I haven't posted for a month. It has been a hard month. I don't think you need to completely understand things to write about them, but you do need to have at least some perspective and purchase on them, and up till now I don't think I have.
For quite a while I have felt as though I have been going through some sort of divorce from Hilfield. Anyone who has moved on from a school, or job, or club, or sports team will probably recognise what I am about to describe: a feeling of loneliness, of being outside and rejected; of being undervalued and then feeling that one has little value in oneself; then a sense of disillusionment, frustration and anger at individuals who seem either not to feel those things themselves or trigger those feelings in me.
Yup, it's been a long month, realising that I have been feeling those things for quite a while.
I think these things would all be quite beareable in themselves, for they are just a normal part of living and working with other people. You either work out a way to live with them, or deal with them with those concerned. But I can't deal with this in that way. I need to go to the source. And that is far more painful and disorientating than any of those quite basic emotions I described above.
The simple truth is that I can't feel God, because I don't feel I am being honest to Him in my life here.
That may seem quite a shocking thing for someone who is preparing to spend a lifetime in God's service to say, but that is the fact of the matter. The more time I spend here, the more my prayers seem just to vanish into the ether, the more life with others seems to lose its sacramental quality, the more my living with myself seems to become without hope or purpose.
That may seem quite a shocking thing for someone who is preparing to spend a lifetime in God's service to say, but that is the fact of the matter. The more time I spend here, the more my prayers seem just to vanish into the ether, the more life with others seems to lose its sacramental quality, the more my living with myself seems to become without hope or purpose.
Caravaggio: The Denial of Peter (John 18:13-27)
How at peace does Peter look as he denies Jesus?
My logical response is to say, "Well, evidently this place isn't good for me. I don't feel spiritually or socially well here and so I should go back to the places which feel more wholesome for me." And there is a lot in that way of thinking. But the problem with it comes in those last two words, "for me."
When I came to Hilfield, I very definitively came "for me," if not just to feel good about myself, at least to learn and pray, to seep myself in the things "I feel" that "I need" for "my life" with God. Perhaps God is forcing me to question that. He certainly isn't just giving me those things!
I find rhetoric about "the community" very difficult to swallow. Perhaps it is because I am young and I naturally have more of a "me and the world" mindset, but I just can't inhabit the idea that I am here solely to serve and be served by "the community." A part of me feels this is because I want to protect my developing sense of self, in which I am really rejoicing for the first time, from the great institutional ogre that seems to muscle in on it every day. But actually I find it just as hard to think of my life here in terms of serving and being served by "the people I live with", rather than "the community," however much I love them.
There is a great temptation, to which I fall prey almost daily, to beat myself up for not being able to "get" community life in this sense. "Why don't I get it when they do?" "Am I stupid?" "Am I bad?" But I think that this temptation is so particularly alluring because it allows me to avoid the really difficult question: "What is God actually doing here in me?"
If I find it so unsatisfying to be here for "my" self, or be here for "my" community, or even be here for "my" friends, maybe it is about time I started asking why I am here for God, whom I can never call "mine."
Congdon: Ego Sum: Matt 14:24-27
'Take heart. It is I. Do not be afraid.'
Some Introductory Reading on the Issues in This Post:
On the meaning and purpose of that sense that God is not there: The Dark Night of the Soul - St John of the Cross
On the value of staying in a place or amongst a group of people: Abiding - Ben Quash
On what it means to be true to God's call: The Cost Of Discipleship - Dietrich Bonhoeffer - Chs.2-3
On responding to the love of God: In My Disc of Gold - William Congdon
On community and the purpose of religious community - Cave, Refectory, Road - Ian Adams
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