Screaming at God

'Sunrise' J.M.W Turner (1845)

The White Queen, in Lewis Carroll’s Alice through the looking glass, screams for no apparent reason. When Alice asks her why she is screaming she says that she is about to prick her finger. This does indeed happen, a few seconds later, at which point she falls silent. When asked the reason for this inversion of the logical sequence of events, she replies that she has already screamed, before she pricked her finger, so why bother screaming now? I think this is a fairly good representation of the attitude many of us take to prayer, even in times of national crisis. Why bother praying, or perhaps ‘screaming’, at God now? We have done our praying, or screaming, and the bombs are being dropped, for better or for worse.

Whatever perspective you are viewing the outcome of Wednesday’s parliamentary vote on whether we should get militarily involved in the Syrian conflict, you could be forgiven for thinking that from here on it’s downhill all the way, whichever side of the argument you favoured, so why bother with prayer? But I do not think that prayer works like that. For one thing, it involves starting from where you really are, rather than where you think you ought to be, with regard to God and what you feel about the world and the Syrian crisis, or about your own life.

In all of these contexts, prayer can certainly involve screaming at God. St. Theresa of Avila, a person of great holiness, was known for her rants. On one occasion the wheel of the vehicle she was travelling in came off and lodged in the mud, upturning the vehicle and ejecting all its passengers. She told God, quite forcefully, that it was not surprising that he had so few friends if this was the way he treated them.  It’s fine to scream at God, but it’s better if we can simply hold the person or the situation in the deep inner space where our existence is ‘grounded’, where it is held firm but not mired down.

We cannot hold all the upheavals going on in our world in our rational minds for very long without putting our own mental health at risk, which is not what God would have us do, or what prayer is about. So we have to do the holding in a different way, using other methods for processing the world’s trauma.

Such methods could involve placing all the events of the past few weeks within the larger moment. The larger moment is time itself, understood any way you like, but understood as that dimension which embraces the past, the present and the future, in Love’s eternal regard.

Holding the moment in the larger moment is like a very simplified version of the Buddhist practice of Tonglen. We breath in the darkness that surrounds us in the present moment and we breath out the light, so becoming a part of that light. The light is life, so when we do this, we are more fully alive. Our minds become clear and steady, more pure, in Buddhist terms.

Christian prayer begins with being present to the moment, breathing it in as we face into the turmoil in the Middle East, what the bible describes as the ‘roaring of the nations’. In prayer, we face into the evil embodied in Isis, the confusion and doubt about what is best to do next, and the moral dilemmas facing world leaders and our own politicians, dilemmas which we must face as a nation, in solidarity with them, irrespective of our political affiliations.

All this darkness comes to us as a kind of scream from outside. If being present to the darkness is not to do us psychological harm, we must encounter it in the silence which is already within us in the form of Christ who waits for us to yield to the grace which he offers. 

The silence is our inner sanctuary. It needs to be cared for and guarded. The darkness will yield to the grace which comes out of silence if we are prepared to spend time in our inner sanctuary, constantly returning to it as our default position. When we do this, and it becomes our way of life, we can begin to breath out the light which comes from the inexhaustible reserve of God’s love for his world and which the darkness will never consume. 

Only connect

My current computer screen saver is Giovanni Bellini’s Christ Blessing, as shown on my post of February 10^th.  I am returning to this picture because it holds my attention in a particular way. With our slow internet connection, there is always time to contemplate it, even if contemplation is abruptly cut off by the arrival of emails and other distractions emanating from the ‘real’ world. By contemplating, I mean looking through the picture, rather than looking at it. To contemplate this picture is to look through it to the Christ who is inviting the viewer into relationship with him, and into a different way of seeing the world. Looking at the face of Christ makes me wonder sometimes which world is the most real – his or the one I seem to inhabit, as most of us do, via a computer.

