Jealousy in the Spiritual Life

For the last few days I have been experiencing a strange emotion. Its a Kolkata feeling. Its jealousy.

I was barely in my teens when I had my first very vivid encounter with the presence of God. It is something I can't and won't try describing here, for it is enough to say that I had it. The fire lasted a year and a half, a time about which I fear I cannot share lest I impinge on the sacred (this is probably in my head, but it is how I feel).

December 14, 1998 began a new period in my spiritual journey-- an eight month stint of intense darkness, feelings of separation, and soul agonizing doubt. I emerged from that experience during the summer of '99 and have spent every minute of my life since trying to make sense of both spiritual poles: presence and absence, friend and enemy, belief and unbelief. Intellectually I continued to struggle with my committed Christian stance for many years, and as time went on it seemed that doubt would never let me love as freely as I once had. After all, the Person I once loved had become a Mystery. How do you love Mystery?

After learning of Mother Teresa's spiritual darkness during my third year in college, I set out for Kolkata to explore this thing further. Actually, I went for three reasons: The first was to learn how to lose myself (still in progress). The second was to explore the concept of community for Christian believers (I was an Adventist. I wondered what it meant to share my Christian identity with Catholics and other Protestants. Also, I wondered what kind of community I could share with unbelievers, Hindus, seculars, and others.) I made some progress in this department, but I still have a ways to go.

My third and most personal reason for going to Kolkata had to do with Mother Teresa's question, my question, and the question of so many others: Is God truly present in this world? Why do we experience absence? I was on a quest for joy, above all. I ached for intimacy with God.

Reflecting back I am certain that Kolkata was indeed a time of intimacy. But it had such a radically different face from my early experience that it felt like desolation. I longed for God with everything in me, but he seemed only distant, even dead.

Then to my amazement, he showed up. He came in power-- with love and grace and all the riches of consolation. But he didn't come for me. Instead he swept into my Kolkata reality and fell on my friend. That's right, my friend.

They were like two young lovers, God and Marie. And I? I felt like the old wife standing by-- no longer cared for, worn and unwanted. Marie's awakening was the most moving conversion I ever witnessed in my life (besides my own), and I watched it with wonder and awe. I was so honestly happy for her.

And so, so jealous.

Now journeying past Kolkata I can say that a fresh well has also sprung up in my spiritual life (a story for another blog). But there have recently been some painful knocks to my connected happiness, especially as I've grown more deeply towards my first Kolkata objective (forgetting self). For years I thought I was special, having once experienced the Living God. But as I have gradually embraced my humanity and deflated in my own eyes, I've discovered that many believers have had such experiences. In fact, most "born again" believers speak wistfully about their first spiritual awakening. This makes me mad!! How do I know mine was not any different from theirs? More frightening than that is the question, "why does it bother me so much to think that others have also 'known' God?" (Why do I want to be God's "only one"?) The truth is that I still want to be special. I'm mourning the death of my pride.

I can really thank Tony Campolo and his contribution to "The God of Intimacy and Action" for bringing this problem to my attention. In the first section of the book he really brings mysticism down to earth for those of us who would prefer to keep it up in the clouds (for the elite). He says mystical experiences are available to all believers. He even categorizes them into "types of mystical experiences" (new insights, I-Thou relationships, times of heightened awareness, conversion experiences, and breakthrough experiences). Reality is alive with God's presence, and we are the variables who tap in or out. I am a variable, and I am too often out. I am not God or the wife of God (no, not a nun indeed!) I am so wretchedly ordinary and spiritually poor that I can hardly stand it.

I want to be all! I want to pray like Mother Teresa, "Let me love you like you have never been loved before!" I want to speak "face to face" with God, intimately, permanently, forever. But when I said "here I am" to God's call, he sent me to the most mundane place. He sent me to restless activity, endless listening, housework, uncertainty, impermanence, loneliness. This does not feel spiritual at all.

Campolo and his co-author (Mary Albert Darling) claim that it is possible to live in a state of constant intimacy with God. If the path I'm on will take me there, then may I never stray. MT's words are so beautiful (though of course I have never suffered like she did): "When You asked to imprint Your passion on my heart, is this the answer? If this brings You glory, if You get a drop of joy from this, if souls are brought to You, if my suffering satiates Your Thirst-- here I am, Lord. With joy I accept all to the end of life and I will smile at Your Hidden Face-- always."

I do still have one question, however. In her discussion on Mother Teresa's "dark night," Carol Zaleski discusses all the forms of darkness and "not knowing" that have taken place down through the centuries of Christendom. Then she ends by quoting John Chapman of the Downside (Benedictine) Abbey. In 1923 he concluded that "In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries most pious souls seem to have gone through a period in which they felt sure that God had reprobated them... This doesn't seem to happen nowadays. But the corresponding trial of our contemporaries seems to be the feeling of not having any faith; not temptations against any particular article, but a mere feeling that religion is not true."

This comment was particularly striking for me when I first read it, and here's why: I always felt that if I could just believe, then I would find a way to plunge fully into God. I would experience him inquenchably, in radical ways. But doubt was always the thing holding me back, the insurmountable obstacle keeping me from my first spiritual inhibition. We moderns continue to struggle with materialist worldviews, even after we have intellectually rejected (or enlarged) them. We are in endless dialogue with new information, new thoughts and ideas that challenge our religious convictions. For me, at least, these interruptions have always made it difficult to experience peace, joy, and intimacy with God. So my question is, how does a modern person in the grip of doubt enter into a "mystical relationship" with God?

If I ever did settle down on a holy hill I'm sure I could do it. I would have a little garden, a field of wild flowers, and a great blue sky. No one would tell me that the world outside was moving or changing. No one would remind me of the slums of Kolkata or New York. But that is not where I have been called. I cannot live in bliss while others die in pain. After his happiness at success was marred by seeing an old friend's failure, Fredrick Beuchner observed that "none of us can truly have joy until all of us can." Perhaps that is true. Perhaps, even, "none of us can experience pure intimacy with God until all of us can." I wonder if I'll be jealous on that Day too, or if my deep joy will write over it. I think it will. Love shares, after all. It is only the lonely heart that hoards and lashes out in envy.

John McLarty once told me that a pastor's job is to keep a foot in two worlds-- the world of doubt and the world of faith. He or she then becomes the perfect evangelist: a bridge to belief. I hope I can be that in some small way, even if it makes me jealous of those who find faith through my doubt.