GODSPOT
by David Wood
"It was a dark and stormy night and the rain came down in torrents". And it actually was, one February up on the Northumbrian coast. An evening service with a bit sing, a bit talk and a bit pray. Afterwards this woman came up and said "Thank you, I've been waiting 15 years to hear
that" 15 YEARS! to hear what? What I had talked about was 'the Dark Night of the Soul', a place so deep inside where every person who wants to take the Christian life seriously must be prepared to arrive at. It's when pretty well everything you thought you believed about God and Jesus doesn't mean the same any more and starts to disappear. Religious structures in your life disintegrate little by little. Words which before meant so much become empty and tasteless. A whole swarm of questions we had never asked before emerge. As a Cumbrian clergyman I know said a year or two ago in computer language "It's as if the screen has gone blank and nothing, nothing I can do will bring back to life the words and pictures". That is the Dark Night when all that is left is sheer faith, sheer holding on.What that woman did not know was that it's par for the course, part of the journey. " - let the dark come upon you Which shall be the darkness of God." (T.S. Eliot) She thought it was all her fault, she was doing something wrong, had lost it. That's terrible. She did not know that to grow into the Christian God the images of God out there will become blurred and start to vanish, to be replaced, it seems, by all the hobgoblins and foul fiends of our doubts, mistakes and failures. They rise up to rage us, faced as we are by our self-righteousness and lack of mercy. She thought God had gone off and left her to her own devices (15 years!) She did not know that she was becoming more her true self, more Godlike; that the sense of divinity, instead of being out there at arm's length, was growing in deep intimacy within. She was living an increasingly compassionate and caring life, but did not see it as God's presence growing in her. "I have no hands but yours, no feet but yours - " She may have said the prayer but did not believe it.
Alone and fearful in the heart of a dark night when you feel utterly lost is a terrible place. All the lights have gone out. She was so relieved to learn that bewildered and directionless, she was yet on the right track. Her faith was immense - 15 years! Relieved to know that she was not alone and that it could just be that God was nearer to her than when she first believed.
This is the individual story for so many, part of the personal journey through life. It is, simply and completely, about taking risks with love. What we have to grow up and recognise is that where we are now, as a world-people in these dark, dark times when violence and abuse are increasingly exposed, is that we are all together in a Dark Night of the Soul of the World. There is an increasing agony and compassion in many, many hearts. That compassion and agony is Presence. We have to hang on: to hold onto the beautiful and good, to hold onto the heart of our dreams - come what may - is each individual's responsibility (this has happened before through human history and it can happen again even if each time we get a bit more scared as the threats become more global). This is the one light we have to go by and trust that it will guide us through when the safer, simpler world we felt more at home in seems so lost.
I heard a bird sing in the dark of December
Amazing - almost miraculous - that I should receive David’s
latest Godspot the day after a remarkable Friends Meeting in Whitehaven.
We had few reasons to be joyful. Our meeting is so sadly depleted by the deaths
or departure for other reasons of dearly loved Friends that we have seriously
considered closing our Meeting House. Our meeting was troubled by doubtful
thoughts about Christmas, the cause of so many inflated hopes and so many
disappointments, and many of us felt repelled by the idea that Jesus was born of
a virgin, with its implication that to be conceived by a woman in the normal way
is to be born in sin. Perhaps the only thing that held us together was the
conviction that Jesus expresses more clearly and simply than anyone else the
thought that we are all inadequate, we all need one another and let one another
down, and need to forgive ourselves and other people.
After the meeting David Day and Anne Wilson, who were recently married at the
ancient Friends Meeting House at Pardshaw, led us in singing the lovely round:
It’s nearer to Spring than it was in September
I heard a bird sing in the dark of December."
Somehow the simple connection of the song with the
primitive instincts that have always caused people to celebrate the darkest time
of the year helped us to understand why it was important to go on.
And then David’s thoughts about the dark night of the soul arrived.
If you feel that men and women have a soul that longs to know God, but do not
know what you mean by God, you can join others who do not know either. Quakers
meet in Friends Meeting House, behind the disused Methodist Church at the corner
of Lowther Street and Scotch Street, on first and third Sundays at 10.30am -
next meeting 21st January. You are very welcome to come and share your doubts
with us.
There is also a group of Christians who meet in Egremont for
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