(photograph by Kevin Byrne)“I want to paint myself a picture/I want to paint myself in blue and red and black and grey/All of the beautiful colors are very very meaningful/Yeah, you know grey/It’s my favorite color/I just get so confused everyday/But if I knew Picasso I would buy myself a grey guitar and play.”
Counting Crows “Mr Jones” (VH1 Storytellers version)
All of my dearests (namely, those of you privy to this blog) agree that life is too dark to be explained by typical Christianity.
I’m reading this book called Dark Nights of the Soul by Thomas Moore (former Catholic monk, PhD in theology, musicology and religion. Only strike against him: practices psychotherapy)
Here’s his take.
Excerpts:
“…God who is your ultimate darkness.... Religion, too, often avoids the dark by hiding behind platitudes and false assurances. Nothing is more irrelevant than feeble religious piousness in the face of stark, life-threatening darkness. Religion tends to sentimentalize the light and demonize the darkness. If you turn to spirituality to find only a positive and wholesome attitude, you are using spirituality to avoid life’s dark beauty…. Flight from the dark infantilizes your spirituality….”
He quotes Bonhoeffer as saying, “The world that has come of age is more godless, and perhaps for that very reason nearer to God, than the world before its coming of age.”
“Today, Bonhoeffer says, we have to face our problems directly and having lost the option of a God coming like the cavalry from the sky, we discover the real meaning of religion, an openness to the mysteries that are playing themselves out.”
This is a stunningly accurate description of my recent spiritual journey. I have been entirely unable to articulate the spiritual darkness that has overtaken my life for the past three years. I have felt guilty, I have felt inadequate, I’ve felt like a failure… I’ve been tempted with meaninglessness and despair… I’ve been threatened with a thorough unraveling of God as I had been taught. He wasn’t what he had been said to be. The church definitely makes no sense. He did meaningless things without explaining himself and placed me and my family in dark places we didn’t deserve.
And all I came out with was… it is what it is. Nothing more. Nothing less.
What do we think about this Thomas Moore character, people? Call me.
5 comments:
But is this the darkness that we're talking about? I'm not addressing (nor is Moore) a moral darkness... a sin or shameful darkness. He is addressing, as far as I understand, the philosophical darkness of God's silence and seeming absence. Everyone from Job to Abraham to Peter experienced dark seasons that didn't connote the removal of God's hand or his disapproval... but served their purpose. And what of Jacob, wrestling in the darkness for his blessing?
I just think it's not so black and white as morality.
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