 

Computers and social network sites, as well as blogs, leave us in a kind of limbo when we are not on them, which is why it is so difficult to turn them off. It is as if we inhabit two worlds at once, in which we deal with what feel like different realities. What kind of inhabiting is this? and what kind of reality am I contemplating as I look at the face of Christ while waiting for the computer to get going? It seems to be a liminal place. I am standing on a dividing line between two worlds, two realities which interface with one another. In contemplating the image of Christ blessing I sense it reaching in to the world being opened up not only to me, but to millions of others, through the computer. When the screen saver goes, an interruption occurs as the computer releases a different real world into the mind space of its user.

But the image of Christ blessing is not so quick to fade. My screen saver remains with me and serves as a reminder of that other real world. The memory of Christ’s hand raised in benediction now confronts the host of alienating images and stories which shape themselves around not only my own consciousness, but also around everything which the computer may have to offer, its potential for both good and evil. The computer is a re-incarnation of that allegorical tree of knowledge portrayed in the book of Genesis. We need to eat carefully of its fruit.

The computer takes us to dark places and, potentially, to a general darkness, although not  always one which is specifically ‘religious’. It is important to differentiate between general darkness, the darkness of ignorance and materialism, and that which seems to pertain solely to religion, as many people understand it. Those who distrust religion will often associate it with the kind of darkness which comes with the preaching of hatred and murder. This particular darkness is encapsulated in the image depicting the Arabic letter ‘nun’, for ‘Nazarene’, as it is used to single out Christian homes for the intimidation or destruction of those who live in them.

The task which faces all of us, if the world is to survive the current tide of religious violence, consists in bringing together these two images, the one of Christ blessing, and the Arabic letter, and allowing them to confront one another. It is challenging and, at times, frightening work. Firstly, because it requires that we come to terms with the idea that the light, as we see it in the Bellini painting, and as we sometimes sense it in the deeper reaches of our own consciousness, has not been overcome by the sinister darkness associated with the letter ‘nun’.

Secondly, it obliges us to also look at our own inner darkness, those feelings of doubt, fear and anger which surface from time to time and for which there is often no obvious or immediate explanation. This process of confrontation begins with our accepting and coming to terms with the light which we also carry within us. It is the light of God’s presence, the working of his grace in our lives, to the extent that we allow it. Allowing grace into our lives is a matter of making ourselves available to God. It is what the writer Simone Weil called disponibilité.

Being available to the work of light brings us to the outer limit of what we think of as our ‘selves’. In so doing, it faces us with a particular kind of emptiness, one where the ‘self’ that we understand we are, including all its dreams and desires, loves and hates, has to be literally ‘forgotten’.[1] This is what Christ meant when he talked about ‘dying’ to self. In the moment of forgetting, or dying, we are invited to drop down into darkness, the darkness of not having answers, of not knowing, and at the same time of trusting in the light which literally ‘lightens the world’. This whole process of forgetting, dying and trusting leads to a new kind of knowing and seeing.

There is a connection to be made in the process of  knowing and understanding on one level with that of not knowing or understanding on a deeper and more significant level. We are talking about the inhabiting of two worlds, or realities. At the deeper level, we don’t need to know things in the same way. We don’t need to have made sense of why the world is as it is, or to have come up with solutions. All that is required is that we maintain a connection between the light, as we see it in the holy face of Christ, and all that is chaotic, violent and dark in our world.

On the whole, this work of connecting is best done by individuals who are prepared to be open to it for most of the day. They will find, in any case, that once they have made themselves ‘available’, being open to the work of grace will become a way of life, although it will not prevent them from carrying on with life as they have always lived it, with regard to what they do for a living, their marriage or relationships and all those in between times when they are not doing or thinking anything in particular.

The vital work of engaging with darkness, while remaining in the light, is a matter of remaining connected at a deeper level with the light we see in the face of Christ, who confronts and overcomes the darkness in the world around us.

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[1] I am grateful to Maggie Ross for many of the ideas which inform this post, especially that of  ‘forgetting’. See her recent book Silence: A User’s Guide, (DLT)