Loving A Hidden God
DAYS WITHOUT SEEING GOD
After hearing God's voice from heaven, the disciples fell on their faces and were exceedingly afraid. Jesus came near and touched them and said: "Arise and do not be afraid." Lifting up their eyes, they saw no one but only Jesus. As they returned down the mountain Jesus warned them: "Tell your vision to no one until I have risen from the dead."
Matthew 17, 6-9
Augustine imagines the following reaction of Peter after seeing Jesus glorified on the
mountain of transfiguration:
Peter, seeing the transfiguration, said: "Lord, it is good for us to be here". He was finding the crowds a dreadful bore. He wanted Christ for himself. Why abandon the heights only to return to the toil and trouble below?
Sermon 78, 3.
Peter's wish was not to be granted. The wonderful vision of the glorified Jesus did not last all that long. When it was over, the "ordinary" Jesus led his three apostles back down the hill to the darkness below. Augustine imagines Jesus saying to Peter:
"Come back down, Peter! You were eager to go on resting on the mountain, but you must come down from the heights. Go down to labor on earth, to serve on earth, to be despised, crucified on earth. Don't seek your own advantage. Be filled with love and preach the truth to the world. Only in eternity will you find the security you seek.
Sermon 78, 6.
After it was all over, the three apostles (Peter, James, and John) must have wondered what their vision was meant to accomplish. Certainly it did not make their lives any easier. On Good Friday, Jesus would still be killed. On Holy Thursday, Peter would still deny Jesus three times; James would still run away; and John (though more daring than the rest), still would not have the stamina to do more than peek in from the edge of the crowd as Jesus was beaten, tried, and condemned.
Later on they may have come to understand that it was not the seeing of God on a high mountain which finally brought them salvation. Rather it was walking with Jesus through the streets of their ordinary lives, not giving up on a Jesus who mostly did not protect them from troubles but only gave them strength to get through. Later on they may have come to realize that the great gift given them on the summit of the mountain of transfiguration was never meant to be a permanent ecstatic present. Rather it was meant to give them a memory to cherish, a memory not of a past but of a future, a future where it would be possible for them to see God face to face forever. It was a memory of a future that was certain if only they would try their best to walk with their "ordinary" Jesus through the good days and bad days that lay ahead.
The story of the descent of the apostles from the hill of transfiguration teaches important lessons about our own search for a hidden God to love. It tells us that after our laborious journey to the top of the mountain, to that region where finally we may receive the gift of wisdom and the vision of God, we (like the nine Apostles left in the valley below) may be stuck in place waiting for an invitation to go higher, an invitation that may never come in this life. The gift of being lifted up to see the glory of God in this life has been promised to none of us but Christ has made a more important promise, the promise that, if we do our best to live a decent life, we will see that God for all eternity. The ecstasy of the vision of the Godhead in this life is not a necessary requirement for our eternal salvation, nor is it a guarantee of our salvation. The only guarantee is trying to love well in a life that is still filled with troubles. The reality of most of our lives is not a "going up"; it is a "holding out for the Lord". As Augustine puts it:
While we are still plodding along and have not yet finished our pilgrimage, God delays what he has promised but does not deny it to us. He urges us "Hold out for the Lord!" (Psalm 26 (27), 14)
Commentary on Psalm 26/2, 23
The story of the transfiguration also teaches us that even if we have been granted some sort of vision of God in this life, it will not last long. There may be a moment of ecstasy but then it will pass. We will fall back to our ordinary life hoping that God will come again. But he may not. Indeed, like Sisyphus, we may even be forced to begin our journey all over again, laboriously pushing our burdensome lives up to the heights once more.
Both St. Paul and St. Augustine experienced such a fall from the heights. Once lifted up to the heavens they quickly came back down to earth and their own earthiness. St. Paul writes to the church at Corinth:
As to the extraordinary revelations, in order that I might not become conceited I was given a thorn in the flesh, and angel of Satan to beat me and keep me from getting proud.
2 Corinthians, 12.7
Augustine confesses to a similar descent:
In the thrust of a trembling glance my mind arrived at THAT WHICH IS. But I lacked the strength to maintain my gaze and in my weakness I was beaten back, returning once again to my old habits.
