Long, dark night of the soul

I have been feeling a deep sadness lately, a hopelessness bordering on despair. 

I have completed my first semester of seminary, unbelievably arduous even for an accomplished academic, only to be faced with five more just like it and five intensive winter or summer terms in between, beyond which lies an uncertain future to say the least. A detailed conversation with a school official has confirmed my worst fear: that they can and will do nothing to make it any easier for me to fill my denominational requirements here, nor will they waive or allow me to replace any redundant or UU-inappropriate coursework. My church has become a place of work, now--a place of responsibility rather than a place of respite--and for various reasons it seems that my ministers are not able to devote any time to mentoring me right now. My seminary friends have mostly scattered to the winds and taken with them my sole support network. And lest I take this time "off," the professor I have been working for at UT is wanting me to use my "less burdened" time "to play catch-up." And to top it all off, I have been late for practically everything all week, including my kindergartner's first public-school holiday performance. 

It is as though I had traversed a mountain that had proved more difficult to climb than I could possibly imagine, only to see from the peak that there were a dozen more to go, many looking more difficult and remote, and then to land on the other side in a swamp. And to go through all of this only to find that there is no longer anyone designated to hold out a hand to pull me up, certainly nobody to give me directions or to offer any comfort about what lies ahead, and only myself to blame for all of the problems in which I find myself "stuck."

My spiritual director calls it "the dark night of the soul" in reference to a work of the same name by St. John of the Cross. Apparently it is common for seminarians (and others setting out on journeys of spiritual seeking) to go there after the first semester. I forget exactly what he said about it, but it has something to do with the ego needing to get out of the way of the spiritual journey. The old personal spiritual practices that once sustained the student go out the window pretty quickly in the face of an incredible onslaught of new ideas to absorb and process, books to read and papers to write, and weekly (if not daily) challenges to tightly-held facets of their spiritual-theological world view. When the stress finally dissipates at the end of the semester, a deep emptiness remains. The student is left in a place where the easy answers that used to comfort no longer do, where the people who used to serve as guides no longer can, where no sense of controlling or even understanding one's own life path remains intact. 

It is an emptiness that demands to be filled but cannot be if we are to continue the journey. In order to become the people who can give answers and comfort and guidance and perhaps even understanding of where the road is going, we must first let go of our dependence on others to provide these things for us. Even harder, we must admit how many of these things we cannot provide for ourselves, either. Some questions have no comforting answers, some wild places admit no guidance through them, and most of all some paths cannot be known or even understood except in the traveling.

What is to be done about the long, dark nights of the soul? Nothing. They must simply be acknowledged for what they are: periods of waiting for the ego to get out of the way, to admit that it is no longer in control but is now living in service to something greater and more mysterious, for the cloud of self-concern and self-doubt to resolve into a clarity of purpose that may be nothing more than "I have begun this journey, I will follow where it leads." (after all, as the quip goes, when you are going through Hell, for God's sake don't stop going!) And, as the new day dawns, that which is holding the traveler back may suddenly become apparent, and the final leap of faith needed to truly undertake the journey can be made.

Somehow, for me, simply acknowledging that this is going on and that I am not alone has been enough to lift a large part of the weight from my shoulders.  It has also enabled me to see that it is now time to divorce myself from my old career completely, to resign my research post at UT Austin. It has been rightly said that a man cannot serve two masters, and my old master is holding me back in a place of doubt in and incomplete commitment to the new. As for the rest, it is enough to know that I am not alone, that I have traveling companions on an intimidating but well-worn path, that that there are folks looking out for me here and there, and that eventually, on the other side, day will dawn again and I will once again see what i need to do.

Until then, Good Night!

a particular scandal: God is With Us

In brushing up for my theology final tomorrow, I read a series of slams on Unitarian theology in an article titled "The Scandal of Peculiarity" by none other than Cynthia Rigby, the APTS professor who usually teaches this class. The argument seems to go that only a triune God is actively and fully present in our world and is therefore capable of understanding and loving us as we are, of being "God with us" in solidarity (as one who was once human), and of "indwelling" us as challenger, shaper, and transformer of our lives. A unitarian God, she states in negatives, is distant, authoritarian, unloving, and incapable of understanding what it is to be human. 

She is seriously misunderstanding the unitarian God. Rigby's logic, and that of the people she cites for backup, only works if one sees a unitarian God through a trinitarian lens: in particular, Rigby seems to think that Unitarian Christians choose to keep the "Father/Creator" person of her trinity and lose the other two, maintaining the transcendent aspect of God at the expense of the immanent aspect. No! 

Neither Judaism nor Islam, which both insist on a unitarian Diety, has such an understanding. The Jewish scriptures speak time and again about a Diety who is present and involved in the world we live in, and the Sufi tradition of Islam says we have no further to look for Allah than in the living of our daily lives. 

While we Unitarian Universalists have many names for and conceptions of the Divine, I think it safe to say that we would largely agree on one thing: whatever the Sacred is, it is here among us in the midst of things, dwelling in and among all, present in our very Spirit and in every act of Love, stirring things up for the comfortable yet comforting those in pain. God doesn't have to be triune to be with us or to love us. God simply has to be and the with us is taken care of.

It seems no scandal at all to me, then, that such a God could become incarnate, dwelling fully in a particular human for the good of all. The scandal, for me, is the implication by Christians that Jesus of Nazareth was somehow the only time this ever happened; indeed, I believe that God does this all the time. What if God was one of us, right now? What if God was all of us?

What UU's believe

From time to time, I get asked something along the lines of "So, what do Unitarian Universalists believe?" I always have a hard time answering this question, since as a movement held together by covenants rather than creeds we have no readily accessible statements of "what we all believe." 

It's a bit easier, generally, to explain what we don't believe in: we don't believe in setting apart any one particular set of holy scriptures or in limiting ourselves to any one particular definition of "God," for example, and we heartily disapprove of all five points of Calvinism. But these do not get me any closer to answering the question.

Our district executive, Susan Smith, likes holding up James Luther Adams' "Five Smooth Stones" of liberal religion, but they are somewhat hard to make sense of unless you already have some background in theology to compare them with, so that generally doesn't help me in those conversations, either.

But after writing a couple of term papers and listening to a few podcast sermons, I think I have an answer that might do. I'm sure I will keep revising it, of course, but here's a start:

"We believe in the incredible potential of fully realized human persons, the ability of unbridled spirits to go forth and change the world. We believe that a world full of people who are true to their best selves and actively working to do what they know to be right cannot help but be a better world to live in, because those people will accept nothing less than a world where every person--and every other partner in the web of life--is honored and accepted and cared for and given a voice. We believe that we can talk to each other, work with each other, learn from each other, and love one another without having to share a common statement of faith. We believe that the biggest lie that has ever been told is that one person cannot make a difference. We believe that people who bring their great passions to bear on the world's great needs can heal a broken planet. We believe that if enough of us give of the sparks of the divine that glow within each of us, we can kindle a flame that will set the world on fire."

How's that for some Good News?