4 July 2010
The Empty Room
Abba, why have you torn down everything I built?
Why have you taken all that I valued
and dumped it on the curb
and left this house inside me empty?
Why have you turned my gardens into deserts?
Why have you stripped the banners
from the ceilings and the walls?
I wanted desperately to hide behind them.
Don’t you know that you are terrible?
A little light brings certainty,
borders and sharply outlined shadows,
a world crisp and clear and well-defined:
but great light blinds.
Didn’t you want me to make you famous,
to peddle this bargain of a gospel
to a world in need of meaning?
Who will buy from a salesman
with seared eyes and a voice struck dumb?
Who in search of purpose or self-worth
will do anything but flee from mystery?
Wasn’t faith supposed to be like an air-conditioned car,
to roar through the salt flats, a hundred miles an hour,
to fill that awful silence with sound
and to fly over and past the heat and the dryness
and the parched, cracked earth?
Wasn’t faith supposed to be
victorious?
But now this room is achingly empty,
and the walls are fearfully bare.
I had carved our models, images of you,
and they stood between
and comforted my eyes;
I had trophies for all my accomplishments,
and they stood between
and glittered not too brightly;
I made banners of my righteousness
and pillars of my intellect,
and they stood between.
But now I am utterly undone, because
the room is utterly empty,
And at the far side is the Presence,
thick dark and blinding mystery,
and nothing stands between
me and you.
All of my romantic relationships follow the same basic pattern, which I suspect is not unique to me: I meet a woman and connect with her almost immediately. We seem so similar in our thinking that I feel like I understand her perfectly. Then after a few months, I begin to discover that she is a mystery to me, that the woman I think I’ve got all figured out is just a picture in my head, not the reality. At this point I usually panic and bail out. Which is too bad, because I’m slowly learning that it’s at that point that the relationship finally has a chance to deepen, and I have a chance to learn to experience someone else as a real person instead of as a mirror of myself.
I believe the same holds true in our relationships with God. In the first infatuation stage, we have a picture of God in our heads. We think we have God all figured out. We look down on people who have fears or doubts. Their faith simply isn’t strong enough. It’s a really good feeling, to be certain of who God is, and of our connection to God.
It is also idolatry.
Mystery is frightening. It’s no wonder that when I face that mystery in a relationship, my tendency is either to panic, or to try to ignore it, to construct instead a more elaborate but equally inadequate mental model of the other. And it’s no wonder that many of our religious institutions actually serve to keep us in that initial, black-and-white, infatuation stage of faith instead of ushering us into the presence of the One who alone is holy and who dwells in unapproachable light. It’s no wonder that so many contemporary worship songs are saturated with an aggressive sort of certainty. It’s no wonder that we are afraid of doubt and are so pained by the “desert” times in our faith.
But what if the desert is where we meet God? What if the desert is not a place we must hurry through to get to an oasis of faith; what if the desert is our faith’s home? What if it is only in the empty places that we can experience the reality beyond our graven images, and grow into mature intimacy with God?