NEWS FEATURE: Sustaining Belief During a Dark Night of the Soul

c. 2000 Religion News Service (UNDATED) The dark night of the soul. No one knows precisely how to describe it, nor how long it may last. Even revered Roman Catholic mystics like St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross experienced it. In an era of quick-fix spirituality, Philip Yancey’s newest book, “Reaching […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) The dark night of the soul. No one knows precisely how to describe it, nor how long it may last. Even revered Roman Catholic mystics like St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross experienced it.

In an era of quick-fix spirituality, Philip Yancey’s newest book, “Reaching for the Invisible God: What Can We Expect to Find?” (Zondervan), dignifies such difficult questions about faith _ and its sometimes absence _ without providing any easy answers.


Yancey, editor at large for Christianity Today magazine, is the author of a number of award-winning books including, “Where Is God When It Hurts?” “Disappointment With God” and “The Gift of Pain.” His last 10 books have sold more than 4.5 million copies.

In this new one, he acknowledges God may sometimes be experienced as, at best, an elusive presence. The challenge is sustaining a relationship with the divine during those times when God feels absent, he says. Those are times that may provoke as much passion and soul searching as the moments when one is fully aware of God’s presence.

“Every author has one theme and as I try to articulate the theme for my life, I feel I took the worse the church has to offer,” Yancey said in a recent question-and-answer session with reporters. “I think I became a writer to reclaim words, to scrub them off. The words I use in my books were used in my church in a very different way.

“Every writer has a calling _ one simple calling _ and I think my calling is to reclaim words.”

In his current book, he dusts off old ideas and images, polishing them to a bright sheen when possible and recreating them when necessary.

“As I reconsider my own assumptions about relating to God, I now see them as misguided and simplistic,” Yancey writes. “From childhood I inherited an image of God as a stern teacher passing out grades. I had the same goal as everyone else: to get a perfect score and earn the teacher’s approval.

“Almost everything about that analogy, I have learned, contradicts the Bible and distorts the relationship. In the first place, God’s approval depends not on my `good conduct’ but on God’s grace.”


Human beings also tend to project their understandings of human relationships onto their relationship with God, a dangerous process. Under such a system, Yancey argues, believers might assume their relationship with God switches on and off, depending upon their behavior. The same assumption would mean that betraying God could permanently destroy the relationship.

Yet the apostle Peter became the rock upon which the church was founded even after he denied Jesus three times. Other famous biblical figures including Job, Sarah, Jacob, Jeremiah and Martha discovered and lived a faith often begun in or tortured by doubts.

Perhaps, Yancey suggests, the faith giants of his childhood _ traveling evangelists, conference speakers and devotional authors _ are not the only Christians who dwell close to God. In his own life, he has been led to new levels of relationship to God through the struggles of a defrocked priest who fights an addiction to both alcohol and cigarettes.

Real faith, Yancey says, may be lived out of doubt as much as certainty.

“I am learning that mature faith, which encompasses both simple faith and fidelity, works the opposite of paranoia. It reassembles all the events of life around trust in a loving God. When good things happen, I accept them as gifts of God, worthy of thanksgiving. When bad things happen, I do not take them as necessarily sent by God _ I see evidence in the Bible to the contrary _ and I find in them no reason to divorce God. Rather, I trust that God will use even those bad things for my benefit. That, at least, is the goal toward which I strive.”

In exploring doubt and struggle as a cornerstone of faith, Yancey reclaims a portion of his own heritage. Growing up in a strict evangelical Protestant tradition, the theology and the church of Yancey’s childhood focused on a personal God whose devotees most always related tales of spiritual success.

Their testimonies never highlighted the failures Christians experience. Nor did they talk about what it is like to survive when that absent or elusive deity seems far removed from the daily grind of living.


Yancey confronts his own doubt honestly in this new work.

Relating how the French novelist Flaubert said that “a great writer should stand in his novel like God in his creation: nowhere to be seen, nowhere to be heard,” Yancey argues such a silent, seemingly absent and indifferent deity will not meet Christians’ need for “Jesus’ image of God as a loving father.”

“We need more than a watchmaker who winds up the universe and lets it tick. We need love and mercy and forgiveness and grace _ qualities only a personal God can offer,” he says.

In one sense, Yancey’s book is a search for signposts, calling readers back to the Bible to encounter a gracious and loving God. His book is for people who are skeptics and doubters yet who refuse to give up on faith.

DEA END HOLMES

(Cecile S. Holmes, a longtime religion writer, teaches journalism at the University of South Carolina. her email address is cecile.holmesusc.jour.sc.edu)

Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!