I’ve been thinking about how I miss the presence of God in my life.
BY RICK THYNE
It is the final evening of a week-long Junior High conference at Forest Home Christian Conference Center in the mountains outside Los Angeles, and a hundred or more of us are gathered on wooden horseshoe bleachers around the campfire. I’m leaning on the wooden slat behind my back, surrounded by my cabin-mates in the back row, but soon I withdraw into a conversation I’ve been having with myself throughout the week. I feel on my face the light breeze that rustles the birch leaves behind the bleachers, sense something like an accompanying hand on my heart. No voice, but a message as clear as a thirteen-year-old can hear: God calling me to be a minister. I nod a silent Yes that defines my life from this moment forward.
Starting when I returned from that conference, I would rise an hour before the school bell made it necessary and marked with colored pencils my Thompson Chain Reference King James Version of the Bible, Genesis through Revelation, three times before high-school graduation. I prayed very explicit and somewhat demanding prayers about homework and basketball games, friendships, and eventually my desire for a girlfriend: an intimate, completely honest conversation with the One who stood beside me as I knelt at my desk. I asked God every day to protect me, to help me convert my unchurched family and, by high school, to help me reign in my suddenly eruptive impulses.
And I heard back. For years, I could find God’s responses in the scriptures I read every day, in worship on Wednesday nights and twice on Sundays, in personal relationships with fellow devotees, and in experiences of wonder through music and sunsets, scenes in movies, and in the beauty of a certain young woman who asked me to a dance. I remember all of this with clarity and longing.
For years, I could find God’s responses in the scriptures I read every day, in worship on Wednesday nights and twice on Sundays.
Much later in my life, I read and reread The Practice of the Presence of God, a devotional book by Brother Lawrence, a 17th century Carmelite friar who worked in the priory’s kitchen and prayed to the God of all pots and pans. With his hands in the foul water, his face slick from the steam, he felt the unmediated presence of God in whatever he was doing. I sought what he found: constant contact in the ordinary moments of my days with the God I’d pledged my life to. And with help from Brother Lawrence, other ancient saints, and church comrades in prayer and devotional reading, I created this daily discipline that allowed me to sustain for decades my sense of God’s immediate presence.
But such unmediated contact with God is no longer my experience. The breeze has stilled. I feel no hand on my heart. My prayers, long unanswered, now go unspoken.
What happened between God and me?
Through my twenties and thirties (the 1960s and 1970s), I came face to face with gruesome tragedies I could no longer find a divine explanation for. A seventeen-year-old homecoming queen, a member of our church Youth Group, got in a fight with her boyfriend on a Saturday night two weeks after her coronation, ran home, found a bottle of unused antidepressants in her mother’s medicine cabinet, swallowed twenty-five pills, and went into a five-day coma before she died. Trying to explain in my homily to 700 stunned mourners at her memorial service, many of them her high school peers and their now-terrified parents, how God fit into this dark scenario took me beyond what I found credible.
Four months later, I officiated at a twenty-five-year-old beautiful young woman’s wedding: she died of ovarian cancer soon after. I stood to deliver the eulogy, looked across the chancel at her bereft mother, started crying in the middle of the first sentence of my greeting, sat down as our organist covered for me while I gained control of my emotions, stood again, started to speak again, cried again, sat, and finally rose and got through what was clearly a mess of uncertain thoughts and feelings.
I found it increasingly difficult to trust my experiences of God's presence when God seemed so absent in these terrible moments. What had been a powerful emotional experience of the presence of God began to wither with my experiences of God's silence and inaction. My close relationship with God was in trouble.
I found it increasingly difficult to trust my experiences of God's presence when God seemed so absent in these terrible moments.
While teaching adults in a Bible study class in our new parish through the 1980s and 1990s, I ran head-on into the rise of public atheism. Books by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and others made the best-seller lists, each of them defining belief in a transcendent God as intellectual nonsense. I realized that they were spiritual cousins to the fundamentalist believers I’d grown up with and left behind by the time I went to college. Both camps were defined by the certainty of their positions: God’s existence and presence among us is obvious, or contrarily, God’s existence and presence among us is mythic fantasy without a drop of evidence to support it. After all the years of disillusionment about the presence of God in my life, I was used to living with uncertainty, so the certainty of both forms of fundamentalism was useless to me as a believer. I was still hunting for something that my uncertain but hungering faith might attach to.
Through those decades and the twenty years beyond, I taught the lectionary Gospel reading for each week to that adult Bible study class in our parish. These were devout, educated, curious Christians who imposed no boundaries on our discussions; so long as we were cordial to one another, it was permissible to hold virtually any belief about God or Jesus or the church, marriage, gender, economics, politics – whatever the morning’s Gospel raised up among us. And without recognizing it, moment to moment over those years, I was changing my mind and heart about what mattered to me.
I navigated these discussions by insisting that belief in God, or unbelief, are both just that: beliefs. Neither is supportable by the kind of knowledge we’re used to in intellectual discussions. There is not a scrap of scientific evidence that demonstrates conclusively that God exists; nor is there a scrap of scientific evidence that proves God does not exist. You either believe it or don’t believe it, but in neither case can you prove it.
