The Darkness of God
We use many different
images for God. In his poem “The Hound of Heaven,” Francis Thompson likens God
to a dog that is in loving pursuit of a human being. God pursuing cries out:
“Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble
thee, save me, save only me?”
In one of his parables Jesus likens God to
a bad judge in town “who fears neither
God nor man.” A little old lady wanting him to plead her case keeps knocking
away at his door. Finally her
persistence wins: he agrees to take her on, if for no other reason than to shut
her up “because she is wearing me
down.” The moral: keep persisting in your prayer to God, and God will grant
your request (Lk 18:1-8).
In today’s
parable (also about persistence in prayer) Jesus uses a rather amusing image
for God: God is like a dad in bed with
his kids. The door has already been bolted for the night, and all are snuggly
tucked under a nice warm quilt. Suddenly a neighbor is knocking away at his
door. He needs some bread because a visitor has suddenly come upon him, and he
wants to offer the hospitality of food. So the man gets up, comes down, unlocks
the door, and hands the neighbor his bread, if for no other reason than to shut
him up and get him on his way. The moral: keep persisting in your prayer to
God, and God will grant your request
(Lk 11: 1-13).
Both parables are about the prayer of
petition: that’s the prayer we pray especially when the chips are down, and we
need something badly. That’s the prayer that begs for something, and sooner or
later we all become beggars in desperate need of one thing or the other.
Jesus makes us this
promise about prayer: “I tell you, ask
and you will receive; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who
asks, receives; and the one who seeks, finds; and to the one who knocks, the
door will be opened” (Lk 11: 9). But
that promise is a problem. For somewhere along the way, we have all
prayed earnestly for something, and to all appearances our prayer was not
answered. We prayed for a certain job, and we didn’t get it. We prayed for a
loved one seriously ill, and that person died on us. We’ve prayed for a son or daughter beset with some mountainous
problem, and it hasn’t been cast into the sea (Lk 17:6). We’ve prayed for some
dream to come true, and it didn’t.
We’ve prayed for some deliverance, and we’re still in bondage. We’ve
prayed for some miracle to happen, and no miracle was granted. We remember,
because we can never forget, that six million Jews prayed for a miracle, and
six million miracles did not happen. Sometimes we are simply “too pious” to
deal honestly with the problem of prayer.
Today we put our piety away for a moment, and take it on.
Some thing or some One?
Today’s parable is
recorded both in the gospel of Matthew and Luke, but the two accounts end with
an interesting variation. Matthew ends
by saying, "If you, bad as you are, know how to give your children good
things, how much more will the Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him?" (Mt 7:11). (The imagery here is almost that of Santa
Klaus: “the one who gives good things to those who asks him.”) But Luke ends by saying, “If you, bad as you
are, know how to give your children good things, how much more will the Father
in heaven give the Holy Spirit
to those who ask him?" (Lk 11:13). The “Holy Spirit”! Where in the world
did that come from? No one has asked for the “Holy Spirit.” We have asked for a
fish or a loaf or an egg (things) but not for the Holy Spirit.
Matthew promises that we
will get all "the good things" we pray for. Luke promises simply that we will get the “Holy
Spirit” when we pray. That variation is interesting and a bit puzzling. We
wonder whether Luke is offering us a more profound idea of prayer? Could he
possibly mean that in response to prayer heaven does not give us some thing,
i.e. a fish, a loaf, an egg (that we have to give ourselves), but heaven
does give us some One: the Holy Spirit.
Here we speak tentatively
and cautiously, for it is indeed pretentious to claim to know what heaven gives
or does not give earth. One woman
angrily wrote: "When you speak
that way (that heaven perhaps gives us not some thing but “only” some One, and that everything which
earth needs it must give itself), you speak dangerously Marxist. You speak also rather shockingly. And besides, it's all very depressing!"
We really don’t
speak shockingly or dangerously. To be left with "only" the Holy
Spirit is not to be left with nothing. With the Holy Spirit of God, we have
everything we need. With the Holy
Spirit, we have within ourselves the compassion to effectively want for others
the blessings we ourselves enjoy (like good health insurance). With the Holy
Spirit, all those hate-filled ethnics (like Albanians, Macedonians, Croatians,
Serbs) have the power to kill their hatred of each other, instead of
killing each other. With the Holy Spirit, we possess a center down deep inside
ourselves, which can free us from an inordinate need to get the things we want,
and which can empower us to want the thing we get.
