Long Time Ago

When I was a child, God was a source of great strength and comfort. I am not quite sure exactly why I decided to seek God out – when I was about five, I told my mother I wanted to go to church every Sunday, and she agreed to bring me, thence beginning my journey. But I know that it was the same incomprehensible reason that I have done virtually everything in my devotional life. I felt that it what was what I was meant to do, what I wanted to do more than anything, what I was compelled to do. What I was drawn to do. There is something about God and about Church that fulfills the deepest and most secret longings of my heart.

God spoke to me in light, and in God I felt great joy and completeness, as though the whole world had fallen into place. In my childhood, I found opportunities to be by myself and think about God, and be still, as though time had stopped. I still don’t understand it: it’s like somehow being still and being apart while being in and moving within; it is like seeing the world and its events happen around you, and knowing that you’re there, and interacting with the world like normal, but also feeling as though you’re in a bubble or something, like you’ve carried a piece of the stillness away with you as a companion to your experiences. It’s kind of funny because as a child that experience was quite common and easy for me, but now that I’m older it’s more difficult, rarer, something I must ask for and sometimes struggle to achieve. I still don’t know what it is, though, or really how to describe it.

It was funny, because I would be in my space and for some reason other schoolchildren would come and talk to me, often just to talk, sometimes to ask for advice. And I have no idea why. But I felt like that, too, was something for which I had been prepared, something that was the whole point, something that I was supposed to do. It was never meant that I was supposed to be all by myself for myself.

I really can look back on my childhood through the lens of God and see it full of light. There is no experience that can cover that light, and nothing that can put out the fire of the love I so often felt burning through me.

But this is deceptive. It perpetuates a myth people sometimes have about what Christianity means and what it’s supposed to feel like, a myth often promulgated by reading the lives of the Saints. Especially the female Saints, whose actual experiences can be impossible to recover if they haven’t written their own autobiographies – and sometimes even then.

Among other things it’s the idea that devout Christians always feel happy and joyful because God makes them feel happy and joyful even in the midst of terrible persecution. I’m sure we can all think of some examples where the Saint’s faith led to her cheerfulness even in the worst possible circumstances. This is generally crap; but, unfortunately, there are many people who feel like their unhappiness means they’re not being good Christians. I admit that at times I’ve been one of them. A lot of the time, I still am. But I think that this assessment isn’t exactly accurate.

During my life, I’ve experienced things that made me feel great suffering, and I didn’t react with joy but with moments of despair. [warning: too much information time] When I was still young – eight at my first recollection, anyway – I did feel that I wanted to die so that I could escape pain that I felt. I remember this feeling quite distinctly because I did actually try to do it myself, even though I was so young. Luckily, my comprehension of physiology was at the same level as any other eight year old, so my plan was completely benign. Retrospectively, I recognize that this is the first moment that I experienced what despair is and what it can do. I felt that there was nothing, not even God, that could make it stop, or that could make me stop suffering, and that there was no purpose to any of it.

This was not the point of God’s work in my life. God did not, in fact, miraculously change my life so that bad things didn’t happen anymore. Nor did God wipe my sorrow away and replace it with serene calmness and acceptance. God did cradle me in his arms and help me fall asleep, and God was with me. But it is not the point of belief that life becomes all rainbows and butterflies, even if you wish it was. I think the point of Christian life is learning that God suffers with you so that you are never alone, and that God carries you through it so that you can come out the other side. God will not efface even one iota of your humanity, because that wouldn’t be compassion, not really. God does not refuse to suffer: nor should we.

Of course, this doesn’t mean God hasn’t intervened in my life at times when I was in great need. Nor does it mean my experiences of God haven’t themselves sometimes caused me sorrow. All that it means is that me thinking I’m a bad Christian because I feel unhappy, or terrified, or even hopeless, is a ridiculous idea. It just means that I’m human, and that it is in my sorrow and hopelessness that God embraces me. There is nothing, neither death nor life, nor powers nor principalities on earth or in the heavens, nothing now or to come, no height or depth, that can separate me from the love of God in Christ Jesus. For Jesus has overcome them all.

Now if I can just get that through my thick head and cram it into the bottom of my heart I’ll be fine.