Confessions, 7.17.23
Indeed, some who had been gifted with the experience of God fall back to a valley of darkness where not only is God unseen but he seems to have disappeared entirely. Apparently this is what happened to St. Thérèse of Lisieux. After a period of the intense awareness of God, the awareness simply disappeared. She says of this terrifying period in her life:
God permitted my soul to be invaded by the thickest darkness, and the thought of heaven, up until then so sweet to me, became a cause of struggle and torment. It seemed to me that the darkness said mockingly to me: "You are dreaming about the light, about a fatherland embalmed in the sweetest perfumes. You are dreaming about the eternal possession of the Creator of all these marvels. You believe that one day you will walk out of this fog that surrounds you! Advance, advance! Rejoice in death which will give you not what you hope for but a night still more profound, the night of nothingness."
John Clarke, O.C.D. (trans), Story of a Soul: The Autobiography of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, 3rd ed. (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1996), pp. 211-13.
Sometimes those who "fall back" from a vision of God to the summit, fall even further through their own choice. They embrace again the pleasures and addictions they had left behind. Once again they are dominated by lust for physical pleasure, by ambition, by an unhealthy curiosity about the world around them. They turn away from uplifting human love because of renewed selfishness. They give in once more to the cowardice that had kept them from fighting their own passions, rejecting any thought of prayer for help, despairing of being able to deal honorably with the burdens of their lives.
Finally they come to a point where they are not able to believe in anything, including themselves. They remember their vision of the heavens as a fantasy. God has become for them a fiction; Christ, a historical figure of no great consequence. Once again they are a mystery to themselves, important only because there is nothing else in creation of any importance. They close their ears to all advice because they believe that there is no one with the power or knowledge to suggest a way out of their darkness. Once living on the heights of wisdom, they have fallen in despair back to the darkness of the valley. Indeed, the darkness is now deeper that ever because there seems to be no room for hope. To those who tell them that the mountain is still there, that it is possible to climb again to the light of the summit, the sad response is made. "Been there; done that".
Why should this happen to good people? Why should those who have been "lifted up" to the vision of God inevitably "fall back"? Why should so many God-fearing people be denied such vision? Both groups may understandably share the cry of Augustine to God:
Why have you thrust me away from that sublime source of understanding and unchangeable truth? I am already panting for it. Why have I been thrown down to my old life by the burdensome weight of my sinfulness? I cry with the psalmist: "Beside myself with fear, I said, I have been flung far out of your sight." (Psalm 30:23 [31:22]
Commentary on Psalm 41, 18
The first thing that needs to be said in answer to such questions is that no one is owed the vision of God. Even the reward of seeing God forever in the Beatific Vision is not something owed to us. It rests on a promise that God had no need to make. He could have created us and left us to our own devices, to get as much satisfaction out of this life as we could because there would be no life after death. Instead, he promised us immortality, that he would keep his hands on the nozzle of our contingent existence so that the airy life we enjoy would never escape. And more, through his redemptive act of dying for us, he gave us the possibility of being, not only undying, but being undyingly happy. All of these great good things were from a gratuitous act of love on his part.
To enjoy the vision of God in this life is even more gratuitous. It is like an unsecured loan that can be withdrawn at any time. Unlike the Beatific Vision of God after death, it has neither been promised nor guaranteed as a permanent condition for the virtuous. That it is sometimes given is a miraculous event that goes beyond any reasonable expectation.
That the good people so gifted should eventually "fall back" from the heavens is not an unreasonable expectation and should come as no surprise when it does happen. For a brief moment they have lived in a world beyond their capacity. No matter how long we humans live or how virtuous we become, we remain creatures of time as yet incapable of functioning in eternity. We are still changeable creatures incapable of standing immobile for long even before the face of God. As Augustine observes:
As long as we are in the body we are still on pilgrimage and away from the Lord. Our corruptible body weighs down the soul. At times we may in some measure scatter the clouds as our yearning draws us on. We may even come within earshot of heavenly music. By straining we may get some inkling of God's house. But, under the weight of our weakness we inevitably go back to our familiar interests, and slide again into our ordinary way of life. Like a deer yearning to find an everlasting spring, for a time we may have been drawn upward by the allure of heavenly melodies but we still are just human beings, still groaning, still carrying frail flesh, still imperiled in the midst of the stumbling blocks of this world.