Through these transformational years, the idea of a transcendent God pressing up against me continued to lose credibility. I began to trust human experience as a source of truth that no longer came to me through the mysteries of God. The loss of the comfort of God's presence was worth the feeling of credibility that I found at ground level; I gave up the warmth of God's presence for a strong sense of my own integrity. I needed to find the source of my faith where I lived – in human experiences and not in some transcendent mystery.
As a consequence, I wound up with a new focus for my faith. I stopped looking up, as if some transcendence would light my way, guide me through the morass that life became for me in my mid-forties. I’ve described myself since then as a devout follower of Jesus of Nazareth, the lead character in every one of those Gospel stories. The issue of whether he is or is not divine is as useless a discussion as the one about God’s existence. You can believe it or not believe it, but what you or I cannot do is establish our conviction as certain knowledge.
What I can believe in and also know is the content of his life and teaching recorded in four Gospels in the Christian scriptures and in Gospels and parchments from the centuries after his death that contain additional stories by and about him. These texts were the center of my studies during two graduate degrees from Princeton Theological Seminary in the 1960s, and in my private studies since then, so I feel like I’m dealing with material with which I have some expertise.
Curiously, these reports of his teaching and actions are precisely the content that the formal creeds of the church ignore. What they care about is his relationship to God and God’s interventions into human affairs: Born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate says the Apostles’ Creed, with no reference to what he said or did between these two events. He came down from heaven, and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary and became man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate, he suffered death and was buried, says the Nicene Creed, again with no reference to his life’s work.
There is nothing in these ancient faith statements about Jesus of Nazareth’s stories and relationships and pithy aphorisms: what he did and said in the brief time he gathered a community of followers, taught them, and was murdered by the authorities whom he confronted on their behalf. Yet my current faith is defined by my devotion to what I know about him from these stories.
I thrill to the brilliance of his thoughts; he told stories and shared ideas that will endure for as long as there are humans searching for meaning. His compassion for all kinds of people is the example of inclusion and diversity that defines the parameters of my own convictions: every person in the human family is my sister or brother, because they were his. And he was a person of exemplary courage. When we view him through some lens of divinity, it makes inconsequential the profound suffering he withstood to live out what it meant for him to be an authentic human witness to the God who called him to this ministry.
Jesus also had a deep personal relationship with God, the kind I wish I still had. Time and again in the Gospels, he sneaks off from his disciples and the crowds to go one-on-one with the God he was so close to that he called him Abba, dearest Dad. Surly these encounters refreshed and empowered him, as they once refreshed and empowered me but no longer do. I take some solace in the fact that, like my disillusionment with the presence of God, in the last hour of his life Jesus too experienced divine silence: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Jesus of Nazareth is a model for me of what it means to live with integrity and purpose, to be thoughtful, compassionate, and full of courage. Reading about him time and again renews my commitment to the personal love he called compassion and to the public love he called justice. My time with him reminds me that there was a Jewish rabbi whose character was so enlightened that I’m blessed with insight whenever I contemplate stories of what he said and did. But what he does not do is set my heart on fire: that admiration does not create the intimacy like the one he, and for a long time I, experienced as the unmediated presence of God.
I take some solace in the fact that, like my disillusionment with the presence of God, in the last hour of his life Jesus too experienced divine silence.
My father died in 1975. I’d made my peace with this man who worked so hard to support our family despite his lack of education and therefore opportunities to advance, and who took out some of his frustration on his firstborn. Three months before he died at the end of a two-year illness, I told him for the first time that I loved him, and he answered back, I’ve always loved you, Rick. This sparse relationship is a memory with little lasting emotion attached to it.
My mother died twenty years after my father – what a difference. She was the lap I could crawl up on, the arms that embraced me at my best and at my worst, the consistent I’m so proud of you not only when I succeeded but even when I was drowning in public and private shame.
I no longer need my father or my mother. I've outgrown them and become my own parent. I father myself by defining the rules I live by and assessing my own adherence to them. And I never get judged or slapped around if I slip past these boundaries. I miss Mom’s lap, but no longer need it. I’ve discovered my own sources of nurturing mother’s milk in my marriage and family, with friends who’ve proven themselves in the best and the worst of times, in the quietness of reading and the challenges of writing, in dreams and fantasies that take me to places I don’t understand but cannot wait to explore. It is this life, at ground level, that now feeds my soul.
I no longer need my parents – and what dawned on me in this summer of reflection is that I no longer need a Heavenly Father, a Divine Mother. The patriarchal and matriarchal assumptions that come with either of these mythic figures renders me needy, dependent, and subject to judgment in ways that no longer fit my vision of who I am and how I might structure the days remaining to me. I author my own life’s story, feed on the community of family and friends that love and challenge me, commit myself in work and social justice efforts to turn the human race into the human family, and allow each day to unfold as the next moment of my own creation.
There are still moments when I long for my mother’s lap, as I sometimes long to look up and find Someone who will love and protect me, guide, and comfort me. These are the longings of the child I was, and of the child who still lives within me. But like my mother’s lap, Whomever was up there is there no longer, neither as a breeze on my face or a hand on my heart. I make my way at ground level and, for now, it’s enough.
