lord, I cry out to you.I will keep on pleading day by day.O Lord, why do you reject me?Why do you turn your face away from me?I have been sickly and close to death since my youth.I stand helpless and desperate before your terrors.Psalm 88:1315

There is an Old Testament story about Jacob wrestling all night with God (see 32:2431). In the same way, sometimes we are called upon to wrestle with God to "force" him to bless us.

Of course, we can never actually force God to do anything. He's all powerful and we're not. Nor do we have to overpower him in order to get him to love us. But just as a human father sometimes asks a child to do more work before rewarding her, so God sometimes asks us to dig deeper into our souls and emotions requiring more fervent prayer before he will reveal his love to us. The difference is this: many human fathers make their children earn their reward; our heavenly Father is merely helping us identify those issues that really are important for us those we really wrestle with inside and with him. He also wants us to recognize how utterly gracious his love is not something one can take for granted nor order up with a snap of the fingers.

Hanging On

Through all this, we will discover more of God and more of ourselves. When we come to the other side, our intimacy with God will be that much deeper.

A trivial example from everyday life can illustrate this. I love to dabble in computer programming, at least at a modest level. I'll write little routines that allow me to do repetitive functions with a key stroke. For instance, at work I have a program that allows me to instantly call up addresses. The process used to take 1015 key strokes; now it takes three.

But just when I'm feeling pretty confident about my abilities and feeling pretty good about computers, I'll mess up. I'll write the program incorrectly, and the routine simply will not run. I'll go through all the usual checks to see what's going on, but nothing will fix the problem. This is the dark night of the computer program merit’s very frustrating and discouraging.


What it forces me to do, though, is to go deeper. I have to take out a manual and read more closely and carefully than ever about what certain commands do and in what order they need to be written. Invariably, I learn more about programming and gain an even deeper appreciation of my computer.

Prayer is a tad more complex and rich than computer programming, and lessons learned from a dark night of the soul sometimes are not so easily discerned. But the same fundamental dynamic is at work: Frustration and loneliness are often the paths of deeper peace and joy. Perseverance and love the continued pursuit of God are not the happiest of paths to have to trod sometimes, but they are the most trustworthy.