Commentary on Psalm 41, 10
We may have been momentarily entranced by the glory of God but we ourselves are not yet glorified. We are still on our pilgrimage and even though we may have received a glimpse of our destination, we have not yet arrived there.
Added to the burden of still being creatures of time rather than eternity, is the disability we have inherited from past and present sin. We are "cracked". We are now subject to the temptations, weakness, and maladies that are part of our fallen state. As a result ...
First dazzled by the intuition of God as light and truth, we fall back. We are dragged down by the filth of clinging passions and by the confused wandering that is common to our exiled state.
On the Trinity, 8.2.3.
We may have been redeemed but we have not yet been fully healed. We now get "sick and tired" physically and sometimes get "sick and tired" of being good. Paul had his "sting of the flesh"; Thérèse had her pain of physical illness; Augustine had his fragile health and the burden of being responsible for the spiritual health of others. (Commentary on Psalm 106, 7)
In accepting our inability to have visions of the Divine, we can be "trained" to love God even better. When Jesus led the three apostles back down to the valley, he was calling them to a more perfect love, a love for a God who once again is mostly hidden, a love with no ecstasy, a love which moves beyond the sublime contemplation of heaven and returns to the messy workings of earth. Here on earth we are called upon to "prove" our love, to continue to love even though we can no longer see the object of our love. It is a love reflected in Augustine's words to God:
I am struggling here as though you were no longer mindful of me. But you are training me and I know that you are only delaying what you promised, not disavowing it.
Commentary on Psalm 41, 17
As I write these words I think of a woman who came each day to the nursing home where my mother lived. She came to feed lunch to her husband who had been comatose for eleven years. Her act of love was I think a good example of the love God wants from any of us, a love that continues to perform acts of love even though there is never any response. The man in the bed did not know who she was, did not even know that she was there. Her continuing kindness towards him did not depend on getting a reward. It was prompted simply by a love for someone who was seen as beloved. This is the love we shall have for God in heaven. It is the love that he hopes we will have for him even in this life.
Finally, what about those good people (perhaps you and I) who have laboriously climbed the mountain towards Wisdom with the hope of seeing God, but who are still waiting to be "lifted up". There can be a certain peace in such patient waiting. We have done all we can. It is up to God to move us further. Having purified ourselves (as best we can) of earthy desires, we can now perhaps discover the final freedom, the freedom from will. No longer must we make critical decisions about our future (beyond resisting the temptation to go back). We are free from the need to make choices. We stand quietly. Our destiny is now in the hands of someone else who will decide when and where we shall go and how we shall get there. We stand free before the providence of God. Like a little baby in the arms of its mother, we stand and wait to be carried, realizing finally that there is now nothing we can do to determine our future. We are free and can sit back and wait for our future to unfold, convinced now of the wisdom expressed by an old friend of mine (in the early stages of Alzheimer disease) that "Things must be someway" and there is nothing we can do to change the way things must go. We are like those patient folks described by Simone Weil:
They do not turn toward God. God himself sets their faces in the right direction. He does not, however, show himself to them for a long time. It is for them to remain motionless, without averting their eyes, listening ceaselessly, and waiting, they know not for what; deaf to entreaties and threats, unmoved by every shock, unshaken in the midst of every upheaval. If after a long period of waiting God allows them to have an indistinct intuition of his light or even reveals himself in person, it is only for an instant. Once more they have to remain still, attentive, inactive, calling out only when their desire cannot be contained.
Simone Weil, Waiting For God, Emma Crauford trans. (New York: Harper-Colophon Books, 1973), p. 211.
Is it possible to still have joy while waiting for God to come and "lift us up" to vision? The answer must be "Yes". There is indeed a quiet joy possessed by all good people who have tried their best to climb the mountain from darkness to wisdom by living a decent life. It is a peace that comes, not from seeing, but from a conviction that God exists, that God is near, that God is love. It is a peace and joy that rests on the secure hope ...
... that God will guide and help us to achieve at the end our lives the joy of eternal vision,
... that God will be there with open arms when finally we come to the end of our pilgrimage,
... that at the moment of death we will find not darkness, but eternal light.
It is a hope based on a certainty expressed long ago by Augustine in the form of a question:
Will he who gave so great assurances while I was on my journey abandon me on my arrival?
Commentary on Psalm 26/2, 10