A Glorious Dark

"Christianity is the only religion in the world that believes that God for one brief moment in time, looked like an atheist"  -  G. K. Chesterton

Even Jesus on the cross said, "Why God? Why have you forsaken me?"  God forsaken, have you ever been there?  Every skeptic and atheist makes this same point.  And what may be worse for the believer is "Why have you left me?" Why am I all alone?"  There is a new book I have ordered called A Glorious Dark.  I don't know if A. J. Swoboda is dealing with a dark night of the soul but this hits very close to home for me at the moment.  God is withholding Himself and saying, "How much do you trust me?"  I am also pastorally dealing with a potential suicide situation.  Terrible suffering and loneliness is all around me.

What I am discovering is suffering is the very place where God wants to expand our souls.  Suffering is the space where our heart can be enlarged by the heart of God.  The only way to kill pride and our expanded egos is to take them to the cross of Christ.  It's not about being brave enough to go there for it's only by the grace of God we go there at all.  It is only by going to the cross that self can fully die and the spirit-led life can fill the space of our emptiness and our desire to control the world around us.

I said in an earlier post that the spiral way is the way to God.  We typically think of three movements of spiritual cleansing or purification, spiritual illumination and union with God.  Each one of these spirals turn upward towards God in the Divine Trinity.  The first spiral is where we unlearn the ways of our familiar prayer and learn to pray once again like a child in simplicity.  Like a little boy running up a hill towards its home with joyful gratitude and trust.  The Second spiral is where we bear the cross of Christ uphill towards Christ's death which leads to our death of self.  Once this happens, this spirals upward again to ecstatic union with God.  It is here that the dark is glorious because we have found our way back into oneness with God immersed and baptized anew in the peace of the Living God.