But best of all, with the Holy Spirit, we
have the power to forgive, ("Receive, ye, the Holy Spirit; receive, ye,
the power to forgive sin"{ Jn 20: 22-23}). With the Holy Spirit, we have especially the power to forgive
God, the power to forgive God’s sin against us. What in the world could
that possibly be? That’s the sin of God not working our miracle for us.
That’s the sin of God not giving us the things we ask for. That’s the sin of God not being our Santa
Klaus. That’s the sin of God hiding in the darkness and being silent when we
pray.
Christian preaching
ceaselessly enjoins us humans to forgive one another. Is there no room also for forgiving God? Listen to 29 year old
Etty Hillesum forgiving God in prayer, shortly before she died in the gas
chambers of Auschwitz. Elizabeth
O'Connor's book Search for Silence quotes that prayer:
Dear
God, these are anxious times. Tonight for the first time I lay in the dark with
burning eyes as scene after scene of human suffering passed before me. Dear
God, I shall try to help You stop my strength from ebbing away. One thing is
becoming increasingly clear to me: that we must help You, and to the very end,
we must defend Your dwelling place within us.... You cannot help us; we must
help You. And dear God, for that I do not
hold You responsible.
To
God’s forgiveness of us we match our forgiveness of God.
One woman writes, “You
speak shockingly and dangerously.” Listen now to another response, and this one
comes from “our friend.” (And here I shall never cease to marvel at how
worlds-apart two responses to one and the same reality can be. It forces me to believe there is no such
things as reality as it is in itself
but only reality as perceived). She
writes: "When you speak that way, you are really speaking to us about the
poverty of God, who comes to us so poor that all God has to give us is God’s
Self: the Holy Spirit. And when we receive God in that poverty, God becomes
human and we become divine. I am reminded of a quote of unknown source which I
wrote into my Bible several years ago:
nor
yet for your desire, save that the sky
grows
darker still and the sea rises higher.”
She
ends saying, "You are leading us into deep waters and into the Darkness
of God. You invite us to leave our playgrounds and follow you into the
river of rebirth."
What's the
"Darkness of God?" That's the darkness of the Holocaust in which six
million prayers for a miracle spiraled up to heaven with the smoke of the ovens
trying to burn up the evidence, and six million miracles were not granted,
because in the face of such incredible human evil, God is powerless.
What's the “Darkness of
God”? That's the universal incontestable fact that, if perhaps heaven does give us something every now and
then in response to prayer, there inevitably comes a time when heaven no longer
gives us any thing. That’s called death. That’s the supreme moment which no
longer calls for some thing
but only some One, i.e.
the Holy spirit to come into the Darkness of God and to help us find God
somewhere in that Darkness. That, I believe, is what our friend means when she
speaks about “the Darkness of God” and
about getting off “our playgrounds” when we pray.
With the Holy Spirit comes the power to forgive God for not being “Our Santa Klaus
who art in heaven,” granting us our Christmas list. With the Holy Spirit
comes the power to forgive God for not being “Our Power who art in
heaven,” granting us our most impossible requests. With the Holy Spirit comes the power to forgive God for
being “only” “Our Father who art
in heaven.” “Father” --- that’s
Jesus’ image for God: “When you pray, say `Our Father who art in heaven.’”
Jesus’ image for God is not Santa Klaus nor
Wonder-worker but Father: a father who grieves over his children war-torn and
weary. A father who worries and waits for prodigal sons and daughters to return
home. A father who pours the oil of
compassion into his children waylaid and wounded on the highway of life. A father who promises to “wipe away all
tears from our eyes and to do away with dying" (Rv 21).
One day Jesus prayed to that Father to be
delivered, and no deliverance was granted him. And as he died on the cross,
Jesus forgave God saying, “Father, into thy hands I command my spirit” (Lk 23:
46).
At the end of the day,
whatever might be our thoughts about prayer, we keep on knocking at the door
anyway, and we keep on praying for things, because Jesus says we should.
"Ask and you shall receive. Seek and you shall find. Knock and it shall be
opened unto you." And if, when the
door is opened, we are given Matthew's "good things," i.e. the fish
or the egg or the loaf we asked for, that's fine. If, however, when the door is
opened, we are given "only"
some One, Luke's Holy
Spirit, that's better still. For then
we have the power not to get the things we want but to want the things we get.
And then we have the power also to forgive God's Darkness and silence. With
that, we have everything we need for the journey ahead.