(The final post about the book Friendship with Jesus: An Imaginative Prayer Journey)
I toyed with titling this post “Postscript to an Epilogue” because I close the book with an epilogue but want to offer a few more thoughts about living a friendship with Jesus. The epilogue includes some brief reflections on the importance of loving friendships in our life, people who will hold us and walk with us as we move toward cultivating a deeper friendship with Jesus. One of the primary reasons for this is to support us when God goes silent.
The Reality of Relational Pain
One of the inherent dangers of talking about a growing friendship using the language of “stages” is that our minds immediately think of a progression, from one reality to the next, one after the other. We all know that this is not what happens in friendships. They are much more organic, moving and flowing, developing rapidly, then slowing to an easy comfortable pace, then moving deeper again. And one of the core experiences in any authentic friendship, traversing any and all stages, is pain. We hurt each other. We experience disappointment and frustration, flaunted expectations and unmet needs. At our worse, we betray one another.
The movements of a growing friendship with Jesus do not proceed without similar obstacles and challenges. One common disruption that most of us feel from time to time is the experience of God going dark. We cry out to God and are met with deafening silence. We see and hear others sharing stories of healing, comfort, and growth and yet we languish in darkness. I tell a bit of my own story of this in the book, finding myself crying out again and again, “Is there anybody out there?”
In such crisis seasons, we feel deeply alone and abandoned, forsaken by God. We may even despair about life itself. Our hearts are tired and broken and we seem unable to find a way out of our despair. Temptations come, followed by self-accusations and condemnation. Our skepticism turns quickly to cynicism and our inner dialogue taunts us. In our isolation we wonder if our faith in God is just a sickening ruse.
The "Other"
Anthony Bloom opens his classic book on prayer, Beginning to Pray, with a chapter titled “The Absence of God.” What a way to begin! There is no escaping this experience. But Bloom goes on to suggest that God's absence is, ironically, a sign of God’s reality in our lives. He writes,
The fact that God can make Himself (sic) present or can leave us with the sense of His absence is part of this live and real relationship. If we could mechanically draw Him into an encounter, force Him to meet us, simply because we have chosen this moment to meet Him, there would be no relationship and no encounter. We can do that . . . with the various idols we can put in front of us instead of God; we can do nothing of the sort with the living God, any more than we can do with a living person.[1]
This might seem like cold comfort, but I think it helps us see that we are dealing with an actual "Other" when we seek a relationship with God – obvious, of course, until we pay attention to the ways we are trying to control the relationship. The vulnerability of waiting on God, trusting that we are seen and loved when our experience is all in the other direction is extremely difficult. It is much easier to try and control what is happening in relationships, so that our needs are met and our frustrations abated – but that is not what we long for. When we deal with an actual Other, whether it be God or any other person in our lives, we lay ourselves open to be hurt and disappointed, but also to be met by, as psychiatrist Curt Thompson says, “someone who is looking for us.”
Where Else Will We Go?
When Jesus was teaching in John 6 about eating his flesh and drinking his blood, most of his listeners turned and walked away. I think I likely would have done the same. But something had happened in the hearts of the disciples by this point in their friendship journey with Jesus. As Jesus asks them if they, too, want to leave, Peter responds, “Where else will we go?” Jesus was not making sense to them. He was likely causing all kinds of inner turmoil, but a bond had been forged that was strong enough to withstand this storm. They decided to hang on. I think Jesus was teaching them a way to sustain the spiritual crisis moments that inevitably would come - just hang on.
In my own journey with Jesus, I have come to deeply appreciate this posture – hanging on. I may not understand what is happening, where I am going, what Jesus is up to, but I can, like a little child clutching his father’s leg, hold on for dear life. Where else will I go? Who else does my heart long for but Jesus?
Living In God’s House
When we are children, we are oblivious to what goes into making a home function. We run to the table and food magically appears. We hit the light switch and light happens. We go to our room and jump in a bed that we did not buy nor make. A child does none of what is necessary for the home to support her existence. She does not hold the house together. Parents do that. And in so doing they create space for the child to explore, to complain, to wrestle, to learn, and to enjoy all that is being offered them.
There are seasons in our spiritual lives when we are children in need of “parents” – people who know how to hold the “house” of faith together and create space for us to ask our questions and lament our losses. Our Western individualism has taught us that we need to carry the entire weight of our own spiritual lives ourselves, with all our questions, struggles, fears, and frustrations. This is like expecting a parentless child to feed themselves, pay the electric bill and shop for furniture by themselves. They would be left wandering the streets. It is comical to imagine a child creating a home and making it function on their own and yet I think this is precisely what we often find ourselves doing in our spiritual lives, especially when God is silent.
But God has not left us as orphans. God has provided a scripture and a history of “parents” who can hold our “house of faith” together, helping us navigate the experience of God’s silence, and holding space for us while we ask our questions, cry out our laments and pray our disappointments. (I will be exploring this more in future posts). In my own life this has included friends and spiritual directors whose faith I can lean on while I struggle to find my own.
Friendship with Jesus will inevitably lead us to friendship with many others who are answering the invitation to come home.
Please forward this post on to others whom you think might resonate with it. Thanks for reading.
[1] Anthony of Sourozh, The Essence of Prayer, 130.
I needed this.
Thank you for sharing your wisdom, my friend.