The Great Discordancy
O Lover,
Alas, from time to time I experience my life as if You were absent, as if You simply were not. While I often am aware of Your Presence, when I might edit Descartes as saying “we all are, therefore You cannot not be,” it is the other times which occasion this prayer.
At the outset, I need to distinguish among the various contexts in which I might experience You as absent. One is when my sense gates, mind, and/or imagination are saturated with beauty, goodness, and/or truth. These are the idyllic times, the “seven fat years” in the dream which Joseph interpreted (Gen 41). However, while Your intent is that these gifts evidence and be translucent to You, we often exchange the creation for the Creator (Rom 1:18-25). The possibility that this “exchange” can morph into idolatry 101 is alluded to in the book of Wisdom: “For [we] search busily among [Your] works, but are distracted by what [we] see, because that seen is so fair” (13:7; EA). The result is often an experiencing of Your absence even while distractively awash in delight.
A second setting for experiencing Your absence might be in the acres of acédia, a melancholy of the heart. Cited in the Psalter (“the scourge wrecking havoc at high noon” [91:6]) and among the medievals dubbed “sloth” (last of the Seven Mortal Sins) or “noonday demon,” this state is characterized by a dearth of caring, a viscosity of will, a listlessness at the center. Your name might be mouthed, Your works noted, but there is little engagement, even less passion to say nothing of joy. Little, and increasingly, nothing matters; a gray lethargy sets in; indifference reigns regarding Your presence or absence. During his two years of imprisonment Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote experientially of this lethal marauder. Acédia can strip the question of Your presence or absence of any meaning at all.
A third setting is when, in the face of abiding awareness of Your Presence, one’s exterior life, perhaps including my own body and/or mind, is in shambles, when the chaotic darkness is menacing and enveloping, when all empirical metrics for optimism have disappeared and there is seemingly no way forward. Here the very discordancy between abiding trust in You at the center and galloping entropy without may thrust us into the most ominous of straits; here even strong awareness of Your Presence within amid the disintegration without may occasion the greatest crisis of all.
O Lover, I am not exempt from experiencing Your absence, having in various times and to varying degrees been in each of the above situations. However, it is that third setting with which I principally struggle in this my December. Stripped of earlier illusions, wearied of many cul-de-sac sirens posturing as new paths, wary of corporate institutions (e.g., political, ideological, religious), I look out into a society and planet, and see a multifaceted unraveling lubricated by stunning denial. I fear that many of the consequences of this decline will be irrevocable. While I repeatedly pray “My soul clings to You” (Ps 63:8), I witness few evidences beyond the interpersonal of “Your Kin[-]dom come . . . on earth as it is in heaven” (Mt 6:10). And while I know that this dissonance is, and always has been, part of the human condition, I ache in the face of my greater awareness of it now. That Your Christ embodies the truth that You ache infinitely more, and for the same reason, alone shields me from despair. Incarnator entangled with all that is, Immanuel (“[You] with us”): this discordancy hurts!
O Lover, while continuing to cleave to Your timeless dream for the cosmos—“to whom [else] shall we go?” [Jn 6:68])—I find doing so in our “valley of the shadow of death” (Ps 23:4) both difficult and painful. There is an urgency in my raising to You of this lamentation, this cry that it